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Jeremiah 5:1 · World English Bible

Jeremiah 5:1 Meaning Run Back and Forth Through the Streets

Run back and forth through the streets of Jerusalem, and see now, and know, and seek in its wide places, if you can find a man, if there is anyone who does justly, who seeks truth, then I will pardon her.

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What does Jeremiah 5:1 mean?

A whole city can be spared on the account of one upright person, and that is a staggering weight to lay on the individual. Search every street and open square, the demand goes, and find a single man who does what is right and seeks the truth.

From the Clinical Psychology reading below.

Jeremiah 5:1 through 1 lens

The same verse, read by one tradition.

CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY

Clinical Psychology

A whole city can be spared on the account of one upright person, and that is a staggering weight to lay on the individual. Search every street and open square, the demand goes, and find a single man who does what is right and seeks the truth. The guilt of all of it will be forgiven. The many are carried by the one who stands straight. Everything hangs on finding him.

The two things asked of that man are inseparable. He does judgment, acting rightly in the world, and he seeks the truth, refusing the comfortable lie even when everyone around him has stopped looking. His existence would justify the whole place. Becoming such a person is not a private matter. One honest man who chases what is true holds up more than his own life, and the town may never know it owes him its survival.

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Clinical Psychology lens

Live Jeremiah 5:1 today

  1. Do the right version of one small thing today where nobody would check, the honest expense line, the full hours, the sentence in the report you could have shaded. Count it even though no one claps.
  2. When a story is going around the group chat and you suspect it is not true, do not forward it. Say you are not sure it is accurate, and let the thread be a little slower and a little more honest.
  3. In the meeting where the easy answer is already winning, ask the question that actually tests whether it is true. One person still looking is enough to change what the room can get away with.

If my town were spared because of one honest person, would anything about today make me a candidate?

The same truth in other traditions

Judaism · the Talmud

The world is said to rest on a handful of righteous people who are never identified, not even to themselves. Any one of them might be you.

Stoicism · Marcus Aurelius

Stop arguing about what a good person should be and be one. Your own uprightness is the only part of the world you can actually repair.

Taoism · Zhuangzi

The one who holds to the true way does not advertise it. His steadiness quietly keeps things in order around him, and no one traces it back to him.

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