The Temple Sermon
1 The word that came to Jeremiah from Yahweh, saying, 2 “Stand in the gate of Yahweh’s house, and proclaim this word there, and say, ‘Hear Yahweh’s word, all you of Judah, who enter in at these gates to worship Yahweh.’” 3 Yahweh of Armies, the God of Israel says, “Amend your ways and your doings, and I will cause you to dwell in this place. 4 Don’t trust in lying words, saying, ‘Yahweh’s temple, Yahweh’s temple, Yahweh’s temple, are these.’ 5 For if you thoroughly amend your ways and your doings, if you thoroughly execute justice between a man and his neighbor; 6 if you don’t oppress the foreigner, the fatherless, and the widow, and don’t shed innocent blood in this place, and don’t walk after other gods to your own hurt, 7 then I will cause you to dwell in this place, in the land that I gave to your fathers, from of old even forever more. 8 Behold, you trust in lying words that can’t profit. 9 Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, burn incense to Baal, and walk after other gods that you have not known, 10 then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, ‘We are delivered,’ that you may do all these abominations? 11 Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes? Behold, I myself have seen it,” says Yahweh. 12 “But go now to my place which was in Shiloh, where I caused my name to dwell at the first, and see what I did to it for the wickedness of my people Israel. 13 Now, because you have done all these works,” says Yahweh, “and I spoke to you, rising up early and speaking, but you didn’t hear; and I called you, but you didn’t answer; 14 therefore I will do to the house which is called by my name, in which you trust, and to the place which I gave to you and to your fathers, as I did to Shiloh. 15 I will cast you out of my sight, as I have cast out all your brothers, even the whole offspring of Ephraim.
Standing in the temple gate, Jeremiah tells worshipers that the building will not save them, and points to a ruined sanctuary as proof that it has happened before.
The location is the message. He is told to stand in the gate of the house of Yahweh and address people as they come in to worship. Not in the street, not in the palace, but at the threshold of the thing he is about to attack, speaking to a congregation on its way to a service. Everything in the sermon depends on that staging, and the arrest that follows in due course is the natural result of it Jeremiah 26:8.
What he attacks is a slogan, and he quotes it as a chant: Yahweh's temple, Yahweh's temple, Yahweh's temple, are these. The threefold repetition is the tell. This is not an argument being made but a phrase being repeated, and it encodes a real theology. God had chosen Zion. God dwelt between the cherubim. Therefore the city could not fall. A generation earlier the city had in fact been spared when Assyria besieged it 2 Kings 19:34, so the belief had a precedent behind it. Jeremiah calls it lying words that cannot profit.
Against the slogan he sets conditions, and every one of them is ethical rather than ceremonial. Execute justice between a man and his neighbor. Do not oppress the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow. Do not shed innocent blood. Do not walk after other gods. Then the indictment is drawn up in a form nobody in that gateway could have missed: steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely — four of the ten commandments listed in sequence. And then the astonishing sentence, that these same people come and stand before God in his house and say We are delivered. The sermon's charge is not that Judah has abandoned religion. It is that religion has become the mechanism by which the commandments are survived.
The famous phrase is the sharpest form of that charge. A den of robbers is not where robbery happens; it is the cave robbers withdraw to afterward, where they are safe and among their own. The temple is being described as the place where men went to be secure between offenses, and the reply to that arrangement is four words long: Behold, I myself have seen it.
Then the historical proof, and it is the strongest evidence in the sermon because it is a place the hearers could go and look at. Shiloh had held the sanctuary and the name of God at the first, and it was destroyed 1 Samuel 4:10–11 Psalms 78:60. The site of Shiloh lay in ruins a day's walk north, in territory whose population had already been deported. God had abandoned a sanctuary before. The fact was in the record and on the map. What follows is stated as a simple parallel: I will do to the house which is called by my name, in which you trust... as I did to Shiloh. It removes the last ground of the slogan. A building called by God's name is a promise about God's character, not an insurance policy on the building.
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