Objection: Jeremiah 17:9 Literally Means That the Heart Is SICK, So Jesus Came to Heal the Sickness in Our Hearts, Not in Our Bodies

Frankly, I think that this objection is completely ridiculous, but it’s out there so I covered it.

The Hebrew word translated wicked in Jeremiah 17:9 (anash) does indeed mean sick, very sick or incurable.

Jeremiah 17:9:
The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?

Thank God that Jesus came so that our hearts would not have to be sick, very sick or incurable!  But our hearts today as Christians did not get to the “well” condition they’re in by being healed.  Jesus did not HEAL your SICK heart; He REPLACED your DEAD heart with a LIVE one!  You didn’t get a spirit fix-up job; you got a spirit transplant!  The old “you” is gone and the new “you” has replaced the old “you.”  So this objection, which caters to the same people who like to claim erroneously that by Jesus’ stripes we were spiritually healed, refers to something that Jesus did not actually come to do at all!

The “heart” Jeremiah talked about should be considered the same one that Ezekiel talked about.

Ezekiel 36:26:
“I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.

God did not say through Ezekiel that He would heal your “heart of stone” – He said that He would remove it and replace it with a “heart of flesh.”  Ezekiel did not say that God would heal your sick spirit – He said that He would put a new spirit within you.

Anyone who has read even one of the gospels should be impressed by the physical healing miracles that Jesus did.  In fact, you don’t even read explicitly about one single case where Jesus healed a person’s heart or emotions when the crowds pressed on Him to touch His garment to be healed.  Because Jesus was anointed to heal the brokenhearted, you know that people with broken hearts may well have been healed; the Bible does NOT list all the miracles Jesus did (John 21:25).  The ones that were selected were the notable ones to build faith in the reader that Jesus is indeed the Messiah, the Christ (literally the Anointed [One]).  These types of miracles were physically verifiable, unlike having a broken heart mended.

When Jesus commissioned His disciples, He didn’t say that they would lay hands on the brokenhearted and they would be soothed; He said that they would lay hands on the sick and they would recover, which they went on to prove.  We DO have His anointing to minister to the downcast, but that is certainly not the whole story or even the main story in the New Testament.

If it were not His will to heal the sick, we should expect heaven to be full of sickness.  But it isn’t; there’s no sorrow or pain there.  The very numerous bodily healing testimonies in the New Testament should settle forever His will to heal sick bodies!  Because He came to destroy the works of the devil (1 John 3:8), and the devil is the source of things that steal, kill and destroy (John 10:10), including sickness, we know that Jesus came to destroy sickness, not just deal with “heart” issues.