The Heart · The Symbolism of Scripture
The Heart
The single most useful correction a Bible reader can be handed: in Scripture the heart is not the feelings as against the head. It is the whole inner person — where a man thinks, decides and commits — and about a hundred verses read differently once that is in place.
What It Stands For
— the whole inner man, not the feelingsThe Hebrew לֵב leb (H3820) occurs some eight hundred times, and only a minority of those are about feeling. It is where a person plans, remembers, decides, doubts, intends and believes — the control room rather than the mood. The Greek καρδία kardia (G2588) keeps the Hebrew sense rather than the Greek philosophical one, because the New Testament writers are thinking in Hebrew categories.
- Genesis 6:5Their feelings were bad.Every imagination of the THOUGHTS of his heart. The word governs thinking.
- Proverbs 23:7As a man feels, so is he.As he thinketh in his heart. The heart is where reckoning happens.
- Mark 2:8Why do you feel this way?Why REASON ye these things in your hearts? Jesus calls it reasoning.
- Romans 10:9-10Feel it sincerely enough.With the heart man BELIEVETH. Belief is an act of the heart, not of the emotions.
- Matthew 22:37Love God emotionally, and also with your mind.Heart, soul AND mind are listed together — so the heart is not simply the mind, and not simply the feelings either.
This matters practically, not merely lexically. “Follow your heart” and “guard your heart” sound like the same advice in modern English and are opposite instructions in Scripture. Proverbs 4:23 is not asking a reader to protect his feelings from being hurt. It is telling him that everything he does will come out of what he has let himself become convinced of.
Its Presentation Through Scripture
— twelve stops, in canon order — every one of them Scripture speaking about the heart directlyThen the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great upon the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was altogether evil all the time.
The first great statement about the human heart is a verdict, and notice the noun it governs: the thoughts of his heart. The problem named before the flood is a thinking problem.
And you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.
The command that governs the whole law begins there — with all your heart — and the two things added to it, soul and might, are not smaller.
But the LORD said to Samuel, “Do not consider his appearance or height, for I have rejected him; the LORD does not see as man does. For man sees the outward appearance, but the LORD sees the heart.”
The clearest sentence in Scripture about what God is examining, spoken while a prophet is looking at a line of impressive older brothers.
Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.
David asks for a clean heart using the verb Genesis 1 uses for creating out of nothing. He does not ask for it to be cleaned.
Guard your heart with all diligence, for from it flow springs of life.
Guard it above everything, because out of it are the issues of life — the one thing Proverbs says to defend rather than acquire.
The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?
The hardest verse: deceitful above all things, and desperately sick. And the next verse says who is able to search it.
I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will remove your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.
God's answer to Jeremiah 17:9 is not repair. It is replacement: a new heart, and the stone one taken out.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the pure in heart — and the promise attached is not reward but sight.
For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, and slander.
Jesus locates the source of every listed sin in one place, in an argument about washing hands. The defilement was never coming from outside.
Jesus declared, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’
He quotes Deuteronomy 6:5 and lists heart, soul and mind separately — which is the strongest single argument that 'heart' is not simply feeling, and not simply thinking either.
that if you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with your heart you believe and are justified, and with your mouth you confess and are saved.
Paul assigns believing to the heart and confessing to the mouth. If the heart were the emotions, the sentence would not work.
It is clear that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.
And the promise lands: a letter written not on tables of stone but on fleshy tables of the heart — Ezekiel's stone-for-flesh exchange, reported as done.
Man looks on the eyes (so the original word is), and is pleased with the liveliness and sprightliness that appear in them; but God looks on the heart, and sees the thoughts and intents of that.
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible, 1710Nonconformist
1 Samuel 16:7
renew--implies that he had possessed it; the essential principle of a new nature had not been lost, but its influence interrupted (Lu 22:32); for Ps 51:11 shows that he had not lost God's presence and Spirit (1Sa 16:13), though he had lost the "joy of his salvation" (Ps 51:12), for whose return he prays. right spirit--literally, "constant," "firm," not yielding to temptation.
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown· Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible, 1871Reformed
Psalm 51:10
Guarding the heart — the oldest practical teaching on this symbolAmbrose and Caesarius of Arles on Proverbs 4:23
Ambrose of Milantreats it as a matter of property and boundaries: “Your possession is your mind, your gold your heart, your silver your speech: "The words of the Lord are pure words, as silver tried in the fire." A good mind is also a good possession. And, further, a pure inner life is a valuable possession. Hedge in, then, this possession of yours, enclose it with thought, guard it with thorns, that is, with pious care”
And in the same work, on the pairing of heart and mouth: Let us then guard our hearts, let us guard our mouths. Both have been written about. In this place we are bidden to take heed to our mouth; in another place you are told, "Keep your heart with all diligence." If David took heed, will you not take heed?
