23 November 2025

Jeremiah: The Temple of the Lord3

Jeremiah 7:1-14; 26:7-9

While King Josiah was prosecuting his religious reform – renovating and improving the Jerusalem temple, and requiring everyone to worship there and nowhere else – stirring events were taking place to the north. The empire that had dominated the Ancient Near East for a century, the Assyrian Empire, was collapsing like a house of cards. A new threat from the southeast, the kingdom of Babylon was steadily advancing on Assyrian territory, and even the king of Egypt, far to the south, smelled blood and was moving in for the kill. 

Now, one might think that the smart course of action for the king of tiny Judah, halfway between Egypt and Assyria, would be to lie low and let the big dogs tear each other apart, but for whatever reason King Josiah decided to take a hand in international affairs. So, in the thirty-second year of his reign, more than a decade after he began his religious reform, Josiah took his little army north to join the Assyrians in a battle with Egypt. Josiah chose sides … poorly. The Egyptians crushed the Assyrians and in the battle Josiah was killed. The Egyptian army headed back home with their spoil, and since their road took them right by Jerusalem, they stopped by to drop off Josiah’s body, declare that Judah now belonged to them, and take Josiah’s first-born son to Egypt as a hostage. In his place, the Egyptians installed Josiah’s second son, named Jehoiakim, to serve as their vassal king. And in the first year of King Jehoiakim’s reign, the young prophet Jeremiah went to the temple. We read Jeremiah 7, verses 1-14.

7 The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: 2Stand in the gate of the Lord’s house, and proclaim there this word, and say, Hear the word of the Lord, all you people of Judah, you that enter these gates to worship the Lord. 3Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Amend your ways and your doings, and let me dwell with you in this place. 4Do not trust in these deceptive words: ‘This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.’

5For if you truly amend your ways and your doings, if you truly act justly one with another,   6if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own hurt, 7then I will dwell with you in this place, in the land that I gave of old to your ancestors forever and ever.

8Here you are, trusting in deceptive words to no avail. 9Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known, 10and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, ‘We are safe!’—only to go on doing all these abominations? 11Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your sight? You know, I too am watching, says the Lord. 12Go now to my place that was in Shiloh, where I made my name dwell at first, and see what I did to it for the wickedness of my people Israel. 13And now, because you have done all these things, says the Lord, and when I spoke to you persistently, you did not listen, and when I called you, you did not answer, 14therefore I will do to the house that is called by my name, in which you trust, and to the place that I gave to you and to your ancestors, just what I did to Shiloh. 

I mentioned last week that nearly everybody loves Josiah and his religious reforms. He is held up as the very model of a righteous king who turned Israel back to the Lord. One thing I’ve never heard anyone say, though, is: “And how long did those reforms last?” Because it feels as if a genuine religious revival ought to have lasting effects, right? But here we are, a dozen years later, and according to Jeremiah, things are as bad as they ever were. In verse 8, he says: You steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal, and go after other gods. For those of you keeping track, that’s six out of ten commandments right there. And there’s more. We only read part of Jeremiah’s temple sermon. In the following verses, he describes the people baking sacred cakes for the “Queen of Heaven” – the goddess Astarte, maybe? – pouring out drink offerings to idols, and building altars to the god Tophet, to whom the Israelites even sacrificed their own children. Quite a religious reform they had there, huh? It doesn’t feel as if things got any better at all.

In fact, they might be worse. Jeremiah’s frustration isn’t just that they are still breaking every commandment, but that they do all that, then show up at their newly repainted temple and assume that God’s impressed with them, presumably because they had just paid for the restoration. That’s not enough, Jeremiah says: Stop bleating these deceptive words: ‘This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.’ God’s not impressed!

It might be worthwhile to pause a moment here to ask a question: What does impress God? The priests and the people of Judah apparently felt that paying for the new roof on the temple would do it, but Jeremiah disagrees. So what does impress God? What would you say? Here’s what Jeremiah says: For if you truly amend your ways and your doings, if you truly act justly one with another, if you do not oppress the foreigner, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own hurt, then I will dwell with you in this place, in the land that I gave of old to your ancestors forever and ever. 

