Rending

 

“Rend your heart and not your garments. Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love, and he relents from sending calamity.”

—Joel 2:13

In Bible times, rending, or ripping, your garments signaled a deep emotion: grief, anger, penitence, etc. The devout individual would use this act also as a symbol of deep repentance for sin when he or she cried out to the Lord. Yet, this act, over time, became an ostentatious symbol that belied a different inner reality.

The prophets of the Old Testament, and Jesus in the New Testament writings, warned against “playing to the crowd” by acting in holy ways without the inward changes the outward signs represented. As the prophet Joel warned in the Scripture passage at the beginning of this blog post, God looks at the hard, humbling work in the heart and ignores the outward pretentions.

What kind of things do we do in our culture to represent repentance, or a turn around, in our spiritual lives?

Many people will attend Ash Wednesday services this week and wear the sign of the cross on their foreheads to demonstrate their heart intentions. But, quite likely, some will go through the motions and never truly deal with the sins they retain in their hearts.

When I attended high school many years ago, those of us who loved the Lord would carry our Bibles on top of our books. But, I also watched as teenage attractions led some to try to please someone of the opposite gender by playing the part of a devoted Christian and also carry a Bible on top of their books without actually ever allowing God to make a sincere change in their hearts and behaviors.

Some people join churches where the “important” people attend to “see and be seen.” This, too, illustrates “rending the garment and not the heart.”

Charles Spurgeon reminds us:¹

Heart-rending is divinely wrought and solemnly felt. It is a secret grief which is personally experienced, not in mere form but as a deep, soul-moving work of the Holy Spirit upon the inmost heart of each believer… It is powerfully humiliating, and completely sin-purging; but then it is sweetly preparative for those gracious consolations which proud unhumbled spirits are unable to receive.

I am reminded of the beautiful recitative and aria in the oratorio Elijah by Mendelssohn. The texts for this solo come from the verse in Joel, which I quoted, and also from Job 23:3:

“Oh that I knew where I might find him, that I might even come before his presence.”

Mendelssohn continues by quoting from Deuteronomy 4:29-31:

“But if from there you seek the Lord your God, you will find him if you look for him with all your heart and with all your soul… for the Lord your God is a merciful God.”

Let us watch the video clip that follows and allow God to speak to our inner beings, as we soon begin this Season of Lent:

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1 Spurgeon, Charles H. Morning and Evening. McLean, Virginia: MacDonald Publishing Co., Public Domain. p. 706.