Roots That All Run to One Person

Jeremiah does something in one short passage that I have never been able to shake. He puts two trees next to each other.

The first one he calls a heath in the desert. A scrubby thing out in a salt land where nothing else grows, and he says it does not see when good comes. Not that good never comes. That it does not see it. The rain falls somewhere and that plant has no way to reach it.

The second one is planted by water, and its roots spread out toward the river, and the line about it is the one I want:

She shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit.

Both trees experience heat. Both trees are standing in the same year of drought. He does not say the second tree gets better weather.

The only difference between them is where the roots went.

The verse before it names the problem

Now the sentence that sets it up, and it is blunter than most people remember.

Thus saith the LORD; Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the LORD. (Jeremiah 17:5, King James Version)

Maketh flesh his arm. That is the phrase. An arm is what you reach with, what you carry with, what you defend yourself with. He is describing somebody who has made another human being their capacity.

And notice the third clause, because without it this verse gets misread constantly. Whose heart departeth from the Lord. That is what makes it cursed ground. It is not that trusting people is forbidden. Scripture is full of people trusting people, and depending on each other is most of what the New Testament tells the church to do.

The problem is a heart that has quietly relocated. When one person becomes the arm, God becomes optional, and it happens without anybody deciding it.

You are not wrong for loving somebody deeply, and Scripture has never once told you to hold people at arm's length. That is not me dodging a hard verse. Jeremiah 17:5 has three clauses and the third one is the hinge, and it is the Holy Spirit who shows a person where their own heart has actually gone without accusing them of anything.

Nobody chose this

I want to say clearly that this almost never happens on purpose.

A person does not decide to route everything through one human being. It accumulates. Somebody is good to you in a hard year, and they become the one you call, and then the only one you call, and then the one you check things with before you know what you think.

And usually that person is genuinely good. That is what makes it so hard to see. There is no villain in this. Some of the tightest single roots I have seen were attached to some of the finest people I know, and neither party ever noticed it happening.

The test is not whether they are good. The test is what is left standing if they are unavailable for a year.

You have been growing in one direction, and God has never once been angry about how a thing grew. Jeremiah 17:8 talks about roots spreading rather than roots being wrong, and the Spirit of God is the one who shows a person their own shape without shaming them for it.

What spreading out actually means

Here is what I think the practical answer is, and it is not what people usually hear in a sermon about this.

The answer is not to depend on people less. It is to depend on God first and on more people second. That tree does not have one root. It has roots, plural, spread out toward a river, which means it has many points of contact with one source.

That is what a healthy life looks like. God is the river. The roots are ordinary: a friend, a mentor, a group, a person who knows your history, somebody older, somebody who will tell you the truth. Several. Not one.

And a person with several is much easier to love, because none of those relationships is carrying a weight it was never built for.

You are able to put another root down, and it has never once been disloyal to the first one. Jeremiah 17:8 says spreadeth out her roots and uses the plural on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings the right people into a person's life at a pace they can actually manage.

The drought is coming to both trees

I want to be honest about what this passage does and does not promise.

It does not promise the second tree an easy life. Read it again. Heat comes. A year of drought comes. The tree is standing in exactly the same conditions as the scrub in the salt land.

What it promises is that the tree is not careful in the year of drought. That old word means anxious. It is not that the tree is unaffected. It is that the tree is not frantic, because its supply is not sitting in the weather.

So this is not a message that says get your roots right and hard times stop. Hard times do not stop. This is about where a person's supply is coming from when they arrive.

You are supplied from something the weather does not control, and He has never once run dry in anybody's drought. Jeremiah 17:8 keeps the heat and the green leaf in the same sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who steadies a person in a year that has not improved.