Excerpt from Breakthrough Courage: 9 Habits to Conquer Fear and Build a Brave Heart
Last year, my Labrador retriever, Sage, found a prize: a large bone. As I was sitting out by my fire pit working on a sermon, she plopped down beside me with this massive bone that was almost bigger than her and commenced to go through the routine every dog owner knows: shaking it, staring at it, slinging it up in the air, then dragging it to a quiet, solitary place and just chewing—making a lot of low, rumbling, growling sounds of pleasure.
I take delight in my dog’s delight. (The fact that she wasn’t bugging me to throw one of her saliva-covered tennis balls was a delight enough.) But I was further delighted to discover that the words “gnaw” and “growl” are the same as the word Old Testament writers used for “meditate”: hagah in ancient Hebrew. The prophet Isaiah writes, “As a young lion growls [italics mine] over his prey” (Isaiah 31:4), which is the same word used for meditation in the Bible.
It’s the same word David uses in writing: “Blessed is the man [who]… meditates [on God’s law] day and night” (Psalm 1:1–2). In our modern vernacular, when we use the word “meditate,” it fits the more cerebral practice of thinking on something in a quiet garden or study. It conjures up the image of a monk in a lotus position, humming.
But Isaiah’s imagery is of a growling lion crouched over its dinner. It’s Sage devouring a bone: she attacks, she chews, she swallows; she gets the marrow down into her bloodstream. The bone becomes part of her. This kind of chewing and swallowing is the action of metabolizing the protein, the vitamins, the enzymes into one’s system.
Meditation in its true biblical meaning is to chew on, gnaw, and digest God’s Word through spending time on a biblical passage, a truth, with a heart hungry for God. It’s metabolizing truth, through the intimacy we experience with God in our spiritual life, to become part of us and to fuel our outer life.
It might be more helpful to compare “meditate” with another phrase: “eat the book.” The Old Testament prophets understood the power of tranquility found in meditating in God’s Book. They organized their minds and hearts through metabolizing God’s truths and promises in such a way that the idea of consuming The Book entered their vernacular.
Pastor Steve
