Prayers of Desire

Delight yourself in the Lord; and He will give you the desires of your heart.  Psalm 37:4  NASB

Will give you – What a great promise!  Be greatly pleased with God and you’ll get everything your heart desires, right? Take pleasure in God and you’ll be guaranteed divinely provided health, wealth, and happiness (unless, of course, you desire something else).  It seems like the perfect  “prosperity gospel” prooftext.  So why doesn’t it work out this way?  Why do we struggle to achieve?  Why does Israel go through hardships?  It must be because we (or they) haven’t delighted in God enough, right?  It’s not God who is remiss in fulfilling the promise.  It’s us!  We’ve messed up somewhere along the way so God can’t give us all those things we really want.  The solution?  Try harder.  Pray longer. Tithe more.  Be a better person.  Then, maybe, we will be worthy of being blessed.  That’s the implied goal, isn’t it?  To be blessed.  To get something we want.

Unless, of course, that’s not what the verse says at all.

There are two crucial words here; the verb nātan (to give) and the noun mišʾālâ (desire, from the verb šāʾal, “to ask, inquire, beg”).  First, let’s consider nātan.  “Considering the extensive use of this verb, some 2,000 times (mostly in the Qal stem), it is not surprising to find a great variety of meanings given in translation. In addition to its basic and most frequent sense of give, we find in the KJV such renderings as set, commit, put, lay, fasten, hang, make (to be something), appoint, suffer (=allow), bestow, deliver, send, pay, turn, thrust, strike, cast (lots); passive uses adding be taken/gotten.”^[1]  Maybe “will give you” isn’t quite as straightforward as we thought.  Then there’s the noun, mišʾālâ.  Its verbal root, šāʾal, requires the following comment: “Over and over again in the ot šāʾal is used of men and women asking or failing to ask God for guidance, i.e., enquiring of the Lord. David, a man after God’s own heart, many times “enquired of the Lord” (e.g. I Sam 23:2; 30:8; II Sam 2:1; 5:19, 23; I Chr 14:10, 14). . . šāʾal is also used to signify a request for something, and frequently this too is directed to God.”^[2]  The noun occurs only twice in the Tanakh.  “Interestingly enough, both of these occurrences speak of God’s fulness in granting the prayerful petitions of those who love his name amid evildoers and troublesome times.”^[3]

But now we need to add something to this vocabulary investigation.

What “desires” is David talking about?  Anything we want?  If that’s the case, and you get what you want, are you satisfied?  Fully content?  Never wanting anything more?  No, unfortunately, that’s not the way human nature works.  The yetzer ha’ra always presses for the next thing whether that’s the next meal or the next millennium.  Human desires are endless.  Should God actually be in the business of granting your desires, He would be more like a genie in the bottle, with unlimited requests.  What David suggests, and what the vocabulary implies, are totally satisfying desires.  And that’s why the verse must be read like this:

Be fully pleased with God and He will give you your heart’s desires.  That is, He will put those desires in your heart that fully satisfy you.  He will give you the desire you need, not the desires you want, and what you need to be fully pleased with God are His desires in your heart.  As Heschel says, “Prayer teaches us what to aspire to.  So often we do not know what to cling to.  Prayer implants in us the ideals we ought to cherish.”[4]

What does your heart truly desire?  God knows—and He gives those desires to you.  How else could we read this verse, as Heschel notes: “Prayer comes to pass in a complete turning of the heart toward God, toward His goodness and power.  It is the momentary disregard of our personal concerns, the absence of self-centered thoughts, which constitute the art of prayer.”[5]

Topical Index: give, nātan, mišʾālâ, desire, prayer, satisfied, Psalm 37:4

^[1] Harris, R. L., Archer, G. L., Jr., & Waltke, B. K. (Eds.). (1999). Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 608). Chicago: Moody Press.

^[2] Harris, R. L., Archer, G. L., Jr., & Waltke, B. K. (Eds.). (1999). Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 891). Chicago: Moody Press.

^[3] Harris, R. L., Archer, G. L., Jr., & Waltke, B. K. (Eds.). (1999). Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 892). Chicago: Moody Press.

[4] Abraham Heschel, Between God and Man: An Interpretation of Judaism (Free Press Paperbacks, 1959), p. 198.

[5] Ibid., p. 201.