2
Weighed in the Balances and Found Wanting
In 1914 William James wrote, “Just as, if we let our emotions evaporate, they get into a way of evaporating; so, there is reason to suppose that if we often flinch from making an effort, before we know it, the effort-making capacity will be gone. . . . Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day.”1 How about you? Are there daily “efforts” you practice such that they become a healthy habit? Are you a daily Bible reader? Someone who is likely to read the Hebrew Old Testament for life?
Though each one of us has his or her own personality, predilections, and background, we all can learn how to manage our time better and commit more faithfully to things we truly value. I worked in the fitness industry for over ten years as a manager of a gym while in seminary (yes, I was in seminary that long!). I was always mesmerized by the number of people who would pay big money for a personal trainer only to find out that they were hiring a “friend.” Not only did these people want fitness training, but they wanted a life coach. They needed someone to help them organize their life and manage their time, including the time they committed to go to the gym. While we may not all need to hire a life coach, with the right input and accountability, most people are able to improve in managing their time and organizing their lives. Additionally, the key to developing a healthy habit is having a plan.
My wife and I began dabbling in CrossFit in 2011. We both played college sports, and we wanted a workout routine that was similar to the intensity we experienced in college athletics. We considered ourselves to be highly disciplined and motivated people, but we found that when we went to the gym, we stood around asking each other what we wanted to do. Inevitably, we couldn’t agree. My wife played soccer, and so she could run for days. I played football, so I could watch her run for days (my training consisted of eight- to ten-second bursts followed by forty-five seconds of rest). CrossFit gave us a mutual plan and accountability to go to the gym and get something done rather than standing around doing nothing.
As our bodies have aged, the intensity of CrossFit is simply uncomfortable. We sometimes give in to the fatigue and soreness and decide to sleep in . . . six days in a row. To combat this temptation to laziness, we will sometimes sign up for local competitions. The competition (and the registration fee!) gives us an added incentive to keep up the discipline of training. It becomes a new, and more focused, plan to accomplish our goals of fitness. Rather than succumbing to laziness, we force ourselves to compete so that we train consistently. The sharp focus of our plan helps us to accomplish our goal.
A plan . . . accountability . . . a partner/team mentality . . . motivating fear. The clear focus of our plan along with the joy of accomplishing goals with my wife and the fear of failure on the competition floor transformed meandering college athletes into fitness “competitors.” Now, don’t misunderstand. You won’t see us on TV anytime soon throwing hay bales or dragging dump trucks. We are not that serious about this aspect of our lives. Even so, the principles still fit. Without a plan and accountability, we failed to even have an end goal. Once we had a plan, and now that we continue to adjust our plan, we have been attaining our fitness goals since 2011.
A Biblical Look at Laziness and Diligence
Consider for a moment digital assistants like Siri or Alexa. These “brilliant” apps are brilliant only insofar as a human being has created an algorithm that will point the digital assistant to the information you’re asking for. Circuits and software don’t have knowledge independent of the computer programmer, so in order for Alexa to obtain “new” knowledge, a programmer has to rewrite a computer script such that she now has either new information or a new means of getting the information. Need new information? Just rewrite your software script.
Unfortunately, life and Hebrew don’t work that way. The world is broken. Though learning can be a great joy, our knowledge is partial and our memories weak. Because of the noetic effects of sin, not only do humans resist knowledge of God, but the use of the mind for other cognitive endeavors is weakened as well. When Adam and Eve rebelled against God, sin tainted all of creation, including our abilities to memorize and understand. That fragility and fracturing of creation even extends to the sphere of studying the Hebrew Old Testament.
Throughout Scripture, we read about “futile thinking” and “darkened hearts” (e.g., Rom. 1:21). Proverbs 28:26 says, “Whoever trusts his own mind is a fool, but he who walks in wisdom will be delivered” (ESV). After Adam’s sin, there is an incapacity in the human mind to think rightly about God and his creation that makes trusting our own minds “foolish.” Following Adam’s disobedience, God cursed the created order (Gen. 3:17–19), and while this “curse” is most obviously seen in the thorns and thistles that compete with agricultural crops, the life of the mind must also now engage in painful toil. Vocabulary is forgotten. There is never enough time to learn. You or your children catch the flu so that you are not able to study sufficiently for the exam. Or perhaps you find yourself at the end of the semester regretting wasted hours playing video games or watching Netflix—hours that, if filled with study, not only would have prepared you to ace an exam but would have equipped you to read the Bible more faithfully for a lifetime.
