I the LORD search the heart, [I] try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, [and] according to the fruit of his doings.
Ver. 10. I the Lord search the heart.] Be it never so full of shifts and fetches, I cannot be deceived in it. The watchmaker must needs know every turning and winding in the watch. God is the heart maker and the heart mender; neither is there any creature, no, not any creature of the heart, that is not manifest in his sight, but all things are naked and opened before his eyes. Heb 4:13 "Naked" for the outside, and opened for the inside - dissected, quartered, and, as it were, "cleft through the back-bone," as the apostle's word a there signifieth; so opened as the entrails of a man that is anatomised, or of a beast that is cut up and quartered. The heart and reins are taken to be the seat of the thoughts and affections, yea, of the strongest affection, namely, that which is for generation. These are a man's inwardest and most remote parts, so that it is hard for food or physic to come at them. Covered they are also with fat and flesh, &c., and yet they are not hid from God's eye, which is indeed a fiery eye, Rev 1:14 and therefore needeth no outward light. Man's eye is like a candle, which is first lighted, and then extinct; the angels' eyes are like the stars, which shine indeed, and in the dark, too, but with a borrowed light, neither know they the thoughts of men's hearts further than they are discovered. But God's eye is like the sun, yea, far brighter and more piercing than that eye of the world; neither needeth he a window in man's breast, as Momus wished, to look in at, for every man, before God, is all window, totus totus transparens et pellucidus. This Thales and other philosophers saw and confessed.
a τετραχηλισμενα .