Ps. 33.15 (the fashioner of hearts)

“He is the one / who fashions their hearts / individually – he is the one / who discerns / all they do.” We have finally come to the conclusion of Yhwh’s creation: the heart of man. From he heavens we have now descended, past the ‘gaze’, and into the most intimate and controlling aspect of man. Even here, at this most central and particular, Yhwh is present, fashioning man. He does not fashion a ‘universal’ heart. Rather, each person’s heart is under the direct power of Yhwh’s hands. This ‘fashioning’ is certainly to make us recall the ‘fashioning’ of Adam in the garden, the fact that Yhwh ‘stoops down’ and, with his ‘hands’, and like a potter, shapes man into an image of himself. Here, though, we link up with the previous verse on the ‘gaze’ and come to see that to ‘fashion’ man’s heart is to subject man to Yhwh’s discernment. Just as the word is not spoken by Yhwh and then lost to him, but rather it carries with, as if pregnant, Yhwh’s power plans and schemes, so too does man’s heart carry with it the ‘discernment of Yhwh’. It is because he fashioned the seat of their wills and intellect that he comes to see how their words, like his and unlike his, are either ‘right’ and ‘true’ or are ‘false’. Yhwh’s eye is prior to every act, and every act carries with it the discernment of Yhwh. As the psalm has been steadily emphasizing, and now finds its ultimate conclusion, nothing is hidden from him. His power extends from the hosts of heaven to the center of man, and this power is intimately tied to his the fact that he is the speaker of the creative word, that he is has the ‘breath of life’, that his ‘plans and schemes’ survive, and that he ‘fashions’. All of these, ultimately, are of the same quilt—to fail to see their mutual connections is to fail to see the form. To isolate one without realizing its dependence on the other is to misshape the entirety. Finally, to say “he is the one who discerns all they do” in the context of the psalm would indicate that he is the only one who discerns all they do. Everything we have spoken about regarding the word, the breathe, the plans and schemes, and the gaze—all of these are entirely unique operations of Yhwh. For that reason, for him to ‘discern’ the heart of man is something exclusively within his power. He alone is the one present in everyone’s heart through his discerning gaze and fashioning hands. It is important to note that these actions by Yhwh are never delegated actions, they are never mediated by another. Rather, they come directly from him. He may ‘bring them to light’ and reveal them, but these powers are his, and his alone. In this way he is of an entirely different order than the rest of creation.