Is your church a safe house for criminals?

When Jesus arrived in Jerusalem, he wept bitterly over the people and spoke about the temple’s imminent obliteration, in part because the temple was operating as a “den of robbers” (Luke 19:41-46). The inspection grade was a clear fail!

This was not a new message. This is Jeremiah redux 600 years later. That ancient prophet had cried over the same people (9:1) and had predicted the same city’s destruction in similar language (6:6-8). However, it is Jeremiah’s sermon at the temple gates in chapter seven that cuts deeply and gives us one of the scariest expressions in the Bible that Jesus picks up, “a den of robbers”:

Behold, you trust in deceptive words to no avail. Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, ‘We are delivered!’—only to go on doing all these abominations? Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes? Behold, I myself have seen it, declares the Lord. (Jeremiah 7:8-11)

What they were doing was clear. They turned their backs on their maker, and treated his people with contempt. They broke almost all the Ten Commandments, but they were ‘safe’ because they had the temple. They felt safe from God to do all the wicked things they would have done anyway. They were safe to hide from God, not in him.

In 1496, a Catholic reformer, Savonarola, said

Come, leaders of the Church, come, priests, come, friars, come novices… you go at night to your concubine, and the morning after, you go to take the Sacraments.¹

Could Jeremiah/Jesus have spoken the same for God’s people today? We don’t have a physical temple, but we do have Jesus and we do have his people gathered (John 2:21; 1 Cor 3:16). How do we treat these signs of God’s presence?

So I suppose the question is simple. Is your church gathering a safe house for criminals? Though it sounds very much like our beloved expression, “a hospital for sinners”, nothing could be further from the truth. A hospital and a hide-out are polar opposites.

In one, a sinner comes to the name of Jesus and his people to find repentance, healing, forgiveness and peace. In the other, he treats these same good things as ways of hiding out in unrepentant sin. Both offer assurances, but one is real, the other is a lie. Both may look the same, but God sees and is not mocked.

We must leave the hide-out and enter the hospital. Leaders are not exempt.

God was true to his word in Jeremiah, and remains true to his word in Jesus. Judgement was severe. Is there any reason we think that he won’t be true to his word in our age?

So do we treat the name of his Son and the gathering of his people as a place to hide from God? Many of us do. The question is, will we leave the hide-out for the hospital, and let the great physician operate on our hearts?

1 Quoted in J Lundbom, Jeremiah 1-20: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Doubleday, New York, 1999, p. 466.

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