People In the Know: Out of Order

 November 2 2025

Jeremiah 7:1-17

         The stuff people post on Facebook is fascinating. Quite often someone will post a math equation and see if people can come up with the right answer to the problem. Now what fascinates me is just why any one would want to do homework from eighth grade ever again. Yet, people can never seem to pass by a chance to prove that they were indeed an “A”, student in Middle School. The difficulty is not with the numbers in the equation but rather, what is difficult is remembering the order in which task must be done. Did you recall that the part in the parentheses has to be done first, and then you solve any exponents, and after that multiplication and division, and lastly, you can add and subtract. You see, only if the problem is solved in just this order will one be able to say that they have the right answer. So, knowing the order is perhaps the most important aspect of solving equations. It makes sense that if a person were to refuse to follow this order then they can’t expect to have the right answer when they are finished. 

         Well, we know that something is out of order in Jerusalem, especially in what was happening at the Temple because in todays scripture we find the prophet Jeremiah getting in the faces of those who had showed up to worship. In this segment of this series called, ‘People in the Know”, we are looking at why the people who are supposed to be in the know about God are in all actuality, law breakers. Kind of odd, don’t you think, that after attending a worship service at the Temple what the people could not wait to do is to go out and do as much against God that they could. Jeremiah was called by God to be his prophet, one raised up from the people of God who would then become the mouthpiece for God. So what God is doing by sending Jeremiah to harass worshipers on their way to go to God in the Temple is pointing out the problem no one seems to be very concerned about. I mean if you become people who seem to be worse people after coming to worship then when you arrived, perhaps you should avoid worshipping for awhile!

         Well, the people who were to know about God apparently had a different reason for worshipping at the Temple. We hear this in the words of Jeremiah who tells the people gathered for worship, ‘Do not trust in these deceptive words, “This is the Temple of the Lord, “…the Temple of the Lord, ‘…the Temple of the Lord.” They spoke of the Temple as being their possession, much like a superstitious lucky charm to bring them success no matter how awful they might treat the people around them. They could have cared less about the way they acted and what they did to others because their’s was the Temple, the Temple, the Temple. This is why Jeremiah had to point them back to what had been agreed upon when they entered into this land promised to them by God. Had they really forgotten that they were to execute justice in their dealings with each other, not showing favoritism toward some and hatred toward others? Did they skip over those sections of Deuteronomy that had laid out how the fatherless and the widows were to be cared for? I mean, why in the world do you believe that God is not going to have a problem when innocent lives are snuffed out at the hands of the powerful? Do you really believe that God placing his Temple here among you really means you can go out and do as you please? Jeremiah wants to know, just why the people in the know, seem to not know how out of order they really are.

         It seems to Jeremiah that there is too much that people just want to sweep under the rug and act like everything is ok when it is clear that just the opposite is true. Yet what God was doing through Jeremiah was not just pointing out the failures of his people but as God always does, he desires to teach his children the right way to live. Well the very design of the Temple is itself laid so that God’s people might know the right order for their lives. When the people in the know would come to worship, the right way to live would be constantly reenforced. The only thing that was required for those who came to worship is to know the right order to follow on this pathway of life embedded in the very architecture of the Temple. Just like we know that the right order of an equation is the key to achieving success in solving them, so too there is a right order for the way we are to live our life as people in the know. 

         You see, the Temple is laid out into three sections. In the section farthest from the Temple entrance is what is called, “The Holy of Holies”. Here is found a perfect cube shaped room with an entrance marked by a thick curtain. Inside this room was located the ark of the covenant, a wooden box overlaid with gold where the covenant with God was held. The top of the ark was called the mercy seat for it is there that God in his mercy restores our relationship with him. Directly adjacent to the Holy of Holies, was the Sanctuary, the holy space containing an oil lamp, the menorah and also there was an altar for incense. Also in this space was the bread of the presence, a loaf for every tribe of Israel, placed before the light. This symbolized that all of the people of Israel lived and prayed before the light of the presence of God. Well, when we move from the Sanctuary to the outer court of the Temple we find the main altar where sacrifices were offered up daily to God.

         Now in these three spaces we have God’s equation for life. The question is, just where does one begin, say if, this does indeed describe a person’s spiritual journey? You see, the beginning point of a person’s spiritual journey is determined by whether or not they know God. Jeremiah understood this, I believe, because through observing God’s people coming to the Temple to worship, he witnessed that they did not know God for they did not know the correct place to begin on their journey with God. Now, we should not be surprised that the people of God were so out of order for as we discovered last week, the people God had appointed and anointed to watch over and lead his people had become corrupt. As we heard tell, in the eighth verse of the second chapter, the priests never even asked, “Where is the Lord”, and those who handled the Law did not even know the God who had written the Law. The rulers who were to shepherd God’s people did not lead them on the path that leads to life. And the prophets spoke only for the god Baal, who isn’t even a god at all. So without anyone to tell them where the presence of God is, without anyone who would lead them on the right paths, and without anyone speaking to them the purposes of God, no one seemed to know God with any certainty anymore. To know God is to be certain about God, to be certain that we do live before the presence of God, to be certain we are walking on the path that leads to life, to be certain that the purposes of God are only always for our good; none of this certainty was found anymore in Jerusalem. Without knowing God, without being certain of where God is, without being certain of where God is going and without being certain of what God is up to in the world, the people of God were left to operate out of fear. It is this fear, this is what caused the worship of the people of God to become terribly out of order.

