Jeremiah 17.a. Our Only Hope is in God, Not in Some Mortal.

 One of the practices to begin with in good Bible study is to see what words, concepts, or themes are repeated. In this chapter, the word for ‘heart’ and ‘hearts’ is repeated. In fact, it appears 40 times in the book of Jeremiah, more than any other book of the Bible, except Psalms and Proverbs. 

 In Jeremiah, God says that Judah is close to his heart; but Judah has not kept God in their heart. God says that Judah’s hearts need to be circumcised. This metaphor was stated earlier in Jeremiah: 

“Circumcise yourselves to the LORD, and take away the foreskins of your heart, ye men of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem: lest my fury come forth like fire, and burn that none can quench it, because of the evil of your doings” (Jeremiah 4: 4).

 This metaphor is not new to Israel. There are similar statement in the Law (Deuteronomy 10: 16, 30:6). What does repetition mean? It means that something is important. Israel and Judah needed to cleanse their hearts and make them holy, that is, wholly devoted to the Lord in both word and deed.  

 Here in Chapter 17 of Jeremiah, the word ‘heart’ or ‘hearts’ appears at the beginning of each segment of today’s text; in verse 1, in verse 5, and in verses 9 and 10. We can see people’s behavior, but we can only imagine their thoughts and motives. God, on the other hand, can see inner motives. 

 17: 1-4.  The sin of Judah is written with an iron pen; with a diamond point it is engraved on the tablet of their hearts and on the horns of their altars, while their children remember their altars and their sacred poles (Asherahs) beside every green tree and on the high hills, on the mountains in the open country. Your wealth and all your treasures I will give for spoil as the price of your sin (or high places of sin) throughout all your territory. By your own act you shall lose the heritage that I gave you, and I will make you serve your enemies in a land that you do not know, for in my anger a fire is kindled that shall burn forever.

 We have a saying that “Beauty is only skin deep but ugly goes to the bone.” That proverb is similar to what God is saying here. The sin (the ugly) goes all the way to the heart and is deeply embedded there. The metaphor hammers this point home by imagining that sin is engraved on their stone-cold hearts with an iron pen. Ouch! That cuts deep.

  There is also hypocrisy, because the people still attend their worship services and they kneel at the very altar where God has promised forgiveness of sins. How difficult is it to wash away sins that are engraved on the altar itself.  

 They are hypocrites also because that is not the only worship service that families attend. They also go on overnight pilgrimages up in the hills to sites where Asherah poles call them to fertility worship and despicable actions. The children have remembered and reinstated the practices from the time before King Josiah’s reforms.  

 Should we consider that those charges might also be laid toward us? Is sin embedded in our hearts so that we resist any real attempt to extract sinfulness? Are we pious at church, yet pitiful at home? You can answer that question. 

 What will be the destiny of Judah if they continue to resist cardiac surgery and reject the idea of a heart transplant? The text says that the land that God promised ‘forever’ will be forfeit. The people of Judah will be hurled out of the land, just as the people of the northern kingdom were. They will be carried away to be slaves to a land that they do not know. Persistent hardness of heart rejects God’s grace and suffers God’s wrath for it. If you are wondering how the world works, this is it. How long have we got?

17: 5-8. Thus says the LORD:

Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals   

and make mere flesh their strength,   

whose hearts turn away from the LORD.

They shall be like a shrub in the desert   

and shall not see when relief comes.

They shall live in the parched places of the wilderness,   

in an uninhabited salt land.

Blessed are those who trust in the LORD,   

whose hope is the LORD.

They shall be like a tree planted by water,   

sending out its roots by the stream.

It shall not fear when heat comes,   

and its leaves shall stay green;

in the year of drought it is not anxious,   

and it does not cease to bear fruit.

 If you are looking for a quote from Jeremiah to write on the wall, try putting this one up. Goldingay suggests that the reference here is to a ‘macho man’ (The Book of Jeremiah, 2021. Page 413). 