Təqel (תְּקֵל). This is one of the words that the Lord wrote on the wall at Belshazzar’s feast in Daniel 5. As the Lord’s hand departed from the room, Daniel was left to interpret these words for Belshazzar in light of the genetic hubris inherited from his father, Nebuchadnezzar (Dan. 5:17–23). The word təqel is the Aramaic word for “to weigh,” and with the שׁ/ת interchange between Aramaic and Hebrew, it is related to the Hebrew word שָׁקַל. From this root, you may recognize the monetary unit שֶׁ֫קֶל (shekel). Daniel interprets this word for Belshazzar as “you have been weighed in the balances and found wanting” (Dan. 5:27 ESV). To be “found wanting” is to be diminished, to be imperfect. If we are honest with ourselves, we are all “found wanting” in certain areas, and many of us are “diminished” or “imperfect” particularly in our motivation to learn language skills. To some degree, that’s normal. It is simply a result of the curse issued after Adam sinned. We will never be able to know all things perfectly or to remember everything we learn. Studying Hebrew will be difficult. Nevertheless, we cannot let pride or laziness diminish our goal of knowing God better through deep study of Hebrew.
In this life, we will never be able to fully gain the skills, expertise, or performance we desire. We will constantly fall short. And, figuratively speaking, when we die, we will be “found wanting.” However, unlike Belshazzar, who worshiped his own glory, we offer up our incomplete labors as an act of worship to our Lord. We give ourselves to studying God’s word with the hope that we will fall more in love with the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, and we pray that, while our studies will be imperfect, they will not go unrewarded.
In working hard to study Hebrew, we demonstrate that we value God and his word above all things. We read and study the Hebrew Old Testament to know his word, understand it, teach it faithfully, and ultimately know God better and lead others to know him better too.
The curse guarantees the incompleteness of our work, yet we don’t want to be blameworthy builders who have squandered our opportunities. The apostle Paul warns about such poor stewardship in the church. He writes, “If anyone builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, their work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each person’s work. If what has been built survives, the builder will receive a reward. If it is burned up, the builder will suffer loss but yet will be saved—even though only as one escaping through the flames” (1 Cor. 3:12–15 NIV).
Especially in Proverbs, we find repeated warnings about laziness.2 In Proverbs 24:30–34, Scripture provides an illustration of a sluggard allowing his field to be overcome with thorns and nettles. As the author passes by the field of the sluggard, he sees the protective wall broken down and recognizes that this field belongs to a sluggard, “a man lacking sense” (v. 30). After considering the field and its condition, the author says he (the author) “received instruction” (v. 32). The instruction he received was that “sleep,” “slumber,” and “a little folding of the hands” (laziness) will bring poverty and want (vv. 33–34). While that was the direct instruction received by the main character walking by the garden, the instruction for us is “Do not be like that sluggard!”
For some of us, incomplete knowledge and anemic motivation to learn Hebrew is a part of our sinful disposition living in a fallen world. For others of us, that sinful disposition can be labeled as outright laziness. In the same way that this sluggard in Proverbs needs to pick up the pieces of his wall, tend his garden, and reap the riches of the garden he has been blessed with, so also we need to rebuild the Hebrew wall around our studies of Scripture and reap the blessings of digging for gold in God’s word.
Dispositions and Discipline
We all have different personalities. Some people are extremely organized and predictable. They awake at 5:30 a.m. every day and have their quiet time, which includes readings in Hebrew. That routine may seem like the perfect standard to some readers of this book, but if such an organized person cannot interrupt the schedule to help someone in need (Luke 10:29–37), what good is all that biblical knowledge and self-discipline? It’s possible for organized and diligent people to lack the love, grace, compassion, and mercy that are the distinguishing marks of God’s people (Matt. 23:23; John 13:35).
