by By Erick Muriithi
When we think about the problem of evil, we often think about the evil out there. We look at the rapist and say, “God, I wish that fella has a special place in hell.” But the Bible tells us that our problem is within our hearts. We have desperately wicked hearts.
Jeremiah 17:9 (NKJV) “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; Who can know it?”
The core of our being, the seat of our desires and loves is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.
First, the heart is deceitful. It lies and lies. It makes it it’s business to obscure and distort truth. One brother once told me, “We are all potentially false teachers.” And that humbled me. Our hearts are deceivers. Jesus Christ spoke of the devil as the father of lies, and thus, he is the father of all that have this deceitful heart.
How deceitful is the human heart? It is deceitful above all things. What a terrible condition! It is one thing to be deceitful; it is another thing to be compared with all the deceitful things, and to be found to be more excellently deceitful than them all. The human heart is thus so deceitful, that we cannot speak honestly about it without speaking of its deceit.
And what is the deceitfulness of this heart? It calls good evil and evil good. The greatest problem with human beings is not that we pursue evil for evil’s sake. In fact, we are repulsed by evil when we see it for its own sake. Our biggest problem is that we think it is good to do evil. We are self righteous evil doers.
When the Germans were killing Jews, they believed they were doing a good and righteous thing. The greatest evils perpetrated amongst humanity are perpetrated by people who believe they are on a righteous cause. The greatest persecutions of Christians were done by those who believed it to be just and righteous to kill them.
When we become the abitrars of good and evil, we always reason like the Jews in Romans 3. “Let us do evil so that good may abound”. Our condemnation is just.
Secondly, the heart is desperately wicked. Our hearts are not just wicked, they are desperately wicked. Every intention of the thoughts of our hearts is only evil continually (Gen 8). We are always desperately rebelling against our Creator. Our hearts look at holy God and say, “Away with that one”. Such is the depravity of our hearts, we think his laws and precepts are plainly evil and inconvenient. We think his judgements unholy and unrighteous. That is why those in hell gnash their teeth in anger. Give men a good reason to do evil, and we will throw ourselves fully to it’s cause.
Recently, we saw that someone believed it righteous and just to kill Charlie Kirk. The same evil heart in him lies in you and I too. How can this not push you to your knees? How can this not lead to you ask God to forgive you for the evil of your whole being? How can this not lead you to run to God to beg to be changed? Such is the evil of our hearts that we can see evil so clearly described and yet believe ourselves to be better than we are.
Third, who can know this heart? Our wickedness is unknowable and incomprehensible. We have known many things that ordinary people now lie better than kings of the past. We have known the mass of the universe and the code for DNA. The king of Persia would take three months to get a message across his empire. I can get that done in seconds! It would take hours of painstaking labor to write this article for Nebuchadnezzer. I did it in an hour.
We know so much, but we have never known the human heart. We do not know the wicked thing that lies beneath us. Israel’s King Mannaseh burned his son in the fire to Molech; his descendants invented firebombing. And it seems with every expanding bit of technology, evil closely follows behind like a faithful soldier. Who can know our hearts!
The all-knowing God looked at the human heart and said, “Who can know this one?” Even among the regenerate, the residue of that old wicked heart still lingers… till the dying day.
Yet the sweet promise is that God has chosen to grant us the new birth. It is a sweet promise that he has said, “I will give you a new heart”( Eze 36:26).
