Our Heart is Deceitful and our Nature is Evil but God can write His Law of Life on us

In Jeremiah God exposes what we are in our fallen condition: our heart is deceitful above all things, even incurable, and our fallen nature is unchangeable.

Just as the Cushite cannot change his skin nor the leopard his spots, so we who are accustomed to doing evil cannot simply change ourselves to do good.

The kernel of the book of Jeremiah includes three matters – what God wants from us, what we are in our fallen condition, and what Christ is to us.

We have seen what God wants from us: He wants to be the fountain of living waters, the source of our life supply, so that we may drink of Him and thus express Him.

According to Jer. 2:13, God considers it an evil thing if we don’t drink of Him as the fountain of living waters; He has come into us to be the fountain, He has been installed in our being as a springing up fountain of life, and on our side we need to continually drink Him.

God wants us to take Him as the source, the fountain of the living waters; He wants to be the source of our being, and the only way for us to do this is to drink of Him day by day.

Just as humanly we have to drink water daily, even multiple times a day, so spiritually we need to drink the Lord as the living water day by day.

On His side, the Triune God has been processed to become the life-giving Spirit as the living water, the water of life; on our side, we need to exercise our spirit to drink of Him day by day.

Our daily, practical salvation is the processed Triune God Himself as the living water. When we drink of Him, He purifies us, He cleanses us, He reconstitutes us with Himself, He removes the old and natural element, and He fills us with Himself.

The result is that we are saved and transformed, and eventually we will be conformed to His image and glorified.

May we daily draw water with rejoicing out of the springs of salvation by repenting to the Lord, calling on His name, singing praises to Him, thanking Him, and making His deeds known!

As we drink the living water, this water becomes in us a fountain of water springing up into eternal life; the Father is the fountain, the Son is the springs, and the Spirit is the river.

There’s a living, flowing, springing, gushing up fountain of water of life installed in our spirit, and whenever we turn to the lord and call on Him, we enjoy the flowing of the water of life!

The final result of our drinking the water of life is that we become the New Jerusalem, the totality of the eternal life!

May we daily drink of Him; may we daily turn, drink, be filled with Him, and enjoy Him deeply, so that He may fill our inner being, solve all our problems, save us in His life, and flow us all the way into the New Jerusalem!

Though our Heart is Deceitful and Incurable, God can write His law of Life on it!

The second aspect of the kernel in the book of Jeremiah is the exposure of what we are in our fallen condition; according to Jer. 17:9, our heart is deceitful above all things and it is incurable – who can know it?

In our fallen condition, our heart is deceitful to the uttermost and incurable; we are corrupt and rotten to the core.

It is not that we love the Lord and want to do good, and then sometimes we slip and fall, so we sin; rather, our heart is deceitful, we cannot know it or change it, and we are rotten to the core.

We cannot change, correct, or improve ourselves; not even the best teachings and self-improvement methods cannot improve us or correct us.

Many have tried to know their heart, improve their heart, or change their heart, and they have miserably failed; in our fallen condition our heart is deceitful and incurable.

However, even such a word concerning the deceitful and incurable heart of man is related to God’s economy with His dispensing, for God can write His law of life on the tablets of our heart.

Although our heart is corrupt and deceitful, although the condition of our heart is incurable, even such a heart can be a tablet upon which God writes His law of life (Jer. 31:33; 2 Cor. 3:3).

God can impart Himself into man; He can write Himself on the tablet of our heart, and once He comes in our spirit, He spreads into all the parts of our heart to deal with the heart of the fallen man.

In Heb. 8 we see the law of life, which is synonymous with the law of the Spirit of life in Rom. 8:2.

God has been processed to become the life-giving Spirit; as such a One, He has come in our spirit to be the automatic principle and the spontaneous power of the divine life to operate in us.

We need to switch Him on every day, for He operates spontaneously in our being.

As Paul said in Rom. 8, the law of the Spirit of life has freed me in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and of death.

When we switch from our mind to our spirit, when we “switch on” the law of the Spirit of life, the divine life operates in our being to impart the element of God into all the parts of our heart.

When we call on the name of the Lord, when we pray over His word, when we fellowship with the Lord and with the saints, we switch on the law of life, and this spontaneous and automatic principle of life and power operates in us effortlessly, even unconsciously.

Furthermore, when we exercise our spirit to speak the word of God and thus minister Christ to others, we produce them as letters of Christ ministered by us (2 Cor. 3:3).

When we speak the Lord into others, we inscribe the tablets of their heart with the ink of the Spirit of the living God to produce them as living letters of Christ.

On one hand we ourselves become a letter of Christ by having Him wrought into us and inscribed on our heart, and on the other hand, the ones we minister Christ to also become a letter of Christ.

When people look at us, they see Christ, they read Christ, and they sense Christ being manifested through us.

Even though our heart is deceitful and incurable, yet the Lord has a way to impart Himself into man; then, once He has come into us, He will spread from our spirit into our heart.

This is the way that God, according to His economy, deals with the heart of the fallen man.

Lord Jesus, we turn our heart to You. We do not trust our heart, Lord, for in our fallen being our heart is deceitful above all things and it is incurable! Oh Lord, we do not know our heart, we cannot improve or change our heart, and we cannot cure our heart, but we turn our heart to You! We set our mind on our spirit and we want to switch on the law of the Spirit of life so that Christ may be inscribed on the tablets of our heart. Amen, Lord, keep us switching on the law of life so that God would spread from our spirit into our heart. We want to cooperate with You, dear Lord, for You to write Yourself on our heart and inner being, and for You to have a way to inscribe Christ into others as we minister Christ to them!

Realising that our Fallen Nature is Evil and Unchangeable and allowing God to give us a New Heart and a New Spirit

On one hand our heart is deceitful and incurable; on the other hand, our very nature, the fallen nature of man, is evil and unchangeable.

Jer. 13:23 clearly says that, just as the Cushite cannot change his skin and the leopard his spots, so we who are accustomed to do evil are not able to do good. Oh Lord!

In our fallen condition our heart is deceitful and incurable, and our nature is evil and unchangeable.

By nature we are accustomed to do evil; we are like the leopard – we have spots, and we cannot remove them, for they are part of our very nature.

Just as the leopard cannot remove his spots, so we can’t change our nature. Oh Lord!

In Jeremiah we see that Israel became evil, having forsaken God as the source, the fountain of living waters (2:13); Israel had an unchangeable and sinful nature, which cannot be changed.

The true condition of fallen man is that our heart is deceitful and our fallen nature is unchangeable.

As fallen human beings, in ourselves and by ourselves and with ourselves we are incurable and unchangeable.

In Rom. 7 Paul exposes the fallen nature in our being; even while being a Christian, Paul tried in himself to do the good, but he realised there’s something else within him that rises up all the time to defeat him and force him to do the evil which he doesn’t want to do.

So in Rom. 7:18 he realised that in him, that is, in his flesh, nothing good dwells, for to will to do the good is present with him, but to work out the good is not.

All fallen human beings desire to do the good, but they cannot, for the evil is present with them and defeats them all the time.

We may say that we may be loose or unconscious of some of the things that we speak, and we may “joke”, or we may hurt others not because we’re evil in our heart but because we made a mistake.

The reality is that out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks, so the evil man out of his evil treasure brings forth evil things; in our fallen nature we’re evil and unchangeable (Matt. 12:34-35).

We may honour God with our lips, but our heart may stay away from Him; we may outwardly obey His teachings, but our heart is deceitful and incurable (Matt. 15:7-11).

God searches all the hearts and understands every imagination of the thoughts; if we seek Him, He will be found by us (1 Chron. 28:9).

What we need to do is not try to improve ourselves or perfect our nature; we need to come to the Lord and allow Him to shine on us with His light, realising that we in our fallen being are evil to the core and we’re unchangeable, and we need to ask Him to give us a new heart and a new spirit (Ezek. 36:26-27).

We need to ask the Lord to put in us a new spirit, take away the heart of stone out of our flesh and give us a new heart, and put in us His Spirit.

It is only when His Spirit is in us, spreading into all the inner parts of our being and saturating us with God Himself as the law of the Spirit of life, that we can serve God, we can walk in His statutes, and we can keep and do is ordinances.

We can be a proper human being only when we live and walk in this mingling of the divine Spirit with the human spirit, realising that in our fallen being we are corrupt, evil, and rotten to the core, but God is imparting Himself into our inner being to change us from within and cause us to live Him out to express Him.

Lord Jesus, we come to You as we are, with our evil and unchangeable fallen being; we cannot change or improve ourselves, but we turn to You for You to give us a new spirit and a new heart! Oh Lord, in ourselves we are incurable and unchangeable, and we cannot improve or perfect our fallen being, but we turn to You and we allow You to work Yourself into our very nature, our inner being! Take away the heart of stone out of our flesh and give us a new heart to love You and seek after You. Put Your Spirit in us and spread from our spirit into all the parts of our heart to cause us to walk in Your ways and fulfill Your purpose.

References and Hymns on this Topic

• Sources of inspiration: the Word of God, my enjoyment in the ministry, the message by Ed Marks for this week, and portions from, Life-study of Jeremiah, pp. 260-261 (by Witness Lee) and the footnotes on Jer. 17:9, as quoted in the Holy Word for Morning Revival on, Crystallization Study of Jeremiah and Lamentations, week 2, The Kernel of the Book of Jeremiah.
• Hymns on this topic:
  – Wicked by birth, deceitful corrupt in heart, / Our one hope: redemption from our fall, / Wickedness and sin, but that’s not all— / The redemption of Christ and salvation by life / divine dispensed to us. (Song on, The Central Thought of Jeremiah)
  – Thy law of life in heart and mind / My conduct regulates; / The wealth of Thy reality / My being saturates. (Hymns #539)
  – I will also give you / A new heart, and a new spirit / I’ll put within you, / put within you; / And I will take away the heart, / The heart of stone out of your flesh, / And I will give you a heart of flesh. (Scripture song on, Ezek. 36:26-27).