Laziness appears differently depending on a person’s culture, personality, and background. But laziness is an objective behavior condemned in Scripture as unwise and disgraceful. To not be lazy is to be a responsible person before God and others in the work and opportunities put before us. For a Bible college student, seminary student, or minister, that means faithfully seizing the opportunity to learn Hebrew so you can read, study, believe, obey, and teach the Hebrew Old Testament. It is insufficient to say, “I can’t learn Hebrew because I’m not good at learning a new language.” If God has provided this opportunity to know his word deeply, then we cannot blame our personality tendencies for genuine laziness creeping into our lives. With enough work, studying, learning, and reading, Hebrew might actually become a delight.
Many of my first-year Hebrew students arrive to class on the first day intimidated by the language. Their defense mechanism is to let me know that they are not naturally good at learning languages. Their knee-jerk reaction is to think their personality will hinder their learning of Hebrew. My goal at that point is to remind them that hard work each week of the semester will pay off in the end. I give them a plan and daily assignments to stay on pace, and before long these same students express their joy of the language. In fact, they usually begin to act like they enjoy Hebrew by the end of the first week of class when we are reading Genesis 1:1 in Hebrew. They can’t translate it, but having learned the alphabet and vowels, they can read it. This kind of early payoff can often turn a person with a hesitant disposition into a motivated, disciplined warrior.
The Psychology of Habits
Given your own unique personality and background, what will it look like for you to develop a more faithful habit of reading or studying Hebrew? Phillippa Lally and a group of psychology researchers at University College London followed ninety-six people who each chose a new behavior to adopt as a habit. How long would it take each person to form a habit? The shortest time it took was 18 days. The longest time was 254 days. The average was 66 days. Lally’s results were published in the European Journal of Social Psychology. From this study, we learn that no habits are formed overnight and some of us must work longer and harder to form a habit. Where are you on the spectrum? If it takes you 100 days to form a habit, what specifically are you going to do to prevent yourself from giving up before meeting the habit-forming threshold?3
Can you put disincentives in place to “punish” yourself when you fail to keep your habit that day (no dessert, no cup of coffee, or no using your phone until you complete your habit, for example)? What incentives can you put in place to encourage you to stick with your new habit (perhaps a chocolate candy, a walk around the block, or permission to use your phone after you perform your new habit that day)? For the most effective application of incentives and disincentives, it’s best to have another person aware of your accountability system—and it’s even better to turn over control of the incentives/disincentives to another person to prevent you from cheating. For example, you can give your phone to your roommate or spouse at night, and commission them to not give it back until you have read your Hebrew Bible for ten minutes in the morning. Over time, as you form a habit, the incentives/disincentives will be less needed. Eventually, you will form a habit, though it may take you 254 days!
In a 2007 article in Psychological Review, Wendy Wood and David Neal interact with what they call the “habit-goal interface.” They point out there is a massive crossroads of habits and goals, but they specifically explore the way that these two psychological features (habits and goals) interact. Wood and Neal summarize that “goals can (a) direct habits by motivating repetition that leads to habit formation and by promoting exposure to cues that trigger habits, (b) be inferred from habits, and (c) interact with habits in ways that preserve the learned habit associations.”4 In other words, goals motivate the formation of habits, and habits help reinforce and confirm established goals. If we consider the goals discussed in chapter 1, knowing God more through knowing his word better should be a primary motivator to establish routines that will support our goal. What about being a better preacher of God’s word? What about having a better understanding of the biblical text for the sake of counseling? What is your end goal regarding knowledge of the Bible that will motivate your disciplined study of Hebrew?
