Luke 12:16-21
16 And He told them a parable, saying, “The land of a rich man was very productive. 17 And he began reasoning to himself, saying, ‘What shall I do, since I have no place to store my crops?’ 18 Then he said, ‘This is what I will do: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. 19 And I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years to come; take your ease, eat, drink and be merry.”’ 20 But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your soul is required of you; now who will own what you have prepared?’ 21 So is the man who stores up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.”
In this time in our country of fake news, misdirection, and deceit our minds and hearts are anxious for answers of truth, not this constant political rhetoric of lies and agendas taking our country further from God will for our land.
Yes, I know we are all born with sin but God sent His Son to die for us so we had a way out. Through Him, we can change our hearts and the direction this country is heading.
I’m starting this three-part series to give you insight on what it takes to recognize a deceitful heart and the steps it takes to change it. We are going to begin this teaching in Jeremiah 17:9.
The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can
This verse is among the best-known of all verses in the Bible by us. Though we surely know the words is it possible we do not grasp some of the depth of the practical everyday application of what Jeremiah is trying to convey here?
The Hebrew word translated “deceitful” is #6121 in Strong’s Concordance, and interestingly comes from exactly the same root as the name “Jacob,” which gives a bit of insight into the mindset and character of that same Bible character in his pre-conversion days, because God has a habit of naming things what they are.
The word is used only three times in all of the Old Testament, and it indicates a swelling, a humping up, and thus a knoll or a small hill. But when it is used in relation to human traits, a personality, it falls into the area of prideful vanity—something distasteful, useless, corrupting, and intensely self-serving. It is something that puffs a person up.
Again, according to Strong’s, it indicates something fraudulent—an intentional perversion of truth intended to induce another to surrender, to give up something of value. If you can just think what Jacob did to Esau twice, you can get a pretty good idea of its practical meaning.
Today we might say that our heart is attempting to con us into something that is not, by any stretch of the imagination, good for us. Its inducements may indeed appear on the surface to be attractive, but further examination would reveal that its appeals to us are fraudulent. They are lies. In fact, its appeals are not only downright dangerous, it is incurably set in its ways.
The Hebrew word in Jeremiah 17:9 is translated “deceitful.” The other two times that it appears in the Old Testament it is translated “corrupted” and “polluted.” It is a word that should give us a clear indication of what God thinks of our hearts. It is something foul in every sense and should be considered as something belonging in the sewer or the septic tank.
You can probably recall the place in the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus, in speaking to the people there who were ordinary people, said to them that they were evil. He hardly knew a single one of them, except some who might have already been His disciples, and He flat-out called them evil. He then went on to admit, “Yes, you can do good things, but that does not change My original evaluation.”
The King James translators choose to use the word “deceitful” in the English translation, and just about every modern translation has followed its lead, and it is a good synonym. Now “deceit” is a cognate; that is, it is related to “deceive,” and “deceive” means to mislead, to cheat, to give a false appearance or impression, to lead astray, to impose a false idea, and finally, to obscure the truth. Thus “deceitful” indicates the heart to be full to the very brim of these horrible descriptors. This is a far cry from what we like to think of ourselves, but what we think of ourselves is a product of our heart which has deceived us into thinking we are an awful lot better than we actually are.
To finish off the descriptors in this verse is the term “desperately,” which is #605 in Strong’s, and it indicates something so weak, feeble and frail, that it is at the point of death. Thus most modern translations, including the margin in my King James Version, have opted for the word “incurable.” In another place, God calls it “a heart of stone.” Do you know what that indicates? It indicates something that truth has a very difficult time penetrating. It is an interesting illustration that He uses because it is as though rigor mortis has already set in even while it is still alive. In other words, nothing can be done about it. God has to give us a new one. It is set in a pattern of influence that cannot be changed for the better, and so this is why God promises that those He calls will be given a new heart which He describes interestingly as “a heart of flesh”—one that will yield to His way of life.
We can understand all of these descriptors. It is good knowledge to have, but they can only give us what amounts to book-learning on this very important topic. It is what its problems are in practical situations in everyday life that makes God so dead-set against it that He declares that it is incurable. It cannot be fixed. I will illustrate that this way:
What are the two great commandments of the law? First, we are to love God with all of our heart, our soul, and our mind. In other words, we are to love Him above all other things. We are to respond to God’s wonderful generous love toward us with a love employing all of our faculties in order to attempt to match His love toward us. Jesus further stated the following in Luke 14:26.
If any man come to me and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.
Do you understand the practical application of it? It means that we are to make whatever sacrifices are required of us, even to the giving of our life, in order to submit in obedience to any—even the least—of God’s commands. That is one tall order for our deceitful heart, and if at any time we even put ourselves on equal footing with Him, we have actually put ourselves over Him, and committed idolatry.
The second of the two great commandments is that we are to love others as ourselves. This one is not quite as stringent as the first, but it is still a very high standard. Jesus said that on these two commandments everything else hangs. That is, that love and law are inextricably bound together and cannot be separated in our relationship with God, but right here lays the problem.
Keeping them is impossible for man, as he is now encumbered with this deceitful heart. Our heart will not permit us to do this because the heart is so self-centered and absolutely cannot consistently obey either of these commandments; thus no character of any value to God’s kingdom can be created in one with a deceitful heart. The heart is incurably self-centered, self-absorbed, and narcissistic in its concerns about the activities of life.
I am going to give a number of scriptures as to why this needs to be of special concern to us at this time in the current life of the church.
II Timothy 3:13 But evil men and seducers shall wax [or grow] worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived.
