Fire On Your Head

“Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night.” Psalm 1:1-2

“This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success.” Joshua 1:8

If you’re a good Jesus-loving, sin hating, Bible reading follower of Christ, you’ve probably come across passages like this and many other ones in the Psalms, that talk of meditating on the Word of God, ‘day and night‘. This is not some new-agey practice. But seriously, if the Bible talks about something a lot, then we need to take seriously what it repeats, and find out what it means.

The word for meditate used here in the Hebrew is ‘hagah‘. It comes from the root word ‘hagiyg, which literally means “whisper, musing, or murmuring”. Hagah literally means “to moan, growl, utter, muse, mutter, meditate, devise, plot, speak.”

Interesting isn’t it? I don’t know about you, but I think moaning, growling and muttering are kind of aggressive or at least deliberate speech in nature. Almost all of these renderings involve speaking, or orating in some fashion. When the word of God talks of meditating on the law of the Lord, this is not some kind of setting where you sit on the floor with your legs crossed and quietly ponder something, with candles and incense burning and other weird new age type of concepts that come to mind when we think of meditating. Biblical meditation involves speaking.

How do I know this for certain?

For one thing, you don’t need to look up the original Hebrew in order to come to this conclusion, for the passage in Joshua says in the same sentence “this book of the law shall not depart from your mouth.” The writer defines what meditation is. This makes a lot more sense when you read the psalms, where much of the time the psalmists talk about meditating on the book of the law, the same word hagah or hagiyg is used in the Hebrew. Have you ever wondered how on earth it’s possible to ‘meditate’ on the Bible day and night? According to the common modern day understanding of meditation, this would be an impossible feat, since no average Christian has the time or self-discipline to give this much focus to studying and focusing our attention ‘day and night’ on the things of the Lord. It’s simply impossible with all the other daily responsibilities the average Christian and human being needs to tend to.

But we can speak any time we want to, day or night. Alone or in public. Walking somewhere or laying still in our beds.

You can speak Scriptures out loud concerning topics that are important to where you are at in your relationship with God right now. If you need physical healing, ‘meditate’ and speak out loud (confess) Scriptures on the subject of healing, and you will build your spirit up and increase your faith in that area. The Bible says in Romans 10:17 that faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ. In order to be hearing the Word of God, someone needs to be saying it, correct?

Notice the rendering in the King James Version for Psalm 2:1: “Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine (hagah) a vain thing?” Remember the way we looked in a previous blog entry about how the heart/beliefs are intertwined with the mouth/words. So say and imagine the Word of God and things of the Lord, day and night, and then like the rest of Joshua 1:8 says “so that you may be careful to do all that is written in it (the things written in the book of the Law). For then you shall make your way prosperous and then you will have good success.

Look at some other uses of the word (in the ESV translation):

“Those who seek my life lay their snares; those who seek my hurt speak of ruin and meditate treachery all day long.” Psalm 38:12

“When I remember you upon my bed, and meditate on you in the watches of the night.” Psalm 63:6

“When I remember God, I moan; when I meditate, my spirit faints.” Psalm 77:3

In the New Testament, the Greek word that gets translated is not much different than the Hebrew Old Testament one. In the KJV, Jesus tells his disciples in Luke 21:14–in the context of impending persecution they’d face–to “Settle it therefore in your hearts, not to meditate before what ye shall answer.” In the same translation, Paul told Timothy “Meditate upon these things; give thyself wholly to them; that thy profiting may appear to all.” 1 Timothy 4:15. The English Standard Version replaces meditate with the word ‘practice’.

In the Greek, the original word for ‘meditate upon’ is 1) to care for, attend to carefully, practise 2) to meditate i.e. to devise, contrive a) used of the Greeks of the meditative pondering and the practice of orators and rhetoricians.

Again, this is directly tied into to SPEAKING the things of God and His Word.

If you’ve ever tried memorizing anything, Scripture in particular, you’ll know that the most effective way you’ve retained what you tried memorizing, was from repeating it to yourself or someone else over and over again. There’s something about being able to store information in our spirits from speaking it a lot. So, with all this in mind, I highly recommend doing so. In Hebrew culture, much orating was done at young ages, in order that the law of the Lord could be remembered. If they were doing that with the Old Testament law, then how much more us with the words of life!?

If you’re struggling with a besetting sin, then I’d recommend meditating and speaking about verses from places like Romans 4-8 and just feed your spirit stuff on practical holiness. If you are facing a mountain in your life, speak to it and confess the Word of God concerning the promises He makes in the Bible concerning that thing you’re believing for, and like the Bible says, you can cast that mountain into the sea.

If you enjoyed this post, you may enjoy the episode of our podcast where we discussed these concepts in more depth:

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