We certainly don’t put all of our eggs in the psychology basket, but it is true that our brains, personality, and attitudes affect our behaviors. Likewise, the inverse is true. Sometimes our behaviors affect our attitudes. In articles from Psychology Today and Business Insider, authors argue that healthy routines and habits affect our moods, resulting in how meaningful we believe our lives to be.5 Setting goals, developing habits, and accomplishing those goals can lead to satisfaction and joy. It may be too strong to invoke a Hebrew curse (“May the LORD do so to me and more also”; כֹּה֩ יַעֲשֶׂ֨ה יְהוָ֥ה לִי֙ וְכֹ֣ה יֹסִ֔יף [Ruth 1:17]) if we don’t consciously devote ourselves to creating goals and developing habits to accomplish those goals. Even so, for the sake of knowing God’s word better, many of us would be more motivated if we disciplined ourselves to create habits, accomplished small goals of learning Hebrew, and experienced the joy of achieving those goals a little at a time.
Time Management, Effectiveness, and Efficiency
Matt Perman offers countless helpful reflections on time management in his book What’s Best Next. Although many elaborate time-management systems employ some permutation of to-do lists, Perman says the best thing one can do is form routines or habits.6 In other words, it is much more important for a pastor to form the habit of reading the Hebrew Bible every day at a particular time than it is to have that task on a meticulously organized to-do list. What would it look like for your study of the Hebrew Bible to become a routine or habit, such as flossing your teeth? How could portions of your day or week be organized into routines or habits? Might you be able to schedule your life to guard study times from the intrusion of competing concerns?
Complementing Perman’s study, Cal Newport, in his book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, reports that most people have so many distractions that they cannot do “deep work.” For humans to thrive in creative thinking and mental processing, Newport tells us, they must be able to focus without distractions for extended periods of time. One way to do this, says Newport, is to bundle numerous mentally superficial tasks into the same time slot, apart from one’s “deep work.” Newport warns that you must not let “the twin forces of internal whim and external requests drive your schedule.”7
One technique that I will often recommend to students is to study in smaller, more frequent chunks of time. We have weekly quizzes in my Hebrew classes, and very often I find that students will study for hours on Monday before the quiz on Tuesday. When they come to me in week eight because they can’t remember rules or concepts we learned in week two, I will remind them to review a little bit every day, say thirty to forty-five minutes, rather than trying to cram three or four hours in on Mondays. This little trick for time management can be quite beneficial for students and often proves to be more effective for long-term retention. Likewise, shorter chunks of study time can be more efficient for an already busy life. It is easier to find thirty minutes in a day than to find three or four hours.
A Sports Example
Some of the most faithful readers of the Hebrew Bible have learned discipline and perseverance from other areas of their lives. Musicians know what it means to practice every day and see transformed skills over the long haul. Athletes understand regular practice, hard work, and sacrifice for a greater goal. In Runner’s World magazine, Jeff Galloway offers the following training advice.8 (The application to Hebrew study is, of course, our own contextualization of his advice.)
- Vary Your Hebrew Reading. Like running, reading the Hebrew Bible can benefit from some variety. Perhaps some mornings you will pick apart one or two verses—looking up rare forms and slowly reading through the lexicon entries. Another morning you may choose to race through a longer text and not be bogged down by difficult constructions. Maybe you read narrative for a season and then turn to poetry in the Psalter.
- Meet with a Group. Last year I began a Hebrew reading group at the college where I teach. We met on Wednesday mornings simply to read the Hebrew Bible. We began by reading through Deuteronomy a few verses each day, discussing the grammar, parsing verbs, and reviewing syntax. The skill level in the group was incredibly varied, but it was easy to allow students to participate at their own level. For some, that meant only reading the Hebrew text. For others, that meant me asking them questions about parsing difficult weak verb forms. If you are a pastor, you may think this kind of group reading is impossible, but if you can find another pastor in the area who shares your love for Hebrew, you can keep each other accountable, even if you only meet once per month. Or you can check out the Facebook page “Nerdy Language Majors” to find an online reading group.
- Practice Semitic Cross-Training. If you are a runner, cross-training is swimming, biking, or lifting weights. If you are a reader of the Hebrew Bible, perhaps cross-training would be reading from the Mishnah, Talmud, or Targums (Aramaic). Or cross-training may mean taking a week to study vocabulary lists or review syntactical categories as an alternative to your daily reading plan.