The law, and all the prophets up to that point agree with Jeremiah explicitly. A century earlier, the prophet Micah of Moresheth had said, “This is what the Lord requires of you: Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.” Micah’s contemporary Isaiah said, “Stop doing evil, learn to do good, seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.” But Judah had decided to renovate the temple instead, and when they were done, they apparently figured God was so pleased with them that they could do what they wanted. They thought they could impress eternal God with an earthly building. But let’s not be smug. We humans have always made this error. We’ve pictured God as an earthly king and tried to serve God by doing the sorts of things that earthly kings like. We’ve built pyramids, Parthenons, cathedrals, statues, temples, megachurches. We’ve constructed altars encrusted with gold, apparently assuming that the Creator of the Universe is impressed with shiny metal. We’ve tried to extend God’s kingdom through religious war and sought to defend God’s royal honor by sending out crusaders and conquistadors to slaughter those who, in our view, worshiped God incorrectly. We have a long history of trying to buy God’s favor with earthly things.

And it’s still going on. In America today, there is a Christian group called the “Seven Mountain Dominionists.” These people see modern secular society as corrupt – which I’ll grant is a reasonable conclusion. So they have decided that the only solution is for good Christians to take control of the seven “mountains” that influence society: religion, family, government, business, education, arts and entertainment, and the media. Now I’m sure that some of these people are only using this language as a pretext – all they really want is power – but some of them are sincere. They genuinely believe that what God wants them to do is take over the government and every aspect of society and impose their rules on everyone. That would fix everything, and that’s what would please God. The Dominionists probably love King Josiah.

But what Jeremiah’s temple sermon makes clear is that building a new physical structure, establishing a new regime, and enforcing new laws does not change the human heart. Top down reform doesn’t work. Josiah’s reforms, considered ten years later, had accomplished squat. They had only created a thin, superficial appearance of holiness and encouraged people to think that that was all God wanted. Jeremiah rejects this. He goes on to say that if the people don’t change deeply, God is perfectly capable of taking their precious temple away from them. He reminds them that before they had a temple, the sanctuary of God was in a tent in the city of Shiloh, which by that time was a ruin. “God can turn your precious temple into another Shiloh, you know.” I wonder how that went over? As it happens, the story of how that went over is told in Jeremiah 26. We read verses 7-9.

7The priests and the prophets and all the people heard Jeremiah speaking these words in the house of the Lord. 8And when Jeremiah had finished speaking all that the Lord had commanded him to speak to all the people, then the priests and the prophets and all the people laid hold of him, saying, ‘You shall die! 9Why have you prophesied in the name of the Lord, saying, “This house shall be like Shiloh, and this city shall be desolate, without inhabitant”?’ And all the people gathered around Jeremiah in the house of the Lord.

So that went well. 

Here’s the rest of that story. As the people dragged Jeremiah through the city gates, planning to stone him to death, one wise old man stood up. “Could I just say a word? I’m remembering that the prophet Micah once said something very similar. He prophesied that Jerusalem would be ploughed up like a field if they didn’t change their ways. And King Hezekiah and the people listened to Micah, and God forgave them. What if this young man really is speaking for God? Do you want to be the ones who killed God’s messenger?” The mob had a brief consult, then came back and said they had decided to let Jeremiah go this time, but he was banished from the temple until further notice.

Here’s what strikes me so forcibly in that story. Jeremiah had accused them of all sorts of things – of breaking all the commandments, of betraying their covenant with God – but the thing that got him in trouble was talking smack about the temple. He said, “This house, called by God’s name, has become a den of robbers!” (I mean, can you imagine someone using those words about the temple?) And the thing that really set the crowd off was when Jeremiah said the temple could be destroyed. That was unforgivable. Do you remember the story of Jesus’ trial before the priestly council? What was he charged with? Predicting that the temple would be destroyed. In both Jeremiah’s case and Jesus’, six hundred years apart, the only blasphemy that the people really cared about was blasphemy against the earthly structure. That was where their faith was centered. And in both cases, the temple was destroyed shortly thereafter. 

The story of Jeremiah, like the story of Jesus of Nazareth, is a reminder that the things of this earth are temporary. Empires rise and empires fall. Temples are built, and temples are dismantled. Churches and denominations appear, and then they fade away. But God is always here, always the same, always asking the same thing of us: act justly one with another … do not oppress the foreigner, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood … do not go after other gods … and I will dwell with you. Center your faith there: nothing else impresses God.