October 19, 2025

Written on Your Heart

My father used to whip us with a razor strap.  He would double the strap over so that when it smacked our rear ends, the sides would slap together, and the sound of that strap snapping was far more terrifying than the actual pain from the smack on our bottoms.  To this very day, when I fear (or know) that I have done something wrong, I can feel my buttocks tighten up in dread anticipation.  I think my dad did that because his father had done it to him.  I vowed that I wouldn’t do that to my children.  So I just smacked their butts with my bare hand.  I wish for all I’m worth that I had never done that.  One more example of the way in which the Bible is a great book.  It tells us that the sins of the parents are visited upon the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.¹

I suppose that’s partly why my response to this morning’s reading from Jeremiah was so personal.  Jeremiah says that days are coming when “they shall no longer say: ‘The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.’  But all shall die for their own sins; the teeth of everyone who eats sour grapes shall be set on edge.”  In other words, the time will come when the parents’ sins will reside only with themselves and not be visited upon their children and grandchildren.  It will be a time of individual accountability.  And then Jeremiah goes on to describe this age to come as the day of “a new covenant.”  And this is the covenant that God will make with God’s people: “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.  No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest.”  So, this age to come will be a time of personal responsibility, when the lessons of the ancestors will no longer be crucial, and there will be no need for teachers, or for scriptures or laws, because all people will have the very law of God imprinted on their hearts.

In our second scripture reading today, we have what seems to be the polar opposite.  The Apostle Paul, writing to his young protégé, Timothy, also says that “Days are coming . . .”  The coming days that Paul speaks of are similar to Jeremiah’s, but Paul is not so enamored of them as is the ancient prophet.  He says that when people follow their own hearts instead of turning to the sacred writings and the sound doctrine and teaching that begins in childhood they will end up turning “away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths.”

So, these days that are coming, which will they be: no need for scripture or teaching because every person, taking individual responsibility, will have the law of God written on the heart, or a rejection of scripture and sound teaching while each person follows personal desires and “wanders away” from the truth?  I think it’s both.  In fact, I think those days that are coming are already here, on both scores.

Let’s start with Jeremiah’s utopian future.  It’s really a lovely image, but I have a hard time thinking it’s to be taken literally.  And here’s why: If Jeremiah were serious about this time when there would be no need to teach one another, he would have to be envisioning a time when people stopped having babies.  Because a child needs to learn; a child needs to be taught, and guided by parents and others; a child needs to read an encounter and struggle and grow.  In human culture there is no such thing as stasis – as a time when all tradition and learning grinds to a halt.  So I take Jeremiah’s prophecy here (I’m sure you won’t be surprised) as a metaphor.  I think we are being given a picture of something divine, something to be treasured.  I think that treasure is the very way in which Divine law is, in fact, written on our hearts, and has been since this world got “Let there be’d” or “Big Banged” into existence.

The author of the book of Genesis offers another metaphor that makes the point eloquently.  He writes, “God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”  So, the central affirmation at the very beginning of the Bible is that you and I at the most basic core of our being are the very image of God.  Our hearts are indeed etched with the very outlines of divinity.  The great Protestant reformer, John Calvin, agrees.  He wrote, “since there has never been a country or family, from the beginning of the world, totally destitute of religion, it is a tacit confession that some sense of the Divinity is inscribed on every heart.”²

And early Christians certainly regarded this New Covenant of Jeremiah’s as already having come into fruition in Christ.  What we call the “New Testament” is simply another word for “New Covenant.”  And the words of Jesus at the last supper seal the deal.  He said, “This cup is a new covenant in my blood.”  Jeremiah’s vision is not a future possibility it is a present reality.  We are inheritors of a covenant of love “written on our hearts.”  You know that from your own experience.  We all have that “little voice” inside that we have learned to trust.  It’s an intuitive sense that I have found if I disregard I will live to regret it.  Freud may say it’s our “superego.”  I think it’s part of how Divine law is written on our hearts.