Honestly Evaluate Your Behaviors
In many ways, money management is like time management. When a person or couple comes to a financial counselor for help, one of the first things the counselor needs to understand is how much money is coming in, how much money is going out, and where that money is going. Financial counselors encourage counselees to keep a written record of all the money they are spending over the course of a month. People are often shocked to see how much of their money is spent on eating out, or coffees at Starbucks, or snacks at the gas station. Many small purchases can fritter away a great amount of cash.
We all have twenty-four hours in a day, but we spend it very differently. Some things cannot be changed. Your body needs a good night’s sleep, which means at least seven or eight hours in bed. You may have highly inflexible work obligations that consume forty or more hours of your week. But what about all the time in between? Do you watch TV? Do you watch movies on Netflix or Amazon Prime? How much time do you spend on Facebook, Snapchat, or Instagram? How much time per week do you spend playing video games? Do you really even know where all of this time goes?
In a recent article in Harvard Business Review, Hugh McGuire notes that neuroscientific research shows that humans have a preference for “new information”—which can result in almost addictive behavior to check one’s email, see the most recent tweet, or not miss the Instagram photos that were just posted. McGuire explains,
The promise of new information, spurred by, say, pressing the refresh button in your email, or the ding of a Twitter DM alert, triggers the release of a neurotransmitter—dopamine—in the brain. Dopamine makes us more alert to the promise of potential pleasure, and our brains are wired to seek out things that generate dopamine.
There is a learning loop to this process—new information + dopamine = pleasure—that lays down neural pathways that “teach” your brain that there is a reward for pressing the email refresh button (even if that reward is nothing but another message from Dave from accounting).
This loop is reinforced every time you watch a second, third, or fifth, cat video on Facebook. And it’s a very hard loop to break. It’s almost—almost—as if hundreds of billions of dollars of engineering and product design have gone into building the perfect machine for keeping us distracted; the perfect system to tickle certain wiring in how our brains are set up.9
To accomplish his own goal of reading from traditional print books every day and not frittering away his time in an information-induced dopamine stupor, McGuire imposes the following strictures on his own time: (1) laptop and smartphone are completely put away when he gets home from work; (2) after dinner during the week, he does not watch Netflix or TV, or mess around on the internet; and (3) no glowing screens are allowed in the bedroom.
Before instituting new strictures on yourself, you should first take stock of where your time is being spent. Use a notebook feature on your phone, or better yet, carry a small paper notebook to record the duration of your various activities throughout the day. You will certainly fail to record some things and record other things inaccurately, but over time a clearer picture of how you spend your time will emerge. You will be surprised.
I am consistently reminded how many projects I begin and either never finish or take months to return to. I walk outside my garage and see a wooden wall hanging that I began to build and haven’t completed. I open my word processor and see all of the folders full of Hebrew worksheets and summary pages that I’ve never polished or completed. My wife pokes fun at me when I dream about home renovations. While I am (usually) capable of doing whatever the renovation will entail, it takes me months to do what a contractor can do in an afternoon because I find myself distracted by other obligations. Hence, if I begin a household project, whatever room I’m working on will look like a disaster for weeks or months. Certainly, it is understandable that I would be slower than a professional contractor, but when it comes to the “project” of learning God’s word, none of us should delay that pursuit.
Sometimes, keeping that pursuit requires us to ask hard questions about our own personalities and tendencies so that we can leverage our positive inclinations toward accomplishing our goals and put to death the distractions that keep us from attaining our goals. We have to be brutally honest with ourselves about where we fall short on the motivation spectrum and then put a plan in place to overcome that deficiency. We may even have to spend a little time discovering where our time is going. When it comes to the way you spend your time, are you willing to see where the hours really go, develop a plan, and genuinely change your behavior to focus your time on doing the things you truly value most?
In the martial art of jujitsu, you use the strength of your opponents against them. Technology offers ever-present distractions. But technological innovators also offer various applications and programs to inform us about our use of time and keep us focused on what most concerns us. Below are three ideas on using technology against itself—technological jujitsu—to defeat the distractions of technology.
