Jeremiah 9:3 · World English Bible
“They bend their tongue, as their bow, for falsehood. They have grown strong in the land, but not for truth; for they proceed from evil to evil, and they don’t know me,” says Yahweh.
A tongue bent like a bow is a chilling image, because it names deceit as a trained skill rather than a stumble. These are people who have practiced the lie until aiming it feels natural, and each falsehood loads the next.
From the Clinical Psychology reading below.
The same verse, read by one tradition.
CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY
A tongue bent like a bow is a chilling image, because it names deceit as a trained skill rather than a stumble. These are people who have practiced the lie until aiming it feels natural, and each falsehood loads the next. That is the mechanism of corruption. You do not fall into the abyss in one leap; you proceed from evil to evil, one small betrayal of truth at a time.
Courage for the truth is rarer than we admit, because the truth exposes you and costs you standing. To refuse that courage is to lose contact with reality itself, which is what it means to know not God.
Clinical Psychology lens
Which small untruth have you repeated so often that it now says itself without you?
Right speech is listed as a discipline, not a mood, because truthfulness is a muscle that either gets trained or goes slack. Every false word lays down a groove the next one slides into more easily.
He wrote that whoever lies cuts himself off from the nature of things, and so becomes a stranger to the world he lives in. The liar does not just wrong his neighbor, he loses his grip on what is actually there.
True words are not pretty and pretty words are not true. The speech that flatters has already started drifting from reality.
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Clinical Psychology