Jeremiah 17

From Deceit to a Living Spring: The Inner Drama of the Heart

Jeremiah 17 read as a psychological drama reveals a theater of consciousness in which habits, imaginal choices, and the sovereign self struggle for dominion. The people, the city, the altars, the gates and the sabbath are not external facts but qualities of mind and stages of inner life. This chapter lays out two opposing orientations inside us: one that trusts the world of senses and other people, and one that trusts the inner I AM, the conscious power that imagines and thus creates. The consequences described are literal in the inner world: the scenes we live from now determine the architecture of our experience.

The opening image — the sin of Judah graven upon the table of their heart and upon the horns of their altars — speaks of deep engravings of belief. The point of a diamond and a pen of iron symbolize how certain attitudes are sharply incised into feeling. An altar inside consciousness is any habitual object of worship: praise of reputation, habit, habitually played scenes, the comfort of familiar identity. Children remembering altars and groves means the inheritance of unexamined images. When a family, culture or private mind rehearses the same ritual scenes, those grooves grow deeper until the heart is a tablet etched with expectation and fear.

The mountain in the field and high places for sin are elevated perceptions we make into permanent fixtures — the proud thought, the secret expectation, the self-justifying story. When the text says your substance and treasures will be given to spoil, it dramatizes how imagination, when misdirected, hands creative energy to forces that will turn it against you. To trust the world outwardly is to lend your imaginative treasury to enemies: fear, envy, ambition. The prophecy that you will serve enemies in a strange land describes how inner enemies — shadows of thought you do not own — take command and make you live in alien territories of feeling and belief. We call them enemies because they feel other than the true center of being; they are voices that do not belong to the sovereign Imagination.

The central moral hinge comes in the curse and blessing: cursed is the one who trusts in flesh, blessed the one who trusts in the Lord and whose hope is the Lord. Flesh stands for the external self — the visible appearance, the evidence of senses, the testimony of others. Trusting flesh is to let outward circumstance dictate identity. The result is desertification: like the heath in the wilderness, one withers when drought comes because one built life on transient supports. Trust the Lord — that is, rest in the conscious I AM that imagines, feels, and presides — and you become the tree planted by streams. The tree is not static; it is a picture of sustained imaginal activity rooted in the living stream of awareness. When heat or drought (trial, lack, loss) comes, the rooted tree still has its source of life; leaves remain green and fruit continues because the imagination that sustains it is held by the inner center.

When Jeremiah declares that the heart is deceitful above all things, he is diagnosing the unconscious imagination. The heart here is not a moral exemplum only; it is the field of feeling that believes stories told to it by memory and sense. Deceit arises because imagination accepts appearances as fact and fails to examine their provenance. The divine reply — I search the heart and try the reins — is not punitive so much as forensic: awareness scans motive, tests controlling desires, and returns to each the consequence of their inner scene. What you think, imagine, and feel becomes the script you act out; reality cannot but answer the script you live from.

The partridge that sits on eggs and hatches them not is the emblem of ill-gotten gains and uncreative possession. To acquire wealth or success by means that bypass right imaginal process — by greed, by imitation, by taking another's scene — is to sit upon sterile eggs. Without the right inner conception and the generative feeling, what was momentarily obtained is lost mid-course. Accumulations not generated by the creative imagination of the self will depart at mid-life, leaving the owner empty and regarded as foolish. This is a psychological law: what has not been conceived and nourished in consciousness does not endure.

'The glorious high throne from the beginning is the place of our sanctuary' points to the original sovereignty within every mind. There is a throne — a seat of authority and identity — that, when acknowledged, shelters and governs all interior activity. The fountain of living waters is that same source reframed: a wellspring of feeling, creative images, and the living word that refreshes and sustains. Forsaking that fountain — abandoning inward trust for outward props — produces shame and a sense of being cut off. The cure is returning attention to the inner water, to the scene that already implies the desired state.

Jeremiah’s cry, 'Heal me, O Lord, and I shall be healed; save me and I shall be saved,' is literal instruction in imaginal practice. Healing is an act of reorientation: stop rehearsing the sick scene and rest in the felt reality of wholeness. Save me and I shall be saved means let the inner power of imagination rewrite the story. The following complaint, 'Where is the word of the Lord? let it come now,' captures our impatience: we want visible proof before we inhabit the feeling. The scripture challenges that impatience and insists that the word is first interiorly felt; outer confirmation follows the inner decree.

The final and practical imagery centers on the gate of the city and the sabbath law. The gate is the threshold of attention, the point where impressions enter and decisions are enacted. The repeated injunction, 'Take heed to yourselves, and bear no burden on the sabbath day,' is not mere ritual but psychological discipline: do not carry anxious cares, old grievances, or transactional thinking into the sacred state of rest. The sabbath is an inner day of cessation from doership — a deliberate withdrawal from forcing reality to be different — and a submission to the creative presence. When you sanctify that inner rest, your mental gates welcome 'kings and princes' — higher states: authority, right relation, dignified feelings, dominion over circumstance. The city remains and abundance comes in the form of offerings, sacrifices of praise, and the inward incense of gratitude.

Refuse the sabbath by bringing burdens — worry, calculation, striving — into the gate and the text predicts a fire in the gates that will devour palaces. Psychologically, that fire is the combustible energy of misused imagination. When anxious expectation fuels attention, it kindles compulsive scenarios that destroy the dignities of life; relationships, reputation, and inner peace get consumed. The warning that the fire shall not be quenched dramatizes how entrenched worry can become self-sustaining: once the imaginal habit of fear is alight, it feeds itself until the inner palaces — structures of life and meaning — are reduced to ash.

So how does imagination transform this drama? First, by recognizing the engravings: bring what has been unconsciously repeated into awareness. Name the altars and groves you serve. Second, choose the well-spring: practice dwelling in the scene of the I AM, in which you already occupy the throne. Third, sanctify the gates: cultivate moments of deliberate sabbath, a mental cessation in which you refuse to import outer concern into the holy ground of feeling. Fourth, plant the tree by the waters: sustain a repeated, living image of the desired state until roots take hold and new fruit appears. These are not pious exercises but psychotechnics of attention: attention imagines, imagination composes, and the composition becomes destiny.

Jeremiah 17, then, is less about an ancient city than about the climate of the inner city. It announces the law that what you make into an altar you will serve, that trust frames the soil in which your life grows, and that the gate of attention governs what enters your world. The final counsel is merciful rather than moralistic: return to the inward fountain, rest in the sabbath of being, and your life will be reordered. The chapter is a map: it shows where the grooves are cut, how they were carved, and how you can, by imaginative surgery, erase the old script and write a living one. The choice is simple and constant — whom will you trust: the outward evidence of the flesh, or the creative, imagining presence that says I AM?