         The people who operate out of fear, those who do not know God, know at least that to be part of a family or a tribe meant that there is an expectation that everyone brings something to the table. The order of the world is that in order to receive love one has to first, give love. Love is only shown to those who have first made the effort to show some good intentions.Well, when a person does not know God, when they came to the Temple with their sacrifice in hand, they would have thought, wrongly, that their sacrifice was their giving a gift to God, an act of love given so that God might throw a little love their way. So it comes as no surprise that people would just treat their relationship with God just like the rest of their other relationships. They believed, wrongly, that the love of God would be given to them only after their love for him would be proved through the offering of a sacrifice. Yet, with God, such actions seem so uncertain, for just how does one know if God has gotten the message, and how do we know that our gift has indeed caused God to accepted us?

         Well, the hope is that the sacrifices prescribed by the Law, are indeed the key to secure an entrance into a relationship with God. So, now, because of the sacrifice given, one can at last, enter onto the Sanctuary, through the work of the priest. Yet now the question becomes, just what must one say when one finds themselves before a God they are not very certain about. I mean, just what words or combination of words must one say in order that God might hear your request and further, will God actually do what it is that you have asked him to do? So this time of prayer becomes a time of speaking a whole lot of words hoping that something that was said might hit the mark, moving God to act on one’s behalf. 

         Well, if one does indeed find that God has acted and ones prayers have been answered then that person begins to have confidence that they have somehow figured out how to get on the good side of God. You see, in this mindset, a person’s circumstances become proof on a person’s good standing with God. If your harvest was abundant and your house was full of kids, you were someone in the know with God. But, if you found yourself down on your luck without a penny to your name, well, you must have done something to anger God so you had better get to the Temple and see what you can do to patch up your relationship with him. Are you beginning to sense how badly things become out of order when one does not begin from a stand point of being certain about God?

         Well, if a person does begin to believe that they have God all figured out then of course, this must mean that they have to consider themselves, holy. So, of course, when the High Priest enters into the Holy of Holies, these people would consider that they were right there with him because their life is living proof that they are on good terms with God. So when they reach this level of their relationship with God, the belief becomes that since they are now certain of their relationship with God, because their sacrifices and prayers have done the trick, now they can stand before God, with a blank check in hand, knowing that God will rubber stamp any grand scheme they might have, even if it does break a few laws in the process. No longer is it about, “God’s will be done”, but rather, now it is God get busy doing what I want done. How very out of order do people become when this is the way they treat God!

         You see, beginning without certainty about where God is, or where God is going and or what God is up to in the world, you end up with people boasting that the Temple is their ticket to the stars. I mean, you sense something horribly out of order when, as God tells Jeremiah, the house that bears the very name of God now has a reputation as being hideout for a bloodthirsty gang of thugs! I mean, as God rightly points out, just how could these people who were supposed to be in the know about God be people who thought nothing of stealing, murdering others, breaking their marriage vows, going about slandering others, and finding a whole host of things as being worthy of giving their life to, and then just get up and dust yourself off and enter the Temple as if everything between you and God is A, Ok. Jeremiah wonders, “Will God save you when the time comes if you continue to act this way? Tragically, the people who lived like this actually thought that, yes, God would show up and deliver them from their troubles! God gives his people a dose of reality when he calls them to remember where they had formerly worshipped him at a place called Shilo. When the people heard this name mentioned, they had to become unsettled, because they knew that Shilo no longer even existed. It had been wiped off the map a long time ago because of the evil that the people of God had done. So if God had no problems then, washing his hands of a worship place that was out of order then why would he even hesitate to do so again?

         You see, the people who were to be the people in the know about God forgot that the very reason why God had first had the tabernacle and later, the Temple constructed. These worship areas were a gift from God to his people to be a place that would give them the certainty necessary to live in a broken world. When the people of God began to wonder just where is God, or when they would ask, where is  God headed or if they had questions about what God was up to in the world, they had these worship spaces to set them straight. Yet, as God tells Jeremiah, the people needed to let their experiences with God inform their worship of God. You see, God reminds Jeremiah that when the people came out of Egypt they were not even commanded by God to offer up sacrifices. This relationship the people had with God did not begin with the people of God offering him anything at all. No, the relationship that God has with his people begins simply with a word. The word God speaks simply calls those who hear his word to respond to God. They are to echo God’s loyal love with a loyal love of their own. So, the place where we begin in our spiritual journey is in the most Holy of Holies, the place where the holy God loves all with his holy love. The love of God is holy because his love is a love of all people. This is the certainty that the people in the know about God must build their lives upon. Only when we know that God speaks first, will we then be able to rightly enter into a place of prayer before the light of his presence. You see, our prayer is nothing but a response given in the certainty that the God who speaks to us is the God whose love is always certain towards us. So out of the love of God is to come our response of love to God, a prayer that ascends up to God like the smoke of the incense upon the golden altar of the Sanctuary.

         You see, when one comes forth from the Sanctuary, the inner closet where we pray before the face of God, they are to then know that they are to walk in the way of God. The way of God is the way of sacrifice. This is what is known by those who offer up their sacrifices at the Temple. God asks for sacrifices because in this way people remember that all we have is given to us by God. We first offer up a portion of what God has given to us as an acknowledgment of gratitude toward God for the love that he has first shown to us. Yet, our spiritual journey is not finished for after the sacrifices are given then the expectation is that the people in the know about God will offer themselves, and all that they have, to do the work of God. This is what is meant to walk in the ways of God, to walk with a heart fully given over to do whatever God asks and to go wherever God leads.

         Tragically, what God expected from his people never happened. No, the people who were to be the people in the know about God ended up refusing to even listen to God and obey him, the very essence of a love relationship with God. What Jeremiah witnessed in his day should make us wonder about our relationship with God. I hope we never begin to say, “Oh,  Jesus, Jesus, Jesus”, and believe that he will deliver us even if we go and live opposed to what he died and rose again to accomplish. We must know that such a relationship with God is out of order. The good news is that while there is time we have the time to come back to God, and let him bring order to our out of order life. Amen!