17:9
“The heart is deceitful above all things”. Everyone who says “follow your heart” should meditate upon this verse. Does it mean we should never trust our heart? No. First, the heart in the Bible usually includes mind, emotions and will. It is the inner driving force. But we must always be careful about what is motivating us. Fear, greed, hatred, bitterness, selfish ambition, etc all these things can be motivating us at times, and we can rationalise all sorts of stuff to convince ourselves that what we are doing is good when in fact it is evil. It is beyond cure, by human means, and it is a nightmare to understand. There are times when we examine our own motives and find it really difficult to work out if we are doing something for good or bad reasons. We need to be born again, we need a new heart, we need the Holy Spirit.
17:10
We now get the answer to Jeremiah’s cry. “I the Lord search the heart and examine the mind”. We may not know what is going on in someone else’s heart, nor even in our own, but the Lord does. Know. He alone knows what is motivating us. And we need to recognise that as human beings we are not equipped to judge as God judges. We can judge actions, but not motives and thoughts.
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