Are We Really Sick? (1)
“The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; who can understand it?” Jeremiah 17:9 NASB
More deceitful– Just how sick are you? Pretty sick, if you read this verse from Jeremiah as it is typically understood in Christian theology. Many theologians teach that there’s a fatal flaw in human beings. We all have a bad heart, but we aren’t suffering from medical heart disease. No, our bad hearts are the result of disobedience, self-will, and outright rejection of God’s sovereignty. Some even believe we are born this way. But Jeremiah wasn’t suggesting something new in Hebrew thought. Remember Moses? Try this:
It shall be a tassel for you to look at and remember all the commandments of the Lord, so as to do them and not follow after your own heart and your own eyes, after which you played the harlot, Numbers 15:39 NASB
Apparently the bad heart is the result of doing what you want when you want (or a close proximity) and feeding your desires with deliberate choices. Of course, popular culture views this as essential for self-fulfillment. Since Rousseau we have incorporated the nobility of sensual satisfaction into our view of “fully human.” The Hebrew text certainly seems out of touch with the human need to express itself. How can we be self-actualized if we have to constantly suppress our inner desires? Can I really be me if all I am doing is fighting the bad heart in me?
So just what does Jeremiah (and Moses) have in mind? First we need to investigate the background of Jeremiah’s words. Let’s start with ʿāqab. Its derivative (ʿāqōb) is translated “deceitful,” but it’s worth noting that the root means, “take by the heel, supplant.” Ah, what does that remind you of? Perhaps you already recognized one derivation, yaʿăqōb. Yes, the name of one of the Patriarchs. What’s interesting is that the various derivatives suggest “what comes behind” in all sorts of idiomatic and figurative nuances. This is our clue. If the heart is ʿāqōb, then it is the kind of thing that sneaks up on you from behind and attacks when you are least prepared. “More deceitful” might not be a moral judgment. It might be a statement that the heart can’t be trusted. It’s more likely to twist pure motives, find excuses, rationalize, or plot ways to get what it wants, almost as if it were an embedded enemy, an alien force living inside us. Paul suggests something very similar in Romans 7. We know what is good and we want to do it, but when it comes to executing the action we find that we actually do just the opposite. Sounds like we are being seduced into acting against our best judgment. And that is a very old plot line, all the way back to the Garden where the woman seeks to do what she believes to be the right thing to take care of her man and actually upsets the entire order of things. Paul notes that she was seduced, and maybe not just by the serpent.
When Jeremiah says the heart is deceitful above all else, he doesn’t need to be implying that we are fatally flawed from birth or that we have inherited moral corruption. He could be saying that we are just like Havvah, trying to do what we think is best but in the process not listening to God’s instructions, and actually doing what is disastrous. It doesn’t have to mean that we are morally, mortally flawed simply because we have human hearts. In other words, like Genesis 3, this could be descriptive, not prescriptive. That makes a difference. If I read Jeremiah as saying that you and I are essentially bad, and there’s really nothing we can do about it unless God Himself changes us, then I might conclude that since God is the only active agent in the play, I don’t have much responsibility for my actions and either He will fix it or He won’t. C’est la vie. But if I read Jeremiah’s words as a summary of my experience in my efforts to find my way, then I realize that the real problem in life is internal. I will have to deal with the “me” in myself and that will take cooperating with God in a heart transplant. If I don’t do something about this, my yetzer ha’ra (heart) will continue to act as that alien force within.
So I’m sick, but not because I was born ill. I’m sick because I don’t pay attention to my diet. I keep feeding myself indigestible things. I might not even do this deliberately. I don’t sit down at my spiritual and emotional meals and plan to eat toxic things. I just eat what is set before me, not realizing how toxic they are—until I end up with a “heart” attack.
Topical Index: heart, deceitful, ʿāqōb, Jeremiah 17:9, Numbers 15:39
Proverbs tells us that “out of the heart are the issues of life”. Our heart area: the chest cavity that the ancient world viewed as the seat of the soul (they didn’t think much of the brain!) has been proven by science to be the source of our sense of consciousness – of self. (See The Body Has A Mind Of Its Own by Blakeslee.) We get fed this sense in a continuous feedback loop to the brain. Disruption of this looped interaction in the body can damage our sense of self. Our soul is not ‘purely’ our thought life: there is an element of body (somatic) experience that feeds us our consciousness. In other words, we can’t simply cut the body out of our ‘self’ loop. Incidentally, this fact is the single biggest death knell to the high hopes of artificial intelligence, which I think was built upon the Greek model of Cartesian duality: that the mind and body are somehow ‘separate’. But back to the subject.
