Jeremiah (1-31) 7:8 Commentary and Bible Study

But now Jeremiah changes tone; he does this constantly. The Jews are charged with blatant hypocrisy, but God has seen it all. They tell themselves and they tell each other that they are very different from what they really are. They speak lying words and they want to believe those words themselves. It seems that the more often they speak these lies, the more inclined they are to believe them. When there is no answering correction, men can eventually come to believe what they originally knew was false. They are glad that no one corrects them, because bit becomes easier to believe the lie. But God, at the end of this block of verses is going to correct them, and they will realise that they have achieved nothing; their lies have no profited them, because the Lord, the one person who needs to be convinced, knows that they are lying.Here is the extent of their lying: ‘Will ye steal, murder, and commit adultery, and swear falsely, and burn incense unto Baal, and walk after other gods whom ye know not; ¹⁰ And come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, We are delivered to do all these abominations?’ This is a sample of their lying speeches. The reality is that they steal, murder, commit adultery, sear falsely, burn incense to Baal, and walk after other gods they have not known. That is what God sees, and it cannot be hidden from him. He overlooks none of it, and he will recompense them for all this wickedness. After doing all these things, is it going to help them to pretend to be pious Jews who come into the house of God? Can he be fooled by their deceptions in the same way that they fool each other and themselves? They are standing before the Lord from whom no secrets are hidden, not before some fallible fellow human being. The words attributed to them – ‘We are delivered to do all these abominations’ – are surely not words that they say out loud. This is what they tell themselves in the privacy of their own hearts. In other words, they say, we have got away with all this. We can come and worship the Lord and stand before him in his house, and still do all these things which he hates, and he is none the wiser. We are delivered, in that we have not been immediately punished. Here we are still standing, and yet we have lived the way we wanted to live, and ignored his laws. It does not seem to have done us any harm, so we can have the best of both worlds. We can live as we like, and then we can come and worship God, and obtain his blessing.‘Is this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes?’ The Lord calls them back to reality. The reality is that they are a pack of robbers. Their wickedness is scarcely possible to conceal, and yet they come into the house of God as if they came in all innocence. In doing this they use the house of God as a cloak for their sin. They hope to come before God as upright Jews, and to be regarded by each other as if they were upstanding worshippers of God. It is an exercise in mass delusion. The house of God is being used by them as a hiding place, and as a cloak for their sin. So what have they in effect ended up doing? They have ended up turning the house of God into a den of thieves. That is the reality of the situation; that is God’s assessment of what they are doing. It is not what they want each other to think, nor what they want the Lord to see, but when he observes them come into his house with all this pretence, and yet knows what they really are, he says that it is as if they wanted to turn his house into a place where thieving and murder and adultery and idolatry could all be hidden up. Christ, of course, quotes this passage as he clears the money changers and the merchants in the temple. ‘He saith unto them, It is written, My house shall be called a house of prayer: but ye make it a den of robbers’ (Matthew 21:13). It is the same hypocrisy at work among the money changers in Christ’s time. They have tried to make the house of God a hiding place, a den, a lair, a secret place, for robbers, where nobody knows what they do, only in Christ’s time they had become even more blatant about it. They pretended they were offering the people a service by changing their money, but really that were on the make, and taking advantage of others to their own profit.The idea is: you live as you like. You are not seeking after God; your lives are not committed to him, but when you come into this temple, all your misdeeds are hidden up, and you behave piously and religiously. Worship has become a cover for a life of wickedness. ‘Behold, even I have seen it.’ I see through all the hypocrisy of the unconverted religious, their outward claim to believe in God, their entire lifestyle and aims and purposes. I can see right through them and into the heart, says the Lord.