So why do we often seem to be such little devils?  That’s where Paul’s letter to Timothy comes in.  It’s the flip-side of the same coin as Jeremiah’s vision.  It’s the truth of the garden of Eden; that, even though we have that image of God in our hearts, we nonetheless seem to crave the forbidden fruit.  We “accumulate for [ourselves],” as Paul put it, “teachers to suit [our] own desires.”  In other words, we start with our prejudices and hurts and needs, and find proof texts, statistics, and people around us who will reinforce them.  And so, we need correction.  We need the lessons of history, the counterbalancing influence of others, and the guidance of scripture.

That’s where this whole thing gets tricky.  Paul writes to Timothy, “. . . continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it, and how from childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.”  And then he talks about those who follow teachers who will “suit their own desires.”  We are immediately reminded of those among our Christian brothers and sisters who seem to find in scripture little more than a way of condemning and shunning the unworthy.  And we find ourselves wondering how they can be so convinced that they are not finding teachers to suit their own desires.  And we wonder the same thing about ourselves.  What is that which Paul calls, “sound doctrine,” and what is that which he calls “wandering away into myths?”  Which is which and how do you know?

I once posed just that question to a group Bible study and got a wonderful response that has stuck with me.  I asked, “How do you know if what you have internalized and trust in your own heart is in accord with Divine intentions for yourself, or for the world?”  And the answer came in the form of another question: “Why do you have to know?”  The light dawned.  I realized at once that the impulse to know that you are right, that your interpretations are in accord with the Lord’s will is the very root of our problem.  It is, in fact, terribly important to not know!  The only way to keep from falling into the same kind of misguided self-assurance that leads to suicide bombing jihadists and hate-driven Christians and others is to be resolutely and vigilantly uncertain.  That means constantly checking your perspectives against the themes and emphases of scripture, repeatedly bouncing your thoughts off of other trusted people (even people who disagree with you), continually asking yourself if what you do and what you profess jibes with that deep inner voice that somehow knows the difference between right and wrong.  And it means never yielding to the temptation to be finally satisfied with your answers to those questions.

But don’t begin to think that this means all religious thought is relative and it doesn’t matter what you believe or what you do.  That’s the farthest thing from either Jeremiah or Paul.  The great novelist Flannery O’Conner expressed her frustration with what she saw happening in modern Protestantism.  She wrote, “One of the effects of modern liberal Protestantism has been gradually to turn religion into poetry and therapy, to make truth vaguer and vaguer and more and more relative, to banish intellectual distinctions, to depend on feeling instead of thought and gradually to come to believe that God has no power, that he cannot communicate with us, cannot reveal himself to us, indeed has not done so, and that religion is our own sweet invention.”³  O’Conner makes  good point.  The point is not to find some wishy-washy place where there are only questions and therefore never an answer.  The point is to be clear and earnest in listening to the law that is written on your heart, pursuing sound teaching, and following your beliefs with committed action – but to never stop questioning yourself, correcting yourself, searching for more light, more truth.  It is by that means that we grow and become more than we are, a process that never ends.  T.S. Elliot, in his poem, Little Gidding, captured poignantly the power of this transformation expressed in remorse.  He wrote:

. . . the rending pain of re-enactment

Of all that you have done, and been; the shame

Of motives late revealed, and the awareness

Of things ill done and done to others’ harm

Which once you took for exercise of virtue.

 

Those lines strike home with me.  When I think back to the father’s sins I visited upon my own children, I find some gratification in knowing that, for me and for them, there is such as thing as becoming.

The long and short of it is that both Jeremiah’s New Covenant of a law written on our hearts and Paul’s admonition about not following our own hearts (and “itching ears”) into a place of error, are the two wings that can keep us flying on course.  And in the end, how can you tell if you are anywhere close to staying on course?  Well, it’s simple.  It’s written on your heart.

¹ See Exodus 34:7.

² John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 1, Chapter 3, Section 1.

³ Quoted in The Life You Save May Be Your Own, by Paul Elie, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.