One disease that we all have in common as fallen sinners is hardened hearts.

The Spirit directed the prophet Jeremiah to write in Jeremiah 17:9 - “The heart is deceitful [perverse and corrupt] above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” Just as physical heart disease, uncorrected will certainly lead to death, so spiritual heart disease, without God’s healing grace, ‘the end thereof are the ways of death,’ Proverbs 14:2.

What then are the symptoms of a hardened heart, unhealed by the grace of God? ‘This people’s heart is waxed gross,’ means ‘left unexercised by the Spirit of grace, it grows fat, calloused, dead and insensitive.’

1. A hardened heart is a heart that is dull of hearing and blind.’ Hardened sinners are both unwilling and unable to hear the Word of Christ to come unto Him. There is not even any desire to hear because they are hardened in their sin. So hardened are they that left to themselves they not only won’t come to Him, but they won’t desire to come to Him. Our LORD Jesus noted how the religious Jews in His day had the written Word, and searched it, thinking that by so doing they would find eternal life in their religious devotions, but, as He told them, ‘they are they which testify of me,’ John 5:39. And, He immediately adds in v.40, ‘And ye will not come to me, that ye might have life.’ So the hardened heart is evidenced by an unwillingness to come to the LORD Jesus for salvation, but also an inability to come, because of the hardened, self-serving state of the heart. Our LORD declared, ‘No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him:” John 6:44.
   
   
2. A hardened heart is a condemned heart. ‘Lest at any time they should see…and hear.’ Here is a judicial blindness whereby God gives sinners over to their own reprobate minds, Romans 1:28. And yet it clearly states, ‘their eyes they have closed.’ Hardened sinners would blame God for their hardness, and yet God’s giving them up is due to the hardness of their own heart, and left to themselves, they remain in that state of condemnation. Another symptom of a hardened heart is an unrepentant heart, ‘…lest at any time they…should be converted, and I should heal them.’

In Romans 11:7 we read of God’s judgment on the nation of Israel. “What then? Israel hath not obtained that which he seeketh for; but the election hath obtained it, and the rest were blinded.” Note that any who are save, ‘election hath obtained it.’ That is NOT the sinner choosing God, for that could not be. Rather it is God who has chosen those He will save from eternity, and sending His Son the LORD Jesus to pay their sin debt, that upon completion of His perfect obedience unto death, God might be just to declare them righteous, and in time give them life by His Spirit, and convert them to Christ. Without this effectual, gracious work of the Triune God, there is no hope. A hardened heart left to its own hardening, is most certainly a judicial and righteous condemnation.