ACTS BIBLE
From Judges to the Temple's Fall week 8 · Jeremiah 7:1-15; Jeremiah 31:31-34; 2 Kings 25:8-12
The temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD. Jeremiah says the building will not save them, promises a new covenant, and watches Babylon burn it in 586 BC.
Early in Jehoiakim's reign Jeremiah is told to stand in the gate of the Temple and preach to the people coming in to worship. He goes straight at the thing they were saying to one another: Trust ye not in lying words, saying, The temple of the LORD, The temple of the LORD, The temple of the LORD, are these (Jeremiah 7:4).
Jerusalem believed the house made the city safe. Assyria had taken Samaria and then turned back from Jerusalem in Hezekiah's day, and the lesson people drew was that God lived here and would not let it fall. Jeremiah lists what they did between visits to the house: theft, murder, adultery, false oaths, incense to Baal. Then they came and stood in the courts and said, We are delivered. Is this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes? (Jeremiah 7:11).
He tells them to go to Shiloh, where the tabernacle had stood through the days of the judges, and look at what God did to it. Shiloh was rubble. God would do the same here.
Nobody repented. The priests and the prophets laid hold of him and said he must die (Jeremiah 26:8). When his scroll was read to King Jehoiakim, the king cut it up with a penknife three or four columns at a time and threw it on the fire on the hearth (Jeremiah 36:23). Jeremiah was beaten, put in the stocks, let down into a cistern to sink in the mud, and charged with treason for telling Judah to surrender to Babylon, while the other prophets went on promising that all would be well. He had a phrase for them: saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace (Jeremiah 6:14).
None of this made him hard. He is called the weeping prophet because he wept over the people he was condemning: Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people! (Jeremiah 9:1).
Babylon came three times. In 605 BC Nebuchadnezzar took hostages from the royal house, Daniel among them. In 597 BC he took King Jehoiachin, the craftsmen and smiths, and the young priest Ezekiel. The Babylonian Chronicle, a clay tablet in the British Museum, records that capture and dates it to the second of Adar, March 597. Then Zedekiah rebelled, and Babylon sat down around the city for a year and a half until the famine broke it.
In the fifth month of 586 BC (the year is reckoned from 2 Kings 25:8 and the Babylonian king lists; some put it in 587), Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard burnt the house of the LORD, and the king's house, and all the houses of Jerusalem (2 Kings 25:9). Jachin and Boaz were broken up for their bronze and carted to Babylon. The ark is never mentioned again in the history. Lamentations is the dirge that was sung over it: How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! (Lamentations 1:1).
In the worst of the siege God gave Jeremiah a promise beyond anything in the prophets before him. There would be a new covenant, not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers, which they had broken. This one would be written inside: I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people (Jeremiah 31:32-33). They would all know the LORD, from the least to the greatest, and their sin would not be remembered any more.
Set that beside Judges 2:10 and the generation that knew not the LORD. Israel had always needed a different heart more than it needed a better house or a better king, and here God promises to give one. On the night before he died Jesus took the cup and said, This cup is the new testament in my blood (Luke 22:20). He kept the law from the inside, every day of his life, and then he died for the people who had broken it. Hebrews 8 quotes Jeremiah's whole promise and says it is now in force.