- Unfollow persons or social media feeds that are not pointing you toward the things you want to value most. The Daily Dose of Hebrew and Daily Dose of Greek send out daily tweets, Facebook posts, and emails to invade social media with matters of eternal value.
- Install a software program or smartphone app that prevents you from surfing the internet according to the specifications that you set. Most humans find it very difficult to not be distracted by the occasional news story, viral video, or friends’ social media photos. These sorts of distractions prevent one from “deep work” by keeping one at a superficial, distracted cognitive level. In a blog post titled “The Complete Guide to Breaking Your Smartphone Habit,” Brett and Kate McKay suggest smartphone apps for both auditing your smartphone use (Android: Checky, RescueTime, BreakFree, Quality Time; iPhone: Moment) and restricting it (iPhone or Android: Freedom; Android only: FocusOn, Focus Lock, Clear Lock, Stay Focused).10 Citing various sociological and psychological studies, the McKays discuss how overuse of smartphones can result in (1) loss of empathy, (2) loss of sleep, (3) loss of focus and the ability to do deep, meaningful work, and (4) loss of ability to be fully present in one’s life.
- Turn off notifications when you need to get focused work done. I could not live without notifications as I would forget at least half of what I need to get done. However, notifications are also incredibly distracting. I will be working diligently, making wonderful headway on a project, and then I hear the ever-alluring ding. Most people cannot just ignore it. While these notifications can be helpful in certain contexts, we would do well to silence them during focused study.11
When I was writing my dissertation, my wife would sometimes go out of town with our kids to visit my family and give me focused time to write. This wasn’t a regular trend, but she probably made this trip four or five times during the writing phase. When it was time for me to crank out a new chapter, she would pack up the kids and head out. One of the things that held me accountable to write while they were gone was that I knew when they got back, I would have to show my family that I had been working diligently during the time they sacrificed for me to get that project completed. When my wife would leave, she would say, “Be diligent, and let’s get this thing finished.” Her confidence in me gave me a boost of writing fervor, but her exhortation also informed me that the family expected me to be working while they were gone. I couldn’t stand the thought of them returning home and being disappointed that I could/should have gotten more done but instead was lazy. For me, the potential disappointment of my family was enough to keep me motivated; you may need different motivators. Maybe you set financial penalties if you aren’t diligent. Perhaps you ask your kids to keep you accountable at the expense of five dollars per occurrence for dillydallying. Find what works for you so that you set up a situation in which you can be productive with your language studies.
Assess What You Really Love
Perhaps one of the benefits of assessing our time is to cause us to face up to what we really love. We say we wish we had more time to read the Bible and pray, but it is what we actually do that shows what we want to do. James K. A. Smith, in his provocative book You Are What You Love, writes,
To be human is to be animated and oriented by some vision of the good life, some picture of what we think counts as “flourishing.” And we want that. We crave it. We desire it. This is why our most fundamental mode of orientation to the world is love. We are oriented by longings, directed by our desires. We adopt ways of life that are indexed to such visions of the good life, not usually because we “think through” our options but rather because some picture captures our imagination. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the author of The Little Prince, succinctly encapsulates the motive power of such allure: “If you want to build a ship,” he counsels, “don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” We aren’t really motivated by abstract ideas or pushed by rules and duties. Instead some panoramic tableau of what looks like flourishing has an alluring power that attracts us, drawing us toward it, and we thus live and work toward that goal. We get pulled into a way of life that seems to be the way to arrive in that world. Such a telos works on us, not by convincing the intellect, but by allure.12
When you see the way you choose to spend your time, what does it say about what you actually love? In light of God’s word, what is he calling you to do about these loves? Are they in proper relationship with the following instructions of Moses? “And now, Israel, what does the LORD your God require of you, but to fear the LORD your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the commandments and statutes of the LORD, which I am commanding you today for your good?” (Deut. 10:12–13 ESV).
