by The Heart of Man
If you said to a medical professional – or even a student studying biology – that life is in the blood, they would most likely understand what you meant.
Our blood is one of our organs, a fluid circulated around the body by the action of the heart, carrying oxygen to every part of the whole. It’s a vital function – if my blood stopped circulating I would die very quickly. It is very evident that there is life in our blood, and God has purposely designed you and I, and countless other living creatures, in that way. It is also no accident that the heart is responsible for the circulation of ‘life’ around our body, and that the word of God, and the general understanding of man for thousands of years, viewed the heart as the seat of the affections and the source of desires.
What happens when the heart is no longer doing its job properly, naturally speaking? The body doesn’t get the oxygen it needs – it feels fatigued, exhausted. The extremities – the hands and feet – become numb and unfeeling. The flow of life-giving oxygen is restricted, and the body is starved. Imagine stubborn Mr Smith, experiencing these symptoms and wilfully ignoring them, even when the plain evidence of the root cause is set out in front of him. His day-to-day and hour-by-hour experience testifies to him that something is badly awry, but he insists, “There is nothing at all wrong with my heart”.
An evangelist was once preaching in the street, and was entreating passers by to repent of their sins. A smartly-dressed businessman stopped to listen for a moment, then approached the preacher.
“I am highly offended by what you’re suggesting,” he said, heatedly, “I do not commit sins!”
This is like Mr Smith in the doctor’s office – flatly denying what was evident to the doctor (and to the preacher) and refusing to discuss the solution which, in both case, was readily and freely available.
What does God say about the heart of the sinner? “The heart is deceitful above all things, and incurable; who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). The Lord taught that “from within, out of the heart of men, go forth evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders” (Mark 7:21). What kind of heart produces such awful things, and is described so damningly as the most deceitful thing in existence and wholly incurable? A defective heart. A heart whose highways are obstructed, a heart which is corrupted and choked. A heart like that effects the extremities – the hands and feet, desensitised, numb: “swift their feet to shed blood” (Romans 3:15), “Both hands are for evil, to do it well.” (Micah 7:3). If you confronted that well-dressed businessman in the street with these quotations, he might well argue that he is an upstanding citizen, that he has not defrauded his employer or murdered anyone or committed adultery – there is nothing wrong with his heart, thank you very much. Perhaps the preacher would then take the approach that Ray Comfort took in a video I saw once. Comfort was speaking to a young man on the street of an American city. He asks the man if he believe he’s a sinner. The youth replies that he doesn’t think so. “So, you’ve never lied?” asks Ray. The young man shrugged and replied that he guessed he has. “Have you had lustful thoughts?” The man nodded. “Have you stolen anything?” “Yeah, I have…” And you could see the truth dawning on that young man. No matter how good we think we’ve been, no matter how upstanding we might appear in the eyes of man and society, there is something fundamentally wrong with the sinner’s heart. I used to think of myself as a ‘good person’, but if Ray Comfort put those same questions to me, I would have to answer all three in the affirmative. Guilty, guilty, guilty. We cannot deny it – the evidence is in our lives, in the sins we’ve committed.
The scripture says that a man’s heart answers him, shows him what he is, as if he were looking at his own reflection in water (Proverbs 27:19).