Psalm 119 – Samekh: The Single-minded Man

For much of my life, I have been a double-minded man. Even now as I write these words the tug in both directions on my life is palpable, although one of the ropes is slowing becoming untethered. I often wonder whether others feel the same sort of tension. But I don’t wonder what happens when I allow evil’s rope to win the battle.

Living in this tension brings an overwhelming sense of instability. When I am being pulled by the good, I am also dreaming of evil, and when the evil draws me, I long for good. I have spent much of my life standing in front of others instructing them in the ways of scripture, while often struggling with the strong tug of evil within my heart. Many times evil’s tug won the day within mere hours of publicly proclaiming the good.

Having been an actor for much of my life, I can say that this tension is very much like playing a character. I know full well who I am, but acting requires that I step on the stage to become someone different. But many times the character on stage changed who I was off stage, making it more difficult to differentiate the real from the assumed. There have been a few times I played my roles so well that the two characters (my real self and my stage self) melded into a single personality and I found no difference between my on-stage persona and my off-stage persona. The simplest word for my life during these times was “unstable,” ironically the same word used by James to describe the double-minded man.

Even though stepping out of the role on the stage may take some time, it is a simple thing. It merely requires for you to distance yourself from the stage role for a time and embrace your real self. When the play is over, that false self slowly diminishes over time and you return to your real self.

The moral equivalent to this is actually much more difficult as the only time you step away from life’s stage is death. But the process to remove the evil influence is the same: you must remove all of its appearances from your daily life and embrace what is true. This is, however, not your true self, but God and his ways, a thing that is often easier said than done.

Paul spoke about this very thing in Romans 7 when he said he was constantly in a battle between those things he wanted to do and those things he didn’t want to do. I think this means that we are all, by nature, double-minded; we put on a mask pretending to be who we are not. Most of the time (maybe all of the time?) we do this because we don’t like our real self and we fear rejection if we allow that real self to be exposed on stage for all to see. The thing is, I think this inclination is a good one: we shouldn’t embrace our true self, because our true self is double-minded in nearly every way. And, if these are the only two options (embracing our real self or embracing our fake self), then we are very much in trouble, but there is a third option, an option presented by the Psalmist in Psalm 119:113-120.

We should love and embrace God and his ways, allowing him and his ways to become a hiding place and a shield for us. He should be the one to whom we go in the midst of trials and temptations. While this may not feel as immediately rewarding and good as giving into temptation may often seem, it the only place where the dross is removed from our lives. If we don’t rest in him during these times then we ourselves become the dross that is discarded instead of the precious metal that is being purified.

We should also place our hope in God and his ways, finding our life in him and his ways knowing that in doing so we will never come to shame. Most of us have, at one time or another, allowed our evil self to reign, eventually finding ourselves cowering in guilt and shame. In this, we mimic Adam and Eve as they sought their own way of covering their guilt and shame forgetting that God holds the only proper way to cover them and provide them with safety.

And we should tremble when we give ourselves to God, not out of fear of destruction, but rather because will take us from our life and immerse us in his goodness. Lewis describes this when he has Susan ask Mr. Beaver in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe about Aslan, “Is he-quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion”…”Safe?” said Mr. Beaver …”Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.”

We tremble because we stand naked and fully exposed before God awaiting his good use for us, something in our fallen state we all deeply fear. For a life of perfect good is unknown to us and a life in the hands of God, the creator of all, is beyond our imagining. We all fear that which is unknown and uncomfortable, but it is just that to which we are called. We are called to put on a new self, to live with a new heart, so that we will become a new being, one that is single-minded in all our ways.