Deceitful Above All Things

“The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?”(Jeremiah 17:9) God can.

God knows about all of the sin hidden in the heart of man - He can see it. The Lord can plumb the depths of the soul; He is able to understand the heart completely because He made it.

He has foreseen all sin, but He will search for it because that is how perfect justice works - just as angels were sent to the perverted cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to see the sin first hand. Only afterward were the Cities of the Plain incinerated.(Genesis 19) Even today physical evidence of the true justice of God can be witnessed there. Sulfur balls can easily be found by just about anyone who searches for them.

“The heart is deceitful above all things” because deception springs out of a sinful heart. A neighbor's tongue can drip with deceit. David wrote: “Everyone lies to his neighbor; their flattering lips speak with deception.”(Psalm 12:2) Has everyone always had kind words for their next door neighbor?

The deceitful heart is “beyond cure” because there is nothing any of us can do to completely cure it. Humanistic psychology thinks it has a cure for man; treatment is based on the premise that genes are the problem and modern medicine is the cure. But they have left the soul out of the equation - man is a spiritual being as well as physical. God loves us and is willing to heal our whole hearts:

“For this people's heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them.”(Matthew 13:15; Acts 28:27)