One of the most indicting things for most of us is that our greatest love is often ourselves. We make plans that suit our schedules. We devote ourselves to tasks we’re interested in. Perhaps we even devote ourselves to those tasks to the exclusion of others. Likewise, this hubris manifests itself alarmingly through the technology-saturated world in which we live. We mentioned earlier the need to set our phones aside, turn off notifications, and use apps that help us avoid time on glowing screens. In a podcast hosted by Brett McKay of the Art of Manliness, he interviewed author Adam Alter about what makes our phones so addictive.13 Alter argues that app developers put into their apps a feature similar to slot machines. The behavioral addiction to gambling is one thing, but slot machines are also built to keep you coming back. App developers know this and exploit it to our harm. For social media, it’s not that Facebook or Twitter is so engaging in and of itself. In fact, most would probably say we despise everyone’s self-bloviating and “blowing their own shofar” on those platforms. Alter argues that the allure of many apps is the excitement associated with how the world will respond to what we post. As with the slot machine, we don’t know when that Twitter post will “hit the jackpot” and go viral, but that possibility is what continues to draw us in. In other words, we are distracted by the possibility that someone will virtually “like” what we’ve had to say. If that isn’t self-love, then I’m not sure what is.
One way that we can put away distractions is to reorient our loves. Rather than loving ourselves and hoping for a certain number of “likes” or “shares,” we need to set our hearts on a love for God in the word of God. When that happens, running to other (lesser) loves will fall to the wayside, and we will be more diligent to devote ourselves to those things that capture our hearts. My prayer for myself and for you is that God would give us such a deep love for his word that we are not only willing but eager to put aside distractions and laziness for the sake of knowing him through the original languages.
Chapter Reflections
- Given your current life situation (student, pastor, new parent, etc.), what’s a realistic goal for how much time you want to be reading or studying the Hebrew Bible every day?
- Are you willing to assess where you really spend your time? How and when are you going to do that? Are you willing to put monitors on your computer or smartphone to keep up with how you spend your time or to block you from wasting time?
- What’s a realistic next step in your life in moving toward greater efficiency and focus? Reading a book on time management? Arranging accountability to friends? Taking a course? Hiring a life coach? Perhaps prayerfully skim back through the chapter and choose one step.
- Over the next few decades, do you want to fritter away thousands of hours of your life in mindless distractions? If not, what are you going to do to focus your time and abilities on what really matters?
- How can you reorient your life so that you begin to develop new loves? What would it look like if your love for God’s word eclipsed lesser joys?
God May Providentially Answer Our Prayers . . . Way beyond Our Imagination!
RUTH 1:8–9
Since we already know the end of the story of the book of Ruth, it’s difficult for us to feel the heart-wrenching emotions felt by Naomi as she stands somewhere on the road between Moab and Bethlehem. Naomi understands that from any human point of view, it makes absolutely no sense for these two young widows to continue with her on this return to her homeland. They have been faithful wives to her now-deceased sons. But Moabite women are not likely to be highly sought after by any godly men living in Israel during these turbulent times of the judges. And Moabite widows? Probably even less likely. Naomi sees no future for them there, so she encourages them to return to Moab (Ruth 1:8a). But as she does, she prays for them: “May the LORD deal kindly. . . . [May] the Lord grant that you may find rest” (1:8b–9a ESV).
Now, this is an indirect prayer, addressed to God obliquely using the third-person jussive, invoking a blessing. I’m sure Naomi’s prayer for them was sincere. But I’m also pretty sure that she never would have imagined how her prayer, at least for one of these women, would be answered. Indeed, in the providence of God, her prayer became an integral part of the Lord’s plan of salvation for the entire world. And in the Hebrew text of Ruth, this jumps out at us especially with two words: חֶ֫סֶד and מְנוּחָה, which most of our versions translate as “kindness” and “rest.” We can follow the connections with these words in some English versions but not all. But it’s unmistakable in the Hebrew.
