Wicked or Deep: Rethinking the Human Heart

You know what’s funny? Even when I called myself agnostic, I was still studying the Bible.

I think I’m always learning something new when it comes to it.

When I was first introduced to Christianity, I was 22, in a Christian counseling program. That’s where I was introduced to Jeremiah 17:9, and it became a foundation for the version of the Gospel I was taught.

The King James Version says:

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”

But the Septuagint renders it differently:

“The heart is deep beyond all things… and who can know him?”

At first glance, those feel like two very different pictures.

One paints the heart as wicked.
The other paints it as deep and difficult to fully understand.

For years, I interpreted the verse through the first lens. I saw myself as fundamentally broken, and it shaped how I viewed everyone else.

If the heart is wicked, it can’t be trusted or changed.
And if it can’t be changed, then the only solution is external, Christ’s blood as the only way to redeem what is beyond repair.

That created a system:

Shame-based → “I’m broken, I can’t trust myself, I need constant correction.”
Growth-based → “I have blind spots, and I need awareness and discipline.”

Both start from the idea that we don’t fully understand ourselves. But they lead to very different ways of living.

The version of the Gospel I was taught followed that same logic.

The problem was guilt.
God is just.
Sin must be paid for.
And Jesus steps in as a substitute.

That’s often described as Penal Substitution, Jesus taking the punishment we deserve so we can be forgiven.

It’s a coherent system. It answered something real in me.

The version of the Gospel I was taught came with an analogy.

You’re at the bottom of the sea, dead in sin. Lifeless. Unable to change your condition.

Then Jesus comes, lifts your body out of the water, brings you onto the boat, and replaces your heart with His.

Now you have a new life. And from there, you tell others what happened.

The second part of the conversion was the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant in the Gospel of Matthew 18:21–35.

A king settles accounts.
A servant owes him an absurd, unpayable debt.
The servant begs.
The king forgives the entire thing.

Then that same servant goes out, finds someone who owes him a tiny amount…
and chokes him, demanding repayment.

No mercy. No patience.

Word gets back to the king.

The king calls him back and says:

“I forgave you everything because you asked. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on the other guy?”

Then the king hands him over to be punished.

And Jesus ends with:

“This is how my Father will treat each of you unless you forgive from your heart.”

There’s truth in that. I had a lot of anger and bitterness when I was 22.

I was bitter toward Liberty University for kicking me out, my parents who divorced, the doctors who were constantly placing me on new medication, and the hospitalizations.

I had names attached to that bitterness.

So to remedy the state of my heart, Jesus was the answer at that time.

I broke down crying, and I realized I was the wicked servant. In that moment, I believed my heart was sick beyond repair.

But over time, I started to see the Gospel through a different lens.

Not primarily as a legal transaction, but as something more relational.

I no longer see Jesus’ death primarily as satisfying God’s justice. Instead, I see it as the result of confronting human systems of power, fear, and control.

Jesus was killed because what he embodied and taught threatened those systems.

And yet, what he embodied was love.

A kind of love that forgives, restores, and moves toward people rather than away from them.

If the first lens says the problem is guilt,
this lens says the problem is disconnection.

If the first says we need a substitute,
this one says we need restoration.

I didn’t come back to Christianity because I solved the theology.

I came back because of the love shown by others.

I don’t know if I would have come back to Christianity through theology alone. But I know I couldn’t ignore the love I experienced.

And for the first time in a long time, I’m choosing to follow that.