Jeremiah 17:9-10
9 The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse— who can understand it?
10 I the LORD test the mind and search the heart, to give to all according to their ways, according to the fruit of their doings.
This passage is often conscripted (often without verse 10, see carm.org) into the service of proving that everyone is totally depraved.
The actual meaning of this verse can be understood by looking at a little context.
Jeremiah 17:1 says that the people have become so comfortable in their sin that their hearts have hardened to it. The writing on their figurative hearts is etched with a hard stylus. It cannot be erased and written over with right teaching. As we read on (Jeremiah 17:2-3) we learn how this heart hardening happened. The people had become accustomed to worshiping idols. They even taught their children how to practice this worship when they should have been teaching them about covenant with God (Deuteronomy 6:20-25).
The problem was in where they placed their trust (Jeremiah 17:5). Instead of trusting God (Jeremiah 17:7) they have trusted themselves‒their own strength and wisdom.
Contained in this context is invitation to reorient their misplaced trust back to God. The ones who trust God thrive (Jeremiah 17:7-8) while those who trust in themselves harden themselves like a shrub in the desert that has become adapted to lack of nourishment (Jeremiah 17:6).
Jeremiah 17:9 is directed at a particular segment of Judah that was unfaithful to God and had become comfortable with it. The point is that people can easily justify in their hearts that it is okay to do evil if it is for a good cause.
The poet goes on to explain the means by which God knows people's hearts. He knows by testing (see Deuteronomy 8:2; 13:3). What is on a person's heart is evidenced by what he/she does. He does not search the heart by reading people's minds. He observes their actions. He is not a thought cop but he is a fruit inspector; and what they are doing produces nothing useful, as a partridge that broods her eggs but nothing hatches (Jeremiah 17:11, NABre, or they accumulate from other people's hard work like a partridge collecting chicks from other birds).
Jeremiah 17:9 does not mean that everybody is totally depraved. The writer means to express that he is astounded people can engage in error to the extent that they become comfortable with it. They convince themselves that what they are doing is right. What an astonishing thing that some people's hearts have grown that hard.
They were not born that way. They became that way by misplacing their trust.
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