Tuesday - Jeremiah 17 - But, He Has a Good Heart!

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OGWASH! I wish I had a nickel for every time someone has told me this about someone else who is always getting into trouble. "He is in trouble right now, but he has a good heart!" Wrong!  He does not have a good heart, and neither do you. Nor do I. Let God be true and every man a liar. "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?" (Jeremiah 17:9). As Paul wrote in Romans 7:18 & 21, "I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwells no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not... I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me." Again, in Romans 8:7-8 he wrote, "The carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So, then they that are in the flesh cannot please God."  We do NOT have good hearts.   We have depraved, decadent, selfish, deceitful and proud hearts. It is the heart and mind of God that is good. When He gives us His heart, now that's a different matter. But, when HIS heart is the deciding force in our lives, then our actions follow suit with HIS goodness. So still, it makes no sense to say that someone has a good heart and an evil record (unless the good heart is God's heart and if it has only just arrived onto the scene).

No surprise, Judah had a sinful heart. The black and red tattoos of sin were carved deeply into every inch of the metaphysical heart of that nation (Jeremiah 17:1). They had a wayward disposition (Jeremiah 17:5). God had examined their hearts closely (as He does with all of us, according to 1^st Samuel 16:7), and had found only evil (Jeremiah 17:10). Oh, how desperately they needed an infusion of God's grace! They may have felt like they compared well to some of their neighbors, or to past generations, or to imaginary monsters constructed in their own minds, but our Holy God is the standard.  Neither a rock nor a kangaroo can jump over the moon. And frankly, the fact that the kangaroo can jump so much higher than a rock can jump, gets him no closer to achieving that astronomical feat from fairy tales. God told Isaiah, "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts" (Isaiah 55:9).