HIDEOUT                          

Jeremiah 7:1-11 NET.

¹ The LORD said to Jeremiah: ² “Stand in the gate of the LORD’s temple and proclaim this message: ‘Listen, all you people of Judah who have passed through these gates to worship the LORD. Hear what the LORD has to say. ³ The LORD God of Israel who rules over all says: Change the way you have been living and do what is right. If you do, I will allow you to continue to live in this land. ⁴ Stop putting your confidence in the false belief that says, “We are safe! The temple of the LORD is here! The temple of the LORD is here! The temple of the LORD is here!” ⁵ You must change the way you have been living and do what is right. You must treat one another fairly. ⁶ Stop oppressing foreigners who live in your land, children who have lost their fathers, and women who have lost their husbands. Stop killing innocent people in this land. Stop paying allegiance to other gods. That will only bring about your ruin. ⁷ If you stop doing these things, I will allow you to continue to live in this land which I gave to your ancestors as a lasting possession. ⁸ “‘But just look at you! You are putting your confidence in a false belief that will not deliver you. ⁹ You steal. You murder. You commit adultery. You lie when you swear on oath. You sacrifice to the god Baal. You pay allegiance to other gods whom you have not previously known. ¹⁰ Then you come and stand in my presence in this temple I have claimed as my own and say, “We are safe!” You think you are so safe that you go on doing all those hateful sins! ¹¹ Do you think this temple I have claimed as my own is to be a hideout for robbers? You had better take note! I have seen for myself what you have done! says the LORD.

We are now in the 24th book of the Bible. I want to congratulate y’all for staying with me through this adventure. We must spend some quality time in the Old Testament. One evangelist I used to watch on television said that the trouble with some people is that they don’t use the whole sword. They have the handle but not the blade. The handle is the New Testament, and many are familiar with it. But some of the most powerful truths the New Testament authors knew are found in the Old Testament. It is the blade of the sword.

Jeremiah is classified as a major prophet. That doesn’t mean his teachings are more important than those of the minor prophets. It just means he was more prolific. He wrote more. Probably, when people look back on my ministry, they will say the same thing. They might say I wasn’t very influential, but I sure wrote a lot. Well, I identify with Jeremiah, and not just because I write a lot. He was called the weeping prophet. He suffered much during his ministry. He paid the price for standing up for God and his word. His life was not easy, nor was his ministry. His message was not peace and prosperity.

I think it is ironic that some people who hold to the prosperity gospel use a verse in Jeremiah as their life verse. Jeremiah 29:11 says, “For I know what I have planned for you,’ says the LORD. ‘I have plans to prosper you, not to harm you. I have plans to give you a future filled with hope.” People think that if they keep quoting that verse and believing its words that they will eventually succeed financially and improve their health. But Jeremiah 29 is not about getting rich and healthy. It’s about turning back to God. All of Jeremiah is about that. The prophet Jeremiah was called to proclaim God’s word to a people who had already turned their backs on him.

A Sermon at the Gate (2).

The LORD told Jeremiah to preach a sermon on his behalf. He didn’t ask him to stand at a pulpit in a church building. He told him to go to the gate of the temple in Jerusalem. This was a significant venue. Everyone who was committed to the temple and its religious rituals would frequent that gate. They would have the opportunity to hear what Jeremiah was saying. He probably preached this same sermon many times – perhaps over several days. We know, for example, that Jeremiah preached a similar message, and that was recorded in chapter 26. So, people who might not have been paying attention one day would hear the rerun the next. The words would eventually become embedded in the minds of these listeners. They would find themselves quoting the crazy prophet in their conversations.

He was obnoxious. He was confused. He was too negative. He was many things. People hated him. They hated his message. They tried to get rid of him by throwing him into a mud pit. But thousands of years later, Jeremiah is still shouting his message at the temple gate. It is still relevant. It is still significant. It still speaks to people who are outwardly religious but struggle to live out their faith. Jeremiah spoke to people who had substituted ritual for reality. They regularly worshipped God at the temple, but their lifestyle had not changed as God required.

A Misplaced Faith (4).

God tells the crowds entering the temple to stop placing their confidence in the false faith – faith in the temple itself. They cry out, “We are safe! The temple of the LORD is here! The temple of the LORD is here! The temple of the LORD is here!” They see the temple as a magical place to hide from the cares of the world. They see it as a place they can run to on a regular basis, and just by going there, the ugliness and corruption of the city will not cling to them. They think that as long as they practice the temple rituals and enter the temple courts regularly, the temple will protect the nation.

