Wash, Dry, Fold

Create in me a clean heart, God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.  Psalm 51:10  NASB

Steadfast – There’s not much point in washing your clothes if you’re just going to jump back in the mud.  They might be clean for the moment, but unless you stay away from the muck, you’ll be right back where you started—dirty.  That’s the point of using two verbs in this verse.  The first is the clean up: bārāʾ.  Notice that it is God who does the washing.  bārāʾfinds its home in the idea of creation.   Most importantly, it is a “God” word.  

The root bārāʾ has the basic meaning “to create.” It differs from yāṣar “to fashion” in that the latter primarily emphasizes the shaping of an object while bārāʾ emphasizes the initiation of the object.^[1]

The word is used in the Qal only of God’s activity and is thus a purely theological term. This distinctive use of the word is especially appropriate to the concept of creation by divine fiat.^[2]

David entreats God’s creative action in order to thoroughly cleanse his inner constitution.  Surface improvement is not enough.  That means God must render something new in place of the old, smudged personality.  But a once-off cleansing won’t complete the job.  The mud puddle is still out there.

Thus, kûn: steadfast, prepared, fixed, certain.  The object is “to bring something into being with the consequence that its existence is a certainty.”^[3]  A lifetime, mud-avoidance policy.  The verb needed is ḥādaš, an extremely interesting choice.  It implies that the relationship sought after was once in place.  What is needed is renewal, restoration, refreshing.  This is the same word used for the “new” moon, which, of course, is the same moon seen again.  Being cleansed by a divine act should entail a revival, a rehabilitation.  The first move may belong to God alone, but the second requires human commitment and cooperation.

With that in mind, Jonathan Sacks provides a needed cautionary note:

“Crises happen and there is no way we can make ourselves immune to them.  That is the human condition and we cannot escape it.  We live toward an unknown, unknowable future.  Even the answer God gives Moses when he asks Him His name—‘I will be what I will be’—tells us this.  God is saying, ‘You will not know what, where or how I will be until the moment comes.’  Faith is not certainty; it is the courage to live with uncertainty.”[4]

Don’t think that once washed everything will be pretty and nice.  No, sir.  Once washed introduces us to the reality of the broken world—and the possibility of courage in the face of such a world.  The righteous are not a protected class.  They’re just the ones who know where the mud is in order to avoid it.

Topical Index: bārāʾ, create, renew, ḥādaš, steadfast, kûn, Psalm 51:10