I want you to understand that human nature itself is not going to get any worse than it already is or already was in Paul’s day as we approach Christ’s return, but rather the expression of its evils will intensify and grow in numbers as we close in on Christ’s return.
As the heart’s evil acts increase, it provides more and greater inducements and opportunities for everybody to be involved in its sinful ways. Remember that Jesus said in Matthew 24, that just before He returns, it will become as in the days of Noah, and you know how bad it was then, where it says “every thought of man was evil continually.” We are approaching that. So the combination of many factors in the times that we are living in will create the environment for the heart’s evil propensities to intensify. In other words, as the numbers of sin increase, the moral quality of the culture begins to come down, and the inducement of everything that is evil that is going on tends to pull people to believe it is all right to do that. “Everybody is doing it!” It is the mob mentality that begins to draw others into it like a magnet. That is why Paul said it will “grow worse and worse.” Again, please understand and do not forget that the heart was just as evil and deceitful in Paul’s day as it is today, but the culture is somewhat different, and the number of sins is increasing. That is what he was really driving at.
Let us go back to verse one of this same chapter. This appears just before what Paul said there in verse 13.
II Timothy 3:1-5 This know also that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, traitors, heady, high-minded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.
The word “perilous” indicates something difficult, threatening, dangerous, and ominous. There are a number of things to consider so that these verses are best understood. The term “last days” does not specifically mean the times that we are living in at this moment, because Paul clearly felt he was living in the last days. He expected Christ’s return was imminent while he was alive. Many verses prove that point. I Thessalonians 4 and II Thessalonians 2 was written before these books we are reading right now. He meant his instruction to Timothy to apply immediately. Just as soon as Timothy received them, they were already going on.
Now if he did not feel that way why would He tell Timothy, in verse 5, to withdraw from such people as he just described? If Paul did not intend for that to apply right at the moment, was Timothy going to live all the way to Christ’s return? Not in the least. Paul meant it right then. You look at the list that is given there, and you see that Paul was talking about circumstances in his day. They already existed. They still exist right to this time, because every one of these nineteen qualities is expressions of our deceitful heart.
The Greek gives the sense of conditions or expressions of human nature that come and go, like waves of increasing expressions of these characteristics’ resistance rather than something that is constantly occurring. You know the way it is. Those of you who are older know that when we were living in the late 40s and through the 50s that the culture in the United States was a great deal different. People were generally much more law-abiding, respectful of government, respectful of the law, and concerned about things many would consider today to be really odd or weird. But once we passed through the 50s and began to get into the mid-60s, and the Hippie Movement was taking place, and the Baby Boomers were coming along and developing their own culture, things went downhill and into the sewer quite quickly.
What I am getting at here is that cultures come and cultures go. Any of you who have read the book The Fourth Turning know this is true. These men show that there are four general cycles in history, in Britain and in the United States especially, goes through repeatedly. They come and go. That is exactly the sense of what Paul has written in II Timothy 3, and so we see then why Paul would write something like he did in verse 13. They are going to intensify, and then they will ebb. And then they will increase, and then they will ebb, and so forth, but they are always there regardless of when Christians live.
Let us connect this though with what Jesus said because in Matthew 24 He said that when we are approaching His return things will become similar to, parallel to, the days of Noah so that we know. We are warned in our time that these things are going to hit their peak in terms of being prevalent all over the place. It is as though the moral standards and spiritual standards of a whole culture are sinking all at once.
Paul did not intend to say that everybody would express all of these characteristics all the time either; rather that all of these elements would be in each person, because he is describing the elements of everybody’s deceitful heart, but the intensity of their expression would vary from person to person. Not everybody has exactly the same problems is what he is saying. Some people have problems with stealing. Other people have no problem with stealing, but fornication and adultery is their problem. Do you get the point? Everybody is not going to express all of these, but yet all of them are part of the deceitful heart, and they could be expressed by anybody.
As we come to understand this context, the threatening and danger implied to church members is not their bodily injury and death, but the danger of their becoming drawn into what everybody else is doing. It begins to become popular and easier to give in to human nature when everybody around you is doing it. As the standards sink, what used to be horrible becomes normal and acceptable even though, in God’s eyes, it is all sin, and all earns death.
Now here comes a shocker. This provides fuel for us to understand that these characteristics are right in the church; therefore, this begins to really become pertinent to you and me. It is not like we are standing up here looking at all these people on the outside. Brethren, where did we come from? We came from the same world, the same mess of stew out there like everybody else. This then gives us the opportunity to see that we are capable of expressing these. Again, we will not be expressing all of them, but the possibility is there for us to express some of them.
Let’s stop here and in the next segment, we’ll take a look at each of these defective qualities.
I hope our teaching will help and encourage you and strengthen your walk with the Lord … His love for you is more than you could ever imagine.
Until next time we meet stay safe and KEEP LOOKIN UP!!!
My Prayer For You: 
Almighty Father, We come together to ask your forgiveness and we ask that you continue to teach us how to become more Christ-like each day and follow the path you have set before us.
Give us the discernment to detect the deceit being given to us by fake news and self-serving politicians.
Lord, we pray for an end to the attempt to overthrow our government and our way of life, I pray you open the eyes of the unbeliever and reveal your truth and glory and bring your Godliness back to our land.
Father, stop this virus spreading throughout the world and heal the sick. We claim, in Jesus’ name, 1 Peter 2:24 and Isaiah 53:5 for all needing your touch from the top of their heads to the bottoms of their feet.
We pray for hearts to change and become filled with the Holy Spirit and love for one another.
Hear our prayers O’ Lord!
We ask in Jesus precious name
Amen