The people of Judah were misled, but they were willingly misled. When Jeremiah declares to them, _Lo, ye are trusting, for your part, upon the words of delusion, so that ye gain no good!_ (vii. 8) it is perhaps not so much the smooth prophecies of the false prophets as the fatal attitude of the popular mind, out of which those misleading oracles grew, and which in turn they aggravated, that the speaker deprecates. He warns them that an absolute trust in the _præsentia Numinis_ is delusive; a trust, cherished like theirs independently of the condition of its justification, viz., a walk pleasing to God. _What! will ye break all My laws, and then come and stand with polluted hands before Me in this house_ (Isa. i. 15), _which is named after Me 'Iahvah's House'_, (Isa. iv. 1), _and reassure yourselves with the thought, We are absolved from the consequences of all these abominations?_ (vv. 9-10. Lit. _We are saved, rescued, secured, with regard to having done all these abominations_: cf. ii. 35. But perhaps, with Ewald, we should point the Hebrew term differently, and read, "Save us!" _to do all these abominations_, as if that were the express object of their petition, which would really ensue, if their prayer were granted: a fine irony. For the form of the verb, cf. Ezek. xiv. 14.) They thought their formal devotions were more than enough to counterbalance any breaches of the decalogue; they laid that flattering unction to their souls. They could make it up with God for setting His moral law at nought. It was merely a question of compensation. They did not see that the moral law is as immutable as laws physical; and that the consequences of violating or keeping it are as inseparable from it as pain from a blow, or death from poison. They did not see that the moral law is simply the law of man's health and wealth, and that the transgression of it is sorrow and suffering and death.
"If men like you," argues the prophet, "dare to tread these courts, it must be because you believe it a proper thing to do. But that belief implies that you hold the temple to be something other than what it really is; that you see no incongruity in making the House of Iahvah a meeting-place of murderers (_spelunca latronum_: Matt. xxi. 13). That you have yourselves made it, in the full view of Iahvah, whose seeing does not rest there, but involves results, such as the present crisis of public affairs; the national danger is proof that He has seen your heinous misdoings." For Iahvah's seeing brings a vindication of right, and vengeance upon evil (2 Chron. xxiv. 22; Ex. iii. 7). He is the watchman that never slumbers nor sleeps; the eternal Judge, Who ever upholds the law of righteousness in the affairs of man, nor suffers the slightest infringement of that law to go unpunished. And this unceasing watchfulness, this perpetual dispensation of justice, is really a manifestation of Divine mercy; for the purpose of it is to save the human race from self-destruction, and to raise it ever higher in the scale of true well-being, which essentially consists in the knowledge of God and obedience to His laws.
Jeremiah gives his audience further ground for conviction. He points to a striking instance in which conduct like theirs had involved results such as his warning holds before them. He establishes the probability of chastisement by an historical parallel. He offers them, so to speak, ocular demonstration of his doctrine. _I also, lo, I have seen, saith Iahvah!_ Your eyes are fixed on the temple; so are Mine, but in a different way. You see a national palladium; _I_ see a desecrated sanctuary, a shrine polluted and profaned. This distinction between God's view and yours is certain: _for, go ye now to My place which was at Shiloh, where I caused My Name to abide at the outset_ (of your settlement in Canaan); _and see the thing that I have done to it, because of the wickedness of My people Israel_ (the northern kingdom). _There_ is the proof that Iahvah seeth not as man seeth; there, in that dismantled ruin, in that historic sanctuary of the more powerful kingdom of Ephraim, once visited by thousands of worshippers like Jerusalem to-day, now deserted and desolate, a monument of Divine wrath.