Year 9, Day 60: Jeremiah 7

Theological Commentary: Click Here

Jeremiah continues the case against the Hebrew people.  Once more we hear that the people are stealing, murdering, committing adultery, giving false testimony, and chasing after other gods.  It’s a veritable laundry list of typical human behavior.  People are making decisions with their own desires at heart and their own interests in mind.

God tells the people through Jeremiah that the people need to reform.  They need to start doing justice, stop oppressing the sojourner, care for the orphan and widow, cease shedding innocent blood, and stop pursuing other gods.  In other words, they need to stop thinking of themselves first and start caring about the needs of others before their own.  If they do this, then God will relent and allow them to continue in the land.  Of course, we know that they don’t.  The people go into exile because they can’t part with their own self-centeredness.

There’s another dynamic in this chapter worth recognizing.  God spends time focusing in on His holy temple.  He knows that the people are saying that God won’t let Jerusalem fall because this is the home of God’s temple.  How could God possibly let foreigners march all over the place where He dwells?

God is quick to refute this thinking.  What is a manmade temple to Him?  Is not the whole earth His footstool?  In fact, God reminds the people of Shiloh.  Shiloh is the place where the tabernacle resided when the Hebrew people overtook the Promised Land – prior to the David lineage building the temple in Jerusalem.  After the time of Eli the priest, the Philistines likely come and destroy Shiloh.  Here was the place of the tabernacle of God resided, yet it was now in ruins.  If God allowed that to happen once, is it so hard to believe that it could happen again?

The truth is that a place is nothing to God.  God can come and go to any place of the earth.  He can use everything and anything He wants.  He does not hold the kind of attachments to locales that we as human beings do.  He is holy in Shiloh.  He is holy in Jerusalem.  He is holy wherever He wants to work.  There is no place that is so holy that God is willing to allow any amount of desecration.  God cares more about our hearts and our desire to do His will than the personal reputation of any geographic point.

Does God spare Jerusalem?  No.  In fact, even after the Hebrew people return the Greeks come in after the Persians and take it away.  The Romans come after them.  After Jesus, Jerusalem becomes a place of struggle between the Jews, Christians, and Muslims.  That struggle continues even to this day.  That alone should warn us that God cares more about our hearts than our location.

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