The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?
All Commentaries on Jeremiah 17:9 Go To Jeremiah 17
Jerome
AD 420
Symmacus translates this passage thus: “The heart of everyone is inscrutable. Yet, who is the man who can find it?” It is customary by our own good wish, therefore, but not according to objective knowledge, to use this passage to argue against the Jews that the man in question is the Lord and Savior, according to the dispensation of the assumed flesh, and that no one shall be able to know the mystery of his nativity, according to what is written: “Who will explain his generation?” except God alone, who probes the secrets and returns to each one according to his works. But it is better that we simply accept that no one knows the secrets of another’s thoughts except God alone, for it says above, “Accursed is the person who trusts in humankind” and, “Blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord.” Hence, lest we think ourselves to be sure of human judgment, the psalmist implies that almost every heart is perverse, saying, “Cleanse me from hidden thoughts, O Lord, and spare your servant from foreigners,” without doubt meaning foreign thoughts. Also in Genesis, it is written, “God saw how great human malice was on the earth and that every thought of the human heart was intent on evil continuously”; and again, “The senses and the thoughts of a person’s heart are prone to evil from his adolescence.” Through these texts, we learn that God alone knows a person’s thoughts. Yet, if it is said of the Savior that “Jesus saw what they were thinking,” and if no one is able to see one’s thoughts except God alone, then Christ is God, “who examines hearts and probes the mind and gives to each one according to his works.”