If I was born innocent, why can’t I trust myself? At age 3 I lost my sense of innocence when I discovered the unthinkable fact that I WANTED to do bad. I spun into a depression that I never really recovered from, although it took me years to identify why I felt so bad. But, we are hardwired to do as we are done by. By that time, I had been deceived many times; either through those around me (I already knew I was being lied to about where my younger siblings came from!) as well as direct temptation that I struggled with. Of course we are going to deceive ourselves if we have been deceived! I think it is because we are also hardwired to learn love instead of instinctively ‘knowing’ it already.
I believe we all come wanting love, but we don’t come ‘knowing’ what love is. Limited by the Tree of Experience to having to learn about love only through experience, but also needing love; whatever is done to us in that need, but also in the name of love; we are going to – by design as well as choice – think is love. If we are lied to ‘for our own good’, we are going to think that is love, and we will DO IT TOO, because we also learn (by that experience, of course) to not only treat others, but also ourselves, as others treat us. This is a super sad reality – a reality I think we chose to limit ourselves to when our ancestors bit that fruit – because I don’t think we were originally created that way. Unfortunately, as the image of the Creator, I think we were also handed the ability to participate in our own expression of reality through our own choices. In other words, I think we chose to alter our design in that Garden, and have been living with the baleful consequences ever since.
I don’t think God made us with a deceitful heart that also did not already know what love was, but we now suffer from this condition because we wanted to experience (“know”) evil for ourselves. All evil is based upon deception: twisted truth. To experience evil, however, I think we have to have the capacity to fall for the lies it tells us. To fall for the lies, we have to have a heart that can be deceived. I believe when Adam and Eve chose to experience evil for themselves, they also chose to limit themselves and their children to the inability, through the conditioning of prior experience, to already “know” (experience, of course) love – which is truth – EXCEPT BY EXPERIENCE.
A heart that is not already experiencing love can be lied to about what love is. This is why I think more sermons are not going to fix this problem! Only love is ever going to change not only our ability to recognize the truth about love, but also our ability to do it ourselves. And that takes not only the experience of the love of God through those around us, but, more importantly, I think we also need a heart operation. We have to put God back on the throne of our hearts – literally experience His love in our lives – before we can “know” (experience, of course) the truth” that can set us free from the deceit that “so easily besets us”. May we let Him back in today!
You are right about the expectations of AI Laurita. Thinking, questioning and intuition are not the same as information processing. IBM’s Deep Blue computer defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov through the sheer brute force of its massive computing power. Only “the human brain can solve a problem it has never seen before,” says Greg Hullender, a specialist in machine learning and natural language. “Nothing in machine learning is like that. Everything is built for a specific problem.”
The fly in the ointment (of self driving cars) is human behaviour. Level-3 autonomy is defined as a system in which the car is in control but can turn the wheel over to its human driver at any time if it encounters a problem it cannot solve. But many specialists now doubt that level-3 autonomy is viable. “Humans are terrible at remaining attentive if we’re not doing anything.”
Einstein once said many decades ago: “The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.” AI can’t explain or reveal the complexity and interactions that shape events and trends let alone think, question and intuit.
That is part of what makes us “created in the image of God.” Our creativity.
Deceitful…such that ALL have transgressed…and fall short of God’s glory…the glory we were intended to display in God’s creation. And now all creation groans and travails…awaiting eagerly the revealing of the sons of God through redemption and adoption…for the restoration of all things…in Christ! Hallelujah!
Excellent word! Thank you.
It’s interesting that we see such a graphic example in the physical of what is going on in the spiritual. Most people eat for pleasure and not for nourishment. We have chosen death over life. We are literally eating death. We know the narrow way to be healthy but we choose the wide path of what is pleasant to the senses at the time. We have left the Father’s house. I sure hope we come to our senses and head back Home.