The Beast Within
I was also blameless with Him, and I kept myself from my iniquity. Psalm 18:23 NASB
My iniquity – It would be much easier to for David to say that he kept himself “from iniquity.” Then the wickedness would be alien, outside, an enemy at a distance. But David uses the Hebrew ‘awoni, the combination of ‘awon (guilt, sin, misdeed) and ani (I, me, my). He declares that he keeps himself (the verb shamar) from his own form of sin. This is crucial. It is precisely where we fall.
The yetzer ha’ra would love us to concentrate on iniquity as a general concept. Then we could easily compare our righteousness against the hideous, pathological wickedness of others. After all, we are not murderers. We are not blatant idolaters. We are not rebels, thieves, blasphemers, child-abusers, stingy, malicious. Those horrible acts are what all the “others” do. By comparison, we are good people, struggling to be better perhaps, but certainly acceptable on the larger scale. That’s why David avoids such a misdirected examination. Iniquity that is not personal, that does not arrive in the form I find most delicious, is of no value in spiritual renewal. For sin to drive me toward the Father, it must be the kind of sin I find most enticing.
It is my iniquity that really matters.
David’s lyric forces me to examine how carefully I have guarded my heart against precisely those acts I find most tempting. Quite frankly, I am not tempted to murder. Nor to steal. Nor to abuse the powerless. In fact, I am outraged by such behavior and recoil at those who do such things. But there are some ghosts in my closet that I find comforting. They are quite familiar to me. We have been friends in the past and I know they would welcome my return. I keep them in the closet because I never know what this day will bring. Perhaps today I will be rejected, shunned, humiliated—and they will be there, offering me comfort, soothing my battered emotions. They are so tempting because they are an exact fit with my fragile self. This is my iniquity.
David says that he must guard himself against himself. By now this is obvious. Obvious in goal and intention, but obscured in practice. How do I keep myself from being me? Over the course of a lifetime, we construct the delicate fabric of personal iniquity. By trial and error, we learn what is needed to block the feelings of pain, of regret, or rejection. We teach ourselves our own personal versions of addiction. What is addiction? It is anything that alters my mood by substituting an action that removes me from the original experience. For example, you’re overweight. You know you are. You look in the mirror and you see someone you don’t want to be. But no matter how much to try, you can’t seem to lose those pounds for good. Somewhere in the past, something happened that convinced you that you were not acceptable, that you had to be some other image of yourself to be loved. So you find a way to soothe that hurt. You eat. But when you eat, your body betrays you. It takes on the look of the very thing you are trying to avoid. Now what you see in the mirror only reminds you of how unacceptable you are. So you eat. Eating becomes an addictive behavior that replaces the original experience of pain with a substitute of comfort.
How do you guard your heart? Can you stop eating? Of course not! What you must do to guard your heart is to go back to the original pain and let yourself experience it in the safety of God’s spirit. You cannot guard something that is at war. You can only guard something that no longer wants to fight.
To guard my iniquity I must first wrestle in the night until my war with myself ends in the morning and I cross over with a new name for an old way.
Topical Index: iniquity, ‘awon, guilt, addiction, guard, shamar, Psalm 18:23
Just like Jacob he crossed over wrestled with an angel, and his name was changed to Israel,, the scriptures also said that we wrestle not against flesh and blood but against spiritual wickedness in high places , it is a constant battle against the enemy, but we have to hold fast to the hem of his garment.
True, but what if those “high places” are inside us?
Yes! On reading this today I finally saw that those high places need not be external to me. The enemy is within.
The highest place inside me is between my ears. My mind. Where does my ‘sin’ start? In my mind. I never do anything i have not thought about first.
To think is to do. Even if it is the thinking 30 seconds prior to doing.
This is MY answer for the query and i’m content with it.
PS not to the enemies garment, but to YESHUA’S!
The only sin that I have any power (choice) over is the sin that I identify, name and own. You are so right, Skip; this is war. Either sin controls me, or I control it, but I cannot have any control over what I am in denial about. This is a battle of identity. Sin in me is all that I, in the truth of my creation, am NOT. Sin obscures and negates who I really am. Righteousness returns me to who I really am; righteousness sets me free from the shackles of insanity to the freedom of who I was created to be. Who am I? I was created to be an expression of the character (Torah) of my Father. When you can look at me and see only Him, then you will be seeing who I really am.
Is sin in the Bible a noun or a verb? If a verb it seems to be on the line of forgetting who we are. Missing what we are to aim at, what we are to walk in. We are beings to remember. Remembering is an action begetting action. Hear, Oh, Israel. Hear, listen and do what contains life. When we remember who we are, aren’t we taking the first and continuing step to teshuva? Sin is missing life, forgetting what living is, an action of us in stepping in to what we’ve missed.
I miss life. I teshuva. I live.
I think Christianity has warped the concept and essence of what sin really is.
Life is doing – here and now. The problem is that sin masquerades as life, that is, we are still actively doing so we think we are alive. “Let the dead buried the dead” may not be about “eternal salvation” at all. It may be about imaging that we are alive because we are animated but actually being dead because we are animated without divine purpose. If life is in the son, that means life is experienced in connection with the purposes of the Father since the son is the living exemplar of the Father. What this implies is that most animated homo sapiens are actually dead. They just don’t know it yet.
Makes sense to me.
Spent a huge amount of time thinking I must not have the self-control cluster of the fruit of the spirit. Which didn’t help in any way. I think I am honing in on that original place of pain, very elusive. This post reminds of Brennan Manning ‘ s impostor, I may be finally ready for a wrestling match. But the impostor doesn’t ever go away apparently. Sigh.
YOU have authority over the imposter. Use it.
Only love works on the imposter/beast within. It is too well versed in all other avenues. I’ll be taking mine into the presence of God’s love.
I love that answer, Vuyelwa!