The Heart Hath Weight

Many millennia ago in Ancient Egypt, the Egyptians had a rather complicated and extensive system of belief; mostly in the area of what happened to the soul once the individual had died.  As one who has studied Egyptology on my own and read numerous books and watched countless hours of documentaries, presentations, and debates on the subject matter; there is one particular scene from the Egyptian book of the dead which describes judgement- that stands out to me in the 21st century as a Christian.  That scene was known as the weighing of the heart.   They believed that the god of the dead (Anubis) would take the heart of the deceased, and weigh it in a scales against the feather of 'truth', personified in the goddess Ma'at.  If the heart was heavier than the personification of truth, the soul was judged to be laden down with sin and guilt, and was thus destroyed by a monstrous demon called Ammit.   If the heart was lighter, then it was judged that the soul was falsifying his life and hiding his crimes, so he was also destroyed by the same demon.  Only those whose hearts balanced with the feather of truth were judged worthy to enter the ancient Egyptian's idea of paradise.  This did not mean that they assumed all dead people would be innocent of sin and guilt; so the Egyptians would place in the sarcophagus with the deceased an amulet in the shape of a scarab, known as a heart scarab.  On this scarab, which would take the place of the deceased's heart, was a prayer to the heart, begging it not to bear witness against the offenses of the soul before the truth.  In essence, the prayer was to beg the heart to lie before judgement, so that the soul could get through, avoiding punishment for what it had done in life.   Truth be told, the entire judgement process of the ancient egyptian afterlife narrative was almost solely centered around lying your way through: from the negative confessions where you literally lied to 42 gatekeepers to say you were clear of a particular sin, to the final judgment hall itself, where you were balanced against the literal personification of truth (for them). 

But, what does that have to do with Christians today? I hear you ask.  Truthfully, we find ourselves in much the same manner as our Egyptian forerunners.  We spend our lives as Christian people looking to the life that is to come, and failing to invest in the life that is here present for us today.  We build monuments to ourselves and others so that we feel better about our shortcomings, yet make no attempt to correct them. We lavish money on charitable organizations who promise us they use it wisely overseas; yet we ignore the poor and forgotten who live next door to us.  Instead of working to build a world of peace, of love, of truth, of justice; we prefer to assure ourselves that we'll have it in the next life, and that others can worry about it here.  We ignore the essential teachings of our faith and its laws, and have the audacity to sit in our pews, when we can be bothered to go to church at all; and insist that our hearts not tell on us to God for what we have done and left undone.  We prefer the comfort of lies to the harsh reality of conviction, telling ourselves that those things in the Scripture which convict our hearts are 'legends', 'fairytales', or worse, simply made up so that religion can control people.  We fill our hearts with our own views of God and the world, to convince ourselves that what we say and do are what is 'truly' right; while we turn from the commandments that God has given to us, preferring our own ideas instead.   We spend day and night telling our heart not to rat us out by means of conviction, and all for naught.  You see, lying to yourself about who God is, what God demands, or what is truth: does not do for us what the Egyptians believed it would.  You cannot lie your way into heaven by pretending to have been a good person, screaming about social justice this, trans rights that; while your heart is filled with hatred for those you disagree with.  You cannot bypass the justice of God in His kingdom by pretending that you were so humble and simple on earth, while you defrauded people of their worldly goods and feasted on their benefices.

  Mankind may come up with all manner of devious deceits, lies, propaganda, and falsity to boost their claims of innocency and moral superiority; but the heart does NOT lie, in judgement.  This is why the topic of the heart is mentioned 160 times in the New Testament alone: because God created the heart, and knows all the secrets contained therein.  As Matthew writes in his Gospel (15:19-20)  "For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies: These are the things which defile a man..."    There is no lying to God when it comes to the judgement of truth; for as scripture warns us; the hearts of all shall be known, and everyone shall be judged according to his works.  Our job as followers of Christ is not to worry about making ourselves feel less guilty when we have done wrong, but to do good in turn.  When we have sinned and fallen from God, Christ calls us to stand up and walk the path again, giving us new life and fresh chances to become the living image of God which we were created to be.   For Christ is the truth, living and eternal.  We need no feather to symbolize it, nor prayers to tell our hearts to lie on our behalf; for all things outside of Christ are nothing.  We need only place our trust in Christ and in HIM ALONE; for there, and only there, will our hearts find balance with the truth.  It is to this cause that the Church since time immemorial hath laid down basic precepts for all men to follow, that are summed up in the creeds: Nicene, Apostle's, and Athanasian.  If any man dare say that the creeds are not important, or if he should seek to alter or adapt them in order to make them more "accessible" to modern man's desires, then he removes from them the spirit of truth which is Christ alone.  As the age-old hymn many southern Christians have heard since birth goes: "On Christ the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand."

Trust in Christ more than the comforting and flattering lies you tell your heart, and you'll find yourself beginning to balance in the scale of eternal justice.  

Here Endeth the Lesson.