Caesarius of Arles puts it beside a psalm about the eyes, which is where the guarding actually happens: Let us listen to the prophet when he says, "With all watchfulness keep your heart," and "Turn away my eyes that they may not behold vanity."
The Diagnosis and the Answer
— Jeremiah 17:9 and Ezekiel 36:26, read as one pairThe heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?The next verse is the point: 'I the LORD search the heart' — the verse is not despair, it is a jurisdiction claim.
I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will remove your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.Not cleaned, not mended, not improved. Taken out, and another one given.
Jeremiah 17:9 is often quoted alone, and quoted alone it is simply bleak. In its own paragraph it is a claim about who is competent to assess a person: the heart is beyond your reading, and the next sentence says the LORD searches it. Ezekiel then supplies what nobody could have inferred — that the fix is not a better effort but a different organ.
God by his grace takes away the stony heart from unbelievers and forestalls merit in people of good will in such a way that their will is prepared by what goes before grace, but that grace is not given through some merit of human will.
Augustine of Hippo· Letter 217, 430Latin father
Ezekiel 36:26
Free will is always present in us, but it is not always good. For it is either free of justice, while serving sin, and then it is evil; or it is free of sin, while serving justice, and then it is good. But the grace of God is always good and brings about a good will in a person who before was possessed of an evil will.
Augustine of Hippo· On Grace and Free Will 15:31, 430Latin father
Ezekiel 36:26
Augustine is writing inside a specific fifth-century argument about grace and the will, and the questions he is answering are still genuinely debated among honoured teachers. What is quoted here is what Ezekiel 36:26 itself supports and no more: the stone heart is removed by God rather than surrendered by the man. Where the wider question of grace and the will is worked out, with the positions and their holders, is regeneration.
It is clear that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.Paul reports Ezekiel's exchange as accomplished — and the writing surface is a congregation.
Said Outright, and Heard by Readers
— this symbol needs very little inference — Scripture explains it constantlyWhat Scripture says outright
Unusually for a symbol, almost everything here is stated. The heart is the one image the Bible defines while using it.
- 1 Samuel 16:7
God contrasts what man sees with what He looks at, and names the heart as the second.
- Matthew 15:19
Jesus lists what proceeds out of the heart and says explicitly that these are what defile a man.
- Romans 10:10
Paul assigns believing to the heart in so many words.
- Ezekiel 36:26-27
God states the exchange, and says in the next verse what the new heart is for: that they may walk in His statutes.
What readers have heard in it
Readings and habits of speech, named as such.
- Jeremiah 17:9
That the verse describes the believer’s heart after conversion, and so should govern a Christian’s self-suspicion. Jeremiah is diagnosing Judah in a specific moment, and Ezekiel 36 and 2 Corinthians 3 both describe a change to the thing being diagnosed. Both halves belong on the page.
- Proverbs 4:23
That “guard your heart” is advice about protecting yourself from being hurt in relationships. The verse is about what flows out, not what gets in — and the phrase “issues of life” is the reason given.
- Deuteronomy 6:5
That heart, soul and might map neatly onto emotion, spirit and body. It preaches well and the Hebrew does not divide that tidily; the three terms overlap deliberately, and the point of the sentence is totality.
The Voices
— named, with the work to go and readAmbrose is the most practical writer on this symbol anywhere in the tradition — his treatment of the heart as a possession to be hedged, in On the Duties of the Clergy, is fourth-century pastoral advice that has not dated. Augustine supplies the theological weight on Ezekiel 36 and is quoted only as far as that verse carries him. Matthew Henry catches the detail in the Hebrew of 1 Samuel 16:7 — man looks on the eyes — and JFB read Psalm 51:10 carefully enough to notice that David asks for renewal of something he already had.
Where Marcus Lands
The thing God looks at; the thing Jeremiah says cannot be read; the thing David asked to have created rather than cleaned — and a letter written on one.
Where to Go Next
— grouped, because a pile of titles is not a hand-offThe heart, and the studies around it
Where the new heart is the subject
Where Jesus takes it inward
Where the picture goes on
Its neighbours in the index
The Symbolism of Scripture gathers every picture the Bible thinks in. This one sits with: