The land that lies to the southwest of the Sea of Galilee is dry. The soil is rocky and dusty. Vegetation is sparse, except where farmers irrigate. There is little or no grass. The trees are little more than shrubs.
Right in the middle of this wilderness is one of the most beautiful places on the face of the earth. It is called Gan Hasheloshah, “Garden of the Three Springs.” Gan Hasheloshah is so beautiful that some rabbis say it was the location of the Garden of Eden. The pools and waterfalls in the garden are filled with deep, cool, emerald-blue water, continually refreshed by underground springs. It is a wonderful place for swimming and diving. Flowers and bushes crowd the banks of the pools, with giant palm trees overhead for shade.
The Bible teaches that a person who trusts in God is like a tree planted at Gan Hasheloshah. To know God is to be refreshed continually by his grace, like a tree watered by underground springs.
This is what the psalmist writes about the man who loves God:
He is like a tree planted by streams of water,
which yields its fruit in season
and whose leaf does not wither.
Whatever he does prospers. (Psalm 1:3)
Psalm 1 and Jeremiah 17 offer the same benediction for godliness. They both say that the one who trusts in God is like a well-watered tree.
IN SELF WE TRUST?
Not only do Psalm 1 and Jeremiah 17 offer the same benediction, but they also pronounce the same curse. Unlike the psalmist, Jeremiah begins with the curse upon those who trust in themselves rather than in God:
This is what the LORD says:
“Cursed is the one who trusts in man,
who depends on flesh for his strength
and whose heart turns away from the LORD.” (v. 5)
This verse is a direct assault on American culture. It would be hard to imagine a statement that is more un-American, at least in the twenty-first century: “Cursed is the one who trusts in man.” In other words, anyone who trusts in technology, economics, psychology, medicine, government, the military, the arts, or any other aspect of human culture more than God is under God’s curse. Yet these are exactly the things Americans trust for meaning and security in life. American money says “In God We Trust,” but what Americans really mean is “In Self We Trust.”
To understand the way Americans think, the author to read is Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882). Emerson’s philosophy is summarized in the title of one of his essays: “Self-Reliance” (1841).1 In the essay, Emerson tells his readers to be completely self-reliant. He tells them not to care for the poor, love their families, or listen to preachers. “Insist on yourself,” he writes, “never imitate.” “Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.” “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.” Emerson’s ideas are so contemporary that quotations from his writings were used to sell sneakers on television during the early 1990s. His motto is the creed of our times: “Trust thyself.”
Jeremiah says just the opposite: Do not trust yourself. To trust in yourself is to turn away from God. Anyone who trusts in man will be cursed. Self-reliance does not bring peace but terror.
Three curses befall the self-reliant—loneliness, poverty, and death. First, loneliness:
“He will be like a bush in the wastelands;
he will not see prosperity when it comes.
He will dwell in the parched places of the desert,
in a salt land where no one lives.” (v. 6)
It makes one thirsty to think of it. Jeremiah imagines a shrub in a salty land, like the dwarf juniper, which has a shallow root system.2 The man who trusts in himself is like that lonely bush. His roots are not deep enough to get water from the ground. He is not planted by the living water of God’s grace. So even when the rains finally come, they will not do him any good. When the showers of blessing come, they will simply disappear into the sand. When the Holy Spirit falls upon the people of God in the power of revival, he will miss it because he will be somewhere else. The man who trusts in himself will be left parched and lonely.
You cannot put yourself first and refuse to be lonely. Once you decide that you come first, before anybody else, you are choosing to be lonely. You will be cut off from God, first of all, and then from other human beings. You will be like a dwarf juniper in the desert.
Second, those who trust in their own strength will become poor:
Like a partridge that hatches eggs it did not lay
is the man who gains riches by unjust means.
When his life is half gone, they will desert him,
and in the end he will prove to be a fool. (v. 11)
Jeremiah was a keen student of nature. He had observed the partridge behave like a surrogate mother, going into another bird’s nest to hatch another bird’s eggs. The chicks hatched, but since they were not partridges, they soon flew away.
The same thing happens to those who amass fortunes by taking advantage of people. The money never belonged to them in the first place, so it will leave them in the end. One thinks of John Bennett, the founder of New Era Philanthropy. In the mid-1990s, Bennett set up a charitable foundation to provide funding for nonprofit organizations. Dozens of museums, universities, seminaries, and mission agencies signed up for matching grants. But when the scheme turned out to be a scam, dozens of institutions were bilked out of millions of dollars.
John Bennett was disgraced and imprisoned. He turned out to be a partridge. He gained riches by unjust means; so when his life was half gone, they deserted him. A man who trusts in his own strength turns out to be a fool. And a poor one at that, for a fool and his money are soon parted.
The third curse to befall men and women who trust in themselves is death:
O LORD, the hope of Israel,
all who forsake you will be put to shame.
Those who turn away from you will be written in the dust
because they have forsaken the LORD,
the spring of living water. (v. 13)
Leaving the oasis to wander out into the desert brings death. Where there is no water, there is no survival. In the same way, there is no spiritual life without the living water of God’s grace. God had already warned his people about this: “My people … have forsaken me, the spring of living water” (2:13). But some people would rather die of thirst than turn to God; so die they must. Like names written in the dust, they will vanish without a trace. There is no water and no life apart from the Lord.
LIKE A TREE PLANTED BY WATERS
Jeremiah knew that to have life, you must stop trusting in yourself. You must put your trust somewhere else:
“But blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD,
whose confidence is in him.
He will be like a tree planted by the water
that sends out its roots by the stream.” (17:7–8a)
Like the curse, the blessing is a matter of trust. The contrast is absolute: “Cursed is the one who trusts in man” (v. 5), but “blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD” (v. 7). Kidner observes that the pivotal word in these verses “is trust, for everything will turn on where one’s heart is.”3
Everything turns on where one’s heart is. So where is your heart? Where is your confidence? Do you rely on yourself most of the time, or do you trust in the Lord all the time? God only blesses those who trust in him. If you want life, you must depend on God the way a tree depends on a river. Total trust in God brings life.
The life God gives cannot be taken away. The blessed man or woman is “like a tree planted by the water.” Will such a tree become parched when there is a heat wave? No, because it is planted by streams of living water. Its leaves will stay green when the weather is hot. Will the tree wither during a year of drought? No, because it has a constant water supply. The tree by the river will be in full bloom when the bush in the desert dies.
Do not leave the water’s edge. Keep trusting in God. Keep reading your Bible. Keep praying even if you are not sure God is listening. The tree planted by the water does not just stand there—it “sends out its roots by the stream” (v. 8a). The tree is alive; it stretches and strains toward the grace that is available through God’s Word, through prayer, and through the sacraments. Keep sending your roots toward the stream of God’s grace and reaching out for the water of life. God will refresh you. He will keep your leaves green when the heat comes and will bring forth abundant fruit in the year of drought.
The tree planted by the water’s edge is a picture of the Christian living close to Christ. After a day of feasting, Jesus stood up in Jerusalem and said in a loud voice, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him” (John 7:37–38).
To live like a tree is to live close to Christ. He is the water of life. In Jesus Christ there is water during times of drought for thirsty souls. In Jesus Christ there is water for cleansing from sin. Every tree planted close to Christ will have green leaves and rich fruit, and everyone who drinks from his fountain will never die.
A HEART PROBLEM
How will you live? Will you be a shrub or a tree? Will you choose curse or blessing? Will you trust in man or trust in God? Will you wander in the desert or plant yourself by the river? Will you die or live?
Jeremiah had a tell-tale heart of his own. He knew that if he trusted in himself he would be cursed, and that if he trusted in the Lord he would be blessed. But his heart betrayed him: “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” (17:9). These words are true whether they came from Jeremiah himself or from the Lord. The human heart cannot be trusted, cannot be healed, cannot be understood. It is devious, incurable, and inscrutable. It cannot be trusted to live like a tree.
“The heart is deceitful above all things.” This is one of the most powerful statements of human depravity in all of Scripture. The doctrine of total depravity means that every human being is sinful through and through. No part of the human person remains untouched by sin. The mind, the will, the emotions, and the conscience are all corrupt. So is the heart, which is the innermost core of the human person. It, too, is depraved.
Nothing is more deceitful than the human heart. The sin of our first parents was a sin of the heart. When Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, their hearts were turning away from God to trust in man. From that one sin have come all the rest of the sins of the human heart. All the lies, conspiracies, betrayals, and murders in the history of the world have sprung from the deception of the human heart.
Every human being has a heart problem. In the introduction to the second edition of his Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis wrote:
Some have paid me an undeserved compliment by supposing that my Letters were the ripe fruit of many years’ study in moral and ascetic theology. They forgot that there is an equally reliable, though less creditable, way of learning how temptation works. “My heart”—I need no other’s—“to show me the wickedness of the ungodly.”7
Truly, the heart is deceitful above all things, as anyone can confirm from personal experience.
If the heart is full of deceit, and it is, then the verse that follows is terrifying:
“I the LORD search the heart
and examine the mind,
to reward a man according to his conduct,
according to what his deeds deserve.” (v. 10)
God knows what is inside every heart. The tell-tale heart tells all its secrets to God.
How alarming it is that these two verses should stand next to one another in Holy Scripture: “The heart is deceitful above all things”—“I the LORD search the heart.” Human depravity is pressed up against divine justice. How alarming it is to know that the deceitful-above-all-things heart falls under the seeing-all-things gaze of Almighty God. How frightening to know that the unknowable heart is known to God. How terrifying to know that God judges the heart, rewarding each person “according to what his deeds deserve.” “Human fickleness and divine accountability together lead to an inevitable judgment.”8 It may be that no one else knows your secret sins, how you have turned away from God in the privacy of your own heart. But God knows!
Jeremiah’s heart betrayed him. He had long preached against the sins of his people. He had listed their transgressions in full, speaking out against the idolatry, adultery, and immorality of his day. But his own heart condemned him. The innermost core of his own being was deceitful beyond cure. This is true about every heart. You, too, have a devious, incurable, inscrutable heart.
SAVE ME, LORD!
The only thing to do with a tell-tale heart is cry to God for mercy. That is what Jeremiah did when he prayed, “Heal me, O LORD, and I will be healed; save me and I will be saved, for you are the one I praise” (v. 14). That is the incurable heart’s prayer for a cure, the unsavable heart’s prayer for salvation.
Jeremiah had often pleaded with God for the salvation of his nation. He had often prayed that God would turn the hearts of his people back to him. But he also had to plead with God for the healing of his own heart.
Somehow Jeremiah must have known that God is able to cure an incurable heart. God not only searches the heart, he knows how to mend it. This is part of the mysterious work of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit takes a deceitful heart and makes it true to God. He comes into an incurable heart and heals it from sin. That is what happens when a sinner comes to Christ. A Christian is someone whose heart has been cured by the grace of God, for “it is with your heart that you believe and are justified” (Romans 10:10a).
Acts 16 tells a wonderful story about the way God answered a similar prayer and cured an incurable heart. It is the story of Lydia, a businesswoman who dealt in purple cloth at Philippi. Like every son or daughter of Adam, she was born with a deceitful and incurable heart. But when she heard the apostles preach the good news about Jesus Christ, “the Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul’s message” (Acts 16:14). That is a beautiful way to describe what happens when a sinner comes to Christ: “The Lord opened her heart.” A heart cannot be mended on its own. But the Lord can send his Holy Spirit to open, mend, fix, and heal the heart. And his cure is total.
Has the Lord cured your deceitful, incurable, sick heart? If he has, then be like a tree planted close to the water of life. Stretch your roots toward the grace that is yours in Jesus Christ. If the Lord has not yet cured your heart, then pray Jeremiah’s prayer: “Heal me, O LORD, and I will be healed; save me and I will be saved” (17:14)
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1 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Essays and English Traits, The Harvard Classics, Vol. 5 (New York: Collier, 1909), pp. 63–88.
2 R. K. Harrison, Jeremiah and Lamentations, Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1973), p. 106.
3 Derek Kidner, The Message of Jeremiah: Against Wind and Tide, The Bible Speaks Today (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1987), p. 72.
4 Thomas Boston, Human Nature in Its Fourfold State (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1989), p. 299.
5 Edgar Allan Poe, A Collection of Stories (New York: Tom Doherty, 1988), pp. 156–161.
6 Jean Bethke Elshtain, “The Newtape File II,” First Things (April 1993), p. 12.
7 C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: Macmillan, 1971), p. 5.
8 Walter Brueggemann, Jeremiah 1–25: To Pluck Up, To Tear Down, International Theological Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1988), p. 153.
Philip Graham Ryken, Jeremiah and Lamentations: From Sorrow to Hope, Preaching the Word (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2001), 273–283.
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