Three times a year, the Jewish men were required to go up to the temple in Jerusalem to celebrate the feasts (Deut. 16:16), and this may have been one of those occasions. The temple was probably crowded, but there weren’t many true worshippers there. The prophet stood at one of the gates that led into the temple courts, and there he preached to the people as they came in. He presented God’s four indictments against the people of Judah.
“Their worship does them no good” (vv. 1–15). Because they believed the lies of the false prophets, the people thought they could live in sin and still go to the temple and worship a holy God. According to Jeremiah 7: and 9, they were guilty of breaking at least five of the Ten Commandments, but the false prophets assured them that the presence of God’s temple in Jerusalem guaranteed the nation God’s blessing and protection from every enemy. Of course, this wasn’t faith; it was blind superstition and Jeremiah quickly shattered their illusions.
Jesus referred to verse 11 after He cleansed the temple (Matt. 21:13). A den of robbers is the place where thieves go to hide after they’ve committed their crimes. Thus Jeremiah was declaring that the Jews were using the temple ceremonies to cover up their secret sins. Instead of being made holy in the temple, the people were making the temple unholy! A century earlier, Isaiah had preached the same message (Isa. 1), and much later Paul wrote a similar warning to Christians in his day (Eph. 5:1–7; Phil. 3:17–21). Any theology that minimizes God’s holiness and tolerates people’s deliberate sinfulness is a false theology.
The people needed to repent, not only to avoid the awful consequences of their sins in their character and their worship, but also to escape the judgment that was certain to come (Jer. 7:12–15). God’s covenant with the Jews included both blessings and judgments— blessings if they obeyed and judgments if they rebelled (Deut. 11:26–30; 27:1–26; Josh. 8:30–35). Although the Jews knew this, they continued in their sins and rejected God’s warning.
They also conveniently forgot God’s past judgments, including His judgment on the tabernacle when it was located in Shiloh. The evil sons of Eli thought that carrying the ark of the covenant into the battle would defeat the Philistines, but they were slain, and the enemy captured the ark. God then wrote Ichabod over the tabernacle, which means in Hebrew the “glory has departed” (1 Sam. 4—6; see especially 4:21–22). Yes, God could protect His holy temple if He desired, but His temple in Jerusalem was no longer holy. It was a den of thieves! Better there were no temple at all than that hypocrisy should desecrate God’s house.
“Your prayers will do them no good” (vv. 16–20). At least three times, God instructed Jeremiah not to pray for the people (Jer. 7:16; 11:4; 14:11)—certainly a terrible indictment against them. God had allowed Abraham to pray for wicked Sodom (Gen. 18:23–33), and He had listened when Moses interceded for sinful Israel (Ex. 32—33; Num. 14), but He wouldn’t permit Jeremiah to plead for the kingdom of Judah. The people were too far gone in their sins, and all that remained for them was judgment (see 1 Cor. 11:30; 1 John 5:16).
When a nation decays, it begins in the home, and God saw whole families in Jerusalem working together to worship idols (Jer. 7:17–19). If only the parents had helped their children learn of the Lord and worship Him! The Jews, however, worshipped the “Queen of Heaven,” which was a title for Ishtar, the Babylonian goddess of love and fertility, whose worship involved abominable obscenities (44:17–19, 25). This sinful worship certainly grieved God, but the people were hurting themselves more than they were hurting the Lord. This pagan immorality was having a devastating effect on their children, and God would send a judgment that would destroy the land, the city, the temple, and people. Judah was sacrificing the permanent for the immediate, and it was a bad bargain.
“Their sacrifices will do them no good” (vv. 21–26). A superficial reading of this paragraph may give the impression that God was denouncing the whole sacrificial system He had given to His people in Exodus and Leviticus, but such is not the case. In an ironic manner, Jeremiah was only reminding the people that the multitude of their sacrifices meant nothing because their hearts were unfaithful to God. God wants obedience and not sacrifice (1 Sam. 15:22), mercy and not religious rituals (Hos. 6:6). “Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams or with ten thousands of rivers of oil?” (Mic. 6:7) asked the prophet Micah. Then he answered his own question: “He has shown you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?” (v. 8 nkjv; see Matt. 22:34–40).
God’s covenant with Israel at Sinai emphasized the demonstration of His grace to the nation and the importance of their obedience to Him (Ex. 19:1–8). Jehovah was marrying a wife, not buying a slave. When Moses in Deuteronomy rehearsed the law for the new generation, his emphasis was on loving the Lord and obeying Him from the heart (Deut. 6:1–15; 10:12–22; 11:1, 13, 22). To substitute external ritual for internal devotion would make the sacrifices meaningless and rob the heart of God’s blessings. The same principle applies to believers today. How easy it is to be busy for the Lord and yet abandon our first love (Rev. 2:4)!
“My discipline and correction do them no good”
(7:27–8:3). “This is the nation that has not obeyed the Lord its God or responded to correction” (Jer. 7: niv). Whom the Lord loves, He chastens (Prov. 3:11–12; Heb. 12:5–13), and if we truly know and love the Lord, His chastening will bring us back to Him in contrite obedience. But God told Jeremiah to lament for the dead nation, because they would not repent.
Topheth is an Aramaic word meaning “fireplace,” and it sounds much like the Hebrew word meaning “shameful thing.” Topheth was the place in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom where the people sacrificed their children to idols by throwing them into the fire (Isa. 30:33). King Josiah had defiled Topheth and turned it into a garbage dump (2 Kings 23:10), but after his death the gruesome pagan rituals were reinstated. The Greek word gehenna, meaning hell, comes from the Hebrew ge’ hinnom, the valley of Hinnom. Hell is a garbage dump where Christ-rejecting sinners will suffer forever with the devil and his angels (Matt. 25:41).
Jeremiah announced that the day would come when the Valley of Hinnom would become a cemetery too small for all the people who would need burial after the Babylonian invasion. The army would plunder the graves and tombs, and the bones of the great leaders and kings would be desecrated on the altars like so many sacrifices to the gods they worshipped. Gehenna would again become a garbage dump, and the corpses of the Jerusalem citizens would be the garbage! “They will not be gathered up or buried, but will be like refuse lying on the ground” (Jer. 8: niv). Many of the people surviving the siege would be carried off to Babylon, and the land would become desolate.