Later in this chapter, Jeremiah will point out the danger of misplaced faith. He will remind them that before the temple existed, there was the tabernacle. One of the places where the tabernacle resided was called Shiloh. Jeremiah invited the inhabitants of Jerusalem to go on a hike and visit Shiloh. He told them to go to the place in Shiloh where he allowed himself to be worshiped in the early days. He wanted them to see what he did to Shiloh because of the wicked things his people, Israel, did. God made Shiloh a desolate place. Its inhabitants had worshipped the place rather than the God it was supposed to represent. As a result, God turned Shiloh into a desolate place. When the place becomes more important than God, God afflicts it with desolation.

Fast-forward to Jeremiah’s time, and we now see God saying that what he did to Shiloh he is prepared to do to the temple in Jerusalem. God says he will destroy this temple, which he had claimed as my own, the temple they trust to protect themselves. He will destroy this place he gave to them and their ancestors, just as he destroyed Shiloh. And he will drive them out of his sight, just as he drove out their relatives, the people of Israel.

It is wonderful to have a place where people can come to seek God’s face. It is a blessing to have a place where our relationship with God can be nurtured and made a priority. Yet there is always a danger that this incredible place might evolve into something evil. When God’s place takes the place of God himself, that place risks becoming a hideout for robbers.

That is what Jeremiah proclaimed about the Jerusalem temple in his day. It had become not a place of spiritual renewal and nurture. Instead, it had become a hideout where people could rest, then go back out to commit more crimes.

A Call to Repentance (3,5).

God’s purpose for his temple had not changed. But the people had created a new purpose for that place. The place had not changed, but the people had. So God demanded that they change back. He wanted them to repent.

However, even as I use that word, I need to define it because people seldom use ‘repent’ nowadays, and when they do, they often think it means only admitting their sins. Admitting you are a sinner is part of what it means to repent. Trusting in God’s grace to forgive your sins on the basis of the blood of Christ is part of repentance as well. But Jeremiah did not merely ask his listeners to admit that they were sinning. Through the prophet, God commanded them to change their ways.

The Hebrew verb Jeremiah used for “change” was יָטַב. It is related to the word טוֹב, which means “good.” The verb means to make something good or right, or beautiful. Jeremiah used it to describe the process of repenting. It means turning away from the bad, wrong, and ugly things in one’s life and exchanging them for good, right, and beautiful things. Instead of hiding behind a veneer of religious propriety, Jeremiah wanted his people to turn away from their sins and seek a genuine relationship with God, as evidenced by their good behavior.

Jeremiah knew this was a nation of hypocrites. He could not leave his message there because the people had convinced themselves they were not doing anything wrong. So Jeremiah had to list the crimes the people were committing to show them that he knew what they were hiding. Here is the list:

• They were not treating one another fairly (5). Their courts and justice system had become corrupt and were used to exploit people.
• They were taking advantage of the weak in their society and exploiting them (6). The weak people that Jeremiah identified were foreigners who lived in their land, children who had lost their fathers, and women who had lost their husbands. These people who needed protection the most had become prey to the powerful.
• They were killing innocent people (6). That was a general statement, but one of the particular incidents was the sacrifice of innocent children to Molech. This was a detestable practice. It involved taking a new infant and burning it alive. It was an unthinkable sin, but it was practiced because some were teaching that the gods would make you more fertile and prosperous if you did it.
• They were paying allegiance to other gods (6). You would think that if a people had become obsessed with the Jerusalem temple and put their trust in it for their safety, they would want nothing to do with other gods. But the devil had convinced them to sin in both ways. They had rejected an authentic relationship with God and had substituted a faith in a building: the temple. But lacking a genuine spiritual life in Yahveh, they sought out other gods.

This list was not exhaustive. There were many more things Jeremiah’s audience was doing wrong. But God, in his mercy, said that if they changed these behaviors, he would allow them to continue living in the land he gave to their ancestors as a lasting possession (7).

History tells us that Jerusalem was destroyed, the temple was lost, and the people were exiled from the land. They did not listen to the prophet, refused to repent, and failed to stop sinning. They put their confidence in the temple and wound up losing both the temple and the land.

Long after that temple was destroyed, Herod built a new one. But the people in Jesus’ time were just as guilty of hypocrisy and a lack of repentance as the people in Jeremiah’s time. That’s why Jesus quoted from Jeremiah 7 when he saw corruption in the temple during his time. He said that God’s house was supposed to be a house of prayer, but they were turning it into a hideout for robbers.[1]

We no longer worship in a temple. We are the temple. We worship in a church building. Yet we can still sin against God by trusting in this physical building instead of the God it is dedicated to. We can still sin against him and against others, as Jeremiah’s people did. We can still run to the building every week and hide our sins by appearing respectable. But God sees everything.

The same God who pleaded with his people to repent in Jeremiah 7 is pleading with us to do the same. He still wants a genuine relationship with us. We can learn to turn from our evil ways to his good ways while we are in this building. Or we can learn to hide our sin well. But we can’t fool all the people all the time, and we can’t fool God ever.

[1] Matthew 21:13; Mark 11:17; Luke 19:46.