Above All That We Think

There is a word the King James Bible keeps using in its darkest sentences, and most of us have absorbed the darkness without ever noticing the word. “Every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually,” it says of the world before the flood. The imagination of man’s heart “is evil from his youth,” God says after it. The prophets take up the same charge against a people who “walk in the imagination of their evil heart.” Read enough of these and you come away with a settled instinct: the imagination is the part of us that drifts towards what it should not, the inner room where appetite and fantasy and self-deception are manufactured. Something to be watched, distrusted, kept on a short leash.

But look at the word the translators rendered “imagination,” and the instinct begins to come apart. The Hebrew is yetser, and it does not mean fantasy or daydream. It means the forming faculty, the heart’s power to conceive and frame and shape a thing inwardly before it exists outwardly. It comes from yatsar, the potter’s verb, the same word used when God formed the man from the dust of the ground. The imagination, in the Bible’s own vocabulary, is a forming power, and it is a small echo of the Maker’s own. That is a strange thing to have been taught to distrust.

And in fact it is not only ever named as evil. The same word turns up in one of the most peaceful verses in all of Isaiah: “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee.” The word under “mind” is yetser. The same forming faculty that conceived evil continually before the flood is here producing perfect peace, and nothing about it has changed except the thing it is fixed upon. Before, it was turned in on itself and bent towards what it should not want. Here, it is stayed on God, and kept. Same faculty. Opposite fruit.

If the imagination were evil in its substance, the only faithful response would be the one most of us were quietly handed: suppress it, distrust it, starve it down until it goes quiet. But a faculty that can be stayed on God and kept in perfect peace is not evil in its substance. It is good, and it has been misaimed. Wounded by the fall, certainly, bent and in need of healing, but wounded in its aim rather than evil in its making. So the work God does with it is not destruction but redirection. He does not reach into the heart and remove the forming power. He turns it around.

And the moment you grant that, the next question follows at once. Turned around towards what? If the imagination is not to be killed but aimed, in which direction is it meant to point? Scripture answers in a sentence that sounds, at first hearing, like the opposite of what we would expect God to say.

“Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old.” That is the answer, and on a first reading it is baffling, because the whole of Scripture seems to press the other way. Remember the Sabbath. Remember that you were a slave in Egypt. Remember the days of old. The command to remember runs through the law and the psalms like a refrain, and here is the same God, through the same prophet, telling His people to stop remembering. Something specific must be meant.

It is, and the context tells you exactly what. Read the verses just above it. Isaiah has been rehearsing the Red Sea, the God “which maketh a way in the sea, and a path in the mighty waters,” who drew out the chariot and the horse and the army and quenched them like a wick. He is recalling the Exodus, the founding deliverance, the single greatest thing God had ever done for the nation. And then, in the very next breath, he says: do not remember it. The things God tells them to stop dwelling on are not their sins. They are their salvations. Their best memories.

Why? “Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it?” There is a kind of remembering that fixes the inner eye so firmly on what God did that it cannot see what God is doing. The former deliverance, precisely because it was so glorious, can fill the imagination until there is no room left to perceive the new thing rising in the present. God is not against memory. He commands it on nearly every other page. He is against an imagination so saturated with the old that it goes blind to the new. “Shall ye not know it?” is a real question, and the danger inside it is that they will not, because their forming faculty is already full.

Now follow that where it leads, because this is the turn the whole argument was built to reach. If God will release His people even from dwelling on the good that is behind them, so that their imagination is free to face what He is doing next, then how much more does He not want that same faculty chained to the bad that is behind them. If the memory of the Red Sea can become a thing to set down, what of the memory of the wound, the failure, the old sin, the injury you have rehearsed ten thousand times in the dark? The imagination that runs backward over its griefs, replaying what cannot be changed, is fixed in exactly the direction God told even the redeemed to turn away from. He turned them forward from their best day. He certainly does not want you aimed backward at your worst one.

So the direction is settled. The forming faculty, redeemed, faces forward. It is not for being imprisoned by what was, whether the glory or the grief. It is for perceiving what is springing forth, and leaning towards it. Which leaves only the last question, and the largest. If the imagination is turned forward, towards the new thing God is doing, how far forward is it allowed to reach? What is the size of the thing it is permitted to expect?

Paul answers in a single verse, and it is one you have almost certainly heard, probably more often than it can bear. “Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think.” It gets quoted at the close of sermons and across the tops of conference banners, worn so smooth by use that we hear it as a vague assurance that God is powerful and good things are coming. But look at the word nearly everyone skips. “Above all that we ask or think.” The word translated “think” is the Greek noeō, and it is not limited to calculation or planning. It means to perceive, to apprehend, to conceive, to take a thing into the mind and form it there. It reaches into the same inner faculty Scripture has been tracing all along, the power to shape and behold what is not yet in the hand. Paul has reached, at the height of his prayer, for the mind’s conceiving power, and set it down as the measure of the verse.

That changes what the verse is about. We are used to hearing it as a statement about God’s power, and it is that. But it is first a statement about the reach of the redeemed mind before God, because the imagination is the ruler Paul lays against Him to reach for His measure. He invites you to reach. Ask for the largest thing you can ask. Then conceive, with the whole forward-facing forming power of a redeemed heart, the biggest thing you can picture God doing. Stretch the faculty to its ceiling, the place where you can frame nothing further. And the verse says God is able to do “exceeding abundantly above” even that. The Greek stacks the words up, a triple reach for something past the edge of speech. The point is not that God will do a little more than you expect. It is that He stands beyond the furthest your imagination can throw.

And here is what the verse refuses to be misread as. This is not the heart manufacturing its own future by the force of its own picturing, the imagination straining to call a thing into being. Paul says God does this “according to the power that worketh in us.” The enlarging is not self-generated. The faculty is not the engine. It is the instrument, stretched forward and then outrun by a power that is God’s and not ours. The redeemed imagination does not create what it reaches for. It reaches, and is exceeded.

Put the three together and the shape of the thing is plain. God does not save the imagination by shrinking it. He does not redeem the forming power by teaching it to expect little and keep still. He saves it by turning it from evil to good, from backward to forward, and then by aiming it at Himself, the one object large enough that the faculty reaches its absolute limit against Him and finds Him still further out. The cure for an imagination that once conceived evil continually is not a smaller imagination. It is a sanctified and enlarged one, fixed on a God who exceeds it.

The word the King James kept using in its darkest sentences was never the problem. That inward faculty was good from the beginning, a small echo of the Maker who shaped us from the dust. It went dark when it turned in on itself and backward into its own griefs. It is healed when it is turned around, and forward, and up, and handed an object worthy of its full reach. “Above all that we ask or think.” The imagination was made for that sentence. It was made to run as far as it can towards God, and to find, gladly, that He was already further