In Ruth 1:8, Naomi asks for the Lord to “do חֶ֫סֶד.” Fast-forward to 2:19–20, where Naomi learns from Ruth the name of the man who dealt so kindly with Ruth and apparently realizes that this man has unique legal connections to Naomi’s family as a redeemer. And in this she sees “his” חֶ֫סֶד, either Boaz’s expression of godly kindness and family loyalty, or God’s expression of kindness in arranging this “random” event. In either case, Naomi, and our narrator, seems to be connecting this providential meeting of Ruth and Boaz with Naomi’s prayer of 1:8. (The word חֶ֫סֶד will make a third and final appearance in 3:10 as Boaz recognizes the manifestation of חֶ֫סֶד in the character and action of Ruth.)
If Naomi believes that she has seen God’s providential answer to her prayer of 1:8, she doesn’t hesitate to imagine that the answer to her prayer of 1:9, מְנוּחָה, isn’t far away. So when we read of her little plan to secure מָנוֹחַ (from the same root as מְנוּחָה) for Ruth in 3:1, we can see what she’s thinking: “God providentially answered my prayer for חֶ֫סֶד; this has got to be his answer for מְנוּחָה.” Well, it might be (3:11). Or not (3:12). Ruth and Naomi will spend an agitated night and day before they have confirmation (3:13, 18). Now it’s all up to their גֹאֵל (redeemer, 3:9).
The connection between 1:8 and 2:20 is fairly obvious in English. The link between 1:9 and 3:1 might be less so, depending on your translation. But in the Hebrew, the connection jumps out at you.
Yes, God does hear our prayers. He sometimes answers prayer in Scripture with spectacular miracles. But here he answers with quiet, ordinary providence—daily living in humble, trusting obedience. Ruth received the blessings of Naomi’s prayer. But what neither Ruth nor Naomi (nor Boaz) ever realized in their lifetimes is that the blessings of Naomi’s prayer (Obed, Jesse, David, and generations on to Jesus) would continue into the twenty-first century and into eternity.
1. William James, Habit (New York: Holt, 1914), 64–65.
2. Prov. 6:6–11; 10:4, 5, 26; 12:24, 27; 13:4; 15:19; 18:9; 19:15, 24; 20:4; 21:25; 22:13; 23:21; 24:30–34; 26:13–16.
3. Phillippa Lally, Cornelia H. M. van Jaarsveld, Henry W. W. Potts, and Jane Wardle, “How Are Habits Formed: Modelling Habit Formation in the Real World,” European Journal of Social Psychology 40, no. 6 (2010): 998–1009. For an abstract of the article, see http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ejsp.674/abstract. Caleb Spindler helpfully summarized Lally’s research for me (as part of a missionary collaboration) in January 2015.
4. Wendy Wood and David T. Neal, “A New Look at Habits and the Habit-Goal Interface,” Psychological Review 114, no. 4 (2007): 843–63, here 843.
5. Meg Selig, “Routines: Comforting or Confining?,” Psychology Today, September 14, 2010, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/changepower/201009/routines-comforting-or-confining; Shana Lebowitz, “A New Psychological Insight Makes Me Feel Much Less Boring,” Business Insider, June 16, 2016, https://www.businessinsider.com/daily-routines-help-you-feel-life-is-meaningful-2016-6.
6. Matthew Perman, What’s Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way We Get Things Done (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2016).
7. Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (New York: Grand Central, 2016), 228.
8. Jeff Galloway, “The Starting Line,” Runners World, June 2015, 40.
9. Hugh McGuire, “How Making Time for Books Made Me Feel Less Busy,” Harvard Business Review, September 1, 2015, https://hbr.org/2015/09/how-making-time-for-books-made-me-feel-less-busy.
10. See The Art of Manliness, February 22, 2016, https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/break-smartphone-habit/.
11. For those who cannot work because you are distracted by the worry of missing a call or text from a family member or in an emergency situation, most cell phones have settings that will silence certain notifications or will allow family members to still make contact.
12. James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2016), 11–12.
13. “Podcast #420: What Makes Your Phone So Addictive & How to Take Back Your Life,” The Art of Manliness, July 5, 2018, https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/podcast-420-what-makes-your-phone-so-addictive-how-to-take-back-your-life/.