HEARING MUSAR
Cease listening, my son, to discipline, And you will stray from the words of knowledge. Proverbs 19:27
There are times I have deaf ears. My wife would no doubt tell you that a substantial amount of those times are when she speaks to me (okay that is not true but it is funny). My deaf ears come into play when my heart (the essence of who I am) does not want to hear. This results in me not doing the things I need to do. The ugly truth is this doesn’t just pertain to my spiritual life; it also pertains to my everyday life.
In Proverbs 19:27, the writer tells us three important things. First, he tells us that we need to listen. The word ‘listen’ in Hebrew is shama which means to “… use the perception of hearing with the ears to process information.”[1] Second, he speaks to us about discipline. In Hebrew, the word discipline is the word musar. Musar means discipline, chastening, and correction.[2] I dislike the word musar. The third thing that the writer tells us comes from the word ‘knowledge.’ The Hebrew word for knowledge is death and means “…knowledge with a focus on moral qualities and its application.”[3]
Here is what this means to us. When we receive discipline, chastening, or correction we need to process it. Next, we need to focus on the moral qualities we need to change. For some of us, it is perhaps anger, others of us may have a difficult time with lust (cars, money, food, etc.) or any number of other things. The point is that all of us have those times in our lives when we receive instruction (musar) it is what we do with it that will make a difference in our lives and to others.
[1] Swanson, J. (1997) Dictionary of Biblical Languages with Semantic Domains: Hebrew (Old Testament) (electronic ed.). Oak Harbor: Logos Research Systems, Inc.
[2] Brown, Francis, 1849-1916. (1996). The Brown, Driver, Briggs Hebrew and English lexicon: with an appendix containing the Biblical Aramaic: coded with the numbering system for Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 1996.
[3] Swanson, Dictionary of Biblical Languages with Semantic Domains: Hebrew (Old Testament) (electronic ed.), Logos Research Systems, Inc.