 In our current political chaos, such a reference to ‘mortals who make mere flesh their strength while their hearts turn away from God’ sounds like the ‘masculinism’ movement (a take on ‘feminism’). Young men who tout the values of the ‘manosphere’ while spewing the usual misogyny about keeping women ‘in their place’. They think that a man’s worth is reduced to his toned, strong body, while a woman’s worth is not in her character or wisdom but in her looks and subservience. That is why, when women responded to instances of rape with the slogan ‘My body, my choice’, the macho men try to counter them with, ‘Your body, my choice’. That’s the world we live in. 

 After cursing this trust in mortal flesh, God pronounces a blessing. Blessed are those who trust, not in themselves and their so-called strength, but those who trust in the Lord whose love is his strength. Men’s character is questionable.

17: 9-13. The heart is devious above all else;   

it is perverse— who can understand it?

I, the LORD, test the mind   

and search the heart,

to give to all according to their ways,   

according to the fruit of their doings.

Like the partridge hatching what it did not lay,   

so are all who amass wealth unjustly;

in midlife it will leave them,   

and at their end they will prove to be fools.

O glorious throne, exalted from the beginning,   

shrine of our sanctuary!

O hope of Israel! 

O LORD!

All who forsake you 

shall be put to shame;

those who turn away from you 

shall be recorded in the underworld,

for they have forsaken the fountain of living water, 

the LORD.

 

The great comparison here is between human hearts and God’s heart;  and the differences between them have been evident for a long time. Go back to the beginning.

“The LORD saw that the wickedness of humans was great in the earth and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the LORD was sorry that he had made humans on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart” (Genesis 6: 5-6).     

 God is privy to the minds and feelings of mankind, and even tests them to know their true worth. The text in Jeremiah says that God will “test the mind and search the heart.” The Hebrew word translated as ‘mind’ actually means ‘kidneys’. So, God searches the heart and tests the kidneys. The phrase ‘heart and kidneys’ is often joined together, as in Jeremiah 11: 20; but also the Psalms.

 Ancients believed that the kidneys were the seat of the innermost being and of the deepest desires. Not until more modern times did we discover that the brain serves this purpose. 

So, Psalm 7:9 actually says: “O let the evil of the wicked come to an end, but establish the righteous, you who test the kidneys and hearts, O righteous God.”

And Psalm 26: 2 reads: “Prove me, O Lord, and try me; test my heart and kidneys.” 

 But in my older age, I have come to think that the ancients were too far off when I read Psalm 16: 7: “I bless the Lord who gives me counsel; in the night also my kidneys instruct me.”

 The proverb about the partridge remains obscure to us today. It may be that people of the time thought that partridges stole eggs, though that is unlikely. However, partridge flocks used to be enormous. With nests close, eggs could slip from one nest to another. Sometimes two females would lay eggs in the same nest, but only the dominant one would hatch them. Those are just guesses about a proverb that is based on folk wisdom, not on science. Yet, if the comparison is fuzzy, the point is still clear. Hoarding wealth without benefitting the community (giving back) means the rich person will not find security and will become a fool at the end. 

 Goldingay says that this is a critique of Jehoiakim (one of Josiah’s incompetent sons). “While government is the responsibility of the entire Davidic household (21: 12; cf. 22: 2), it is particularly the basis for Jeremiah’s critique of Jehoiakim. He looked after himself well as king by exercising authority in a way that benefitted him” (The Book of Jeremiah, 2021. Page 416). Jehoiakim died in midlife, age 36.  

 There is no hope in ill-gotten riches, no security in mere physical strength, no future in political power that is based on lies and deceptions. This is the truth that the later readers of Jeremiah’s scrolls had learned the hard way. They read them while they were enslaved in captivity in Babylon. The only hope for any of us is to trust in the Lord who is reliable in demonstrating love, grace, and mercy.