Jeremiah 16:17 · World English Bible
Jeremiah 16:17 Meaning For My Eyes Are on All
For my eyes are on all their ways. They are not hidden from my face. Their iniquity isn’t concealed from my eyes.
What does Jeremiah 16:17 mean?
Worship God as if you see him, and if you cannot see him, he sees you: you are seen either way A saying of the Prophet, given when he was asked what excellence in faith looks like. Most people live as if the watching starts when someone walks into the room and stops when the door shuts.
From the Sufism reading below.
Jeremiah 16:17 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Sufism
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Sufism
Worship God as if you see him, and if you cannot see him, he sees you: you are seen either way A saying of the Prophet, given when he was asked what excellence in faith looks like. Most people live as if the watching starts when someone walks into the room and stops when the door shuts. Once it sinks in that the door changes nothing, the effort of keeping two versions of a life running at once falls away.
Murāqaba: Keeping watch, aware of being watched Al-Ghazali makes this a daily practice in the Revival. Someone whose wrongdoing has stayed private for years builds a quiet confidence, because silence starts to feel like permission. Holding in mind that one pair of eyes has been open the whole time drains that confidence, and leaves behind a person who can be honest about where they stand.
Wherever you turn, the face of God is there: no direction leads away from him A line from the Quran that Ibn Arabi comes back to again and again. When a person feels found out, the first instinct is to move: change the subject, change the town, change the crowd. Closing off that plan is a mercy, because someone who cannot run is finally free to deal with what is wrong.
Muḥāsaba: Going over your own account Al-Ghazali pairs this with keeping watch, like a shopkeeper checking the day's books. When another person names your faults, everything in you argues back and starts drafting a defense. A person who does the count first takes the sting out of being known, since nothing on the list comes as a surprise.
Tawba: Turning back The word means turning around and walking the other way. Being seen through can leave a person frozen, certain the record is now fixed and nothing can be done about it. The tradition holds that the one who sees everything is also the quickest to take a person back, which is why an honest reckoning is where repair begins.
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Live Jeremiah 16:17 today
- Pick the one thing you have been keeping off the record, in your browser history or your spending or how you talk to yourself, and say it plainly to yourself without softening it. You cannot deal with a thing you keep renaming.
- Let one person you trust know something true about you that you usually leave out. Being known on purpose is easier than being found out.
- When you feel the pull to keep two versions going, the group chat voice and the family voice, the you in the meeting and the you after, say the same sentence in both. Start with something small.
What part of my life am I still running as if nobody can see it?
The same truth in other traditions
Stoicism · Seneca
Live as though a person you respect were standing beside you all day, and most of what you would hide loses its appeal. A life with no audience and a life with one should look the same.
Taoism · Zhuangzi
The way is in the small and the hidden as much as the large and the seen. Nothing is off the record, so the private hours are the real ones.
Judaism · Pirkei Avot
Know what is above you: an eye that sees, an ear that hears, and all your doings written down. The teaching is not a threat, it is an invitation to stop living in two pieces.
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