The English word listen appears once in the King James Version of the Bible. But listening is a major theme of both Testaments. Both use words for listening (hearing) by which they mean listeners understanding and doing, generated from a verbal message. The words are strong. Current day omission of teaching on the theme is a large educational and practical loss. Salvation or no salvation challenge turns on our listening/learning habits, related to attention focus. Nearly all analysts of current life, as related to communications, deplore the low quality of listening demonstrated in an easily distracted population. Listening is vital to education and conduct.
The translation of the KJV, just 400 or so years ago, made generous use of hear and hearken, words standing for listening. Several concordance pages are devoted to the location of those words throughout Scripture. In our era the word, hear, has increasingly come to mean acuity for receiving sounds. Is the person able to hear? If hearing loss occurs, there are gadgets available to improve the hearing acuity of the person. Those aids were unknown in the 1600s. Hearing or harken carried the sense that when one did listen there was an expected response to the message received. It was not a docile reception of noises that meant nothing, but messages that implied a verdict, perhaps important for life and death – and certainly with that meaning in Scripture.
To hear well is no guarantee that the person is listening. I hear the railroad train going through my town, but I don’t listen to it. What I hear in such instances usually does not reach my consciousness. True listening reaches consciousness. It identifies. Some persons with diminished acuity become better listeners than those who hear well. Loss makes the person more attentive, knowing that the loss of sound may be his or her fault, rather than the fault of a clumsy speaker. The knowledgeable analyst, observing the listening habits of others is usually disappointed relative to the quality of listening on nearly every level of human communication exchanges. Even the deaf, as Helen Keller affirmed, listen through detours of touch and reading. In communication seminars I was sometimes asked to offer a section on listening. I began by asking how many people listened well to the sounds they received, or did they tend to listen for the good stuff and disregard the part they didn’t need or care about – which meant they believed it useless or uninteresting or boring. Nearly everyone acknowledged that they listened to the good stuff and did not listen to the bad. Then I asked: If you did not listen to the bad, how did you know it was bad? Very soon they discovered they were poor listeners, and that poverty meant real loss in nearly every aspect of their lives from gaining simple instructions for some ordinary action, to their marriage happiness, even to understanding and responding to the voice of God. If we hear the sound of a voice and miss the articulation, we have not listened for meaning. Listening failure and alertness are major issues in all of Scripture. The people were often reminded that they had ears to hear but they did not listen. Matters have not changed significantly through the centuries. One of the compliments we give to others and ourselves is to be found to be good listeners. Can I repeat succinctly the message just given to me? Do I respect the context in which it was given to determine responses? Do I want to listen to something so to determine belief or action? Active listeners are seldom bored, even with nonsense they may feel compelled to listen to. It helps them to sort out beliefs. It also makes persons better communicators, offering confidence in thought and conduct. They are taken seriously and respected. Listen! *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020