The Shame of Homemade Gods Text: Jeremiah 2:26-28
Introduction: The Adulterous Heart
The book of Jeremiah is a sustained covenant lawsuit. God, through His prophet, is indicting His people for breach of contract. And the central charge, the one that contains all the others, is the charge of spiritual adultery. God had entered into a marriage covenant with Israel at Sinai. He was the faithful husband; they were to be His faithful bride. But they had played the harlot, chasing after every passing pagan deity, setting up idols under every green tree. This was not a small marital spat; this was a flagrant, public, and persistent unfaithfulness.
Our modern sensibilities have a hard time grasping the gravity of this. We live in an age that treats idolatry as a primitive quirk, something involving crude statues in dusty museums. But idolatry is not fundamentally about statues; it is about the orientation of the human heart. It is the creature worshipping the creation rather than the Creator. It is looking at a gift and giving your ultimate allegiance to it instead of to the Giver. And we are masters of it. We worship sex, or power, or money, or the state, or our own autonomy. We are every bit as idolatrous as ancient Israel, we just have better technology for it.
Jeremiah’s task is to strip away all the religious posturing and expose the raw shame of their sin. The people of Judah still had the temple, they still had the priests, they still went through the motions of the sacrificial system. They thought they could have it both ways, Jehovah on the Sabbath and Baal on the weekdays. But God will not be trifled with. He is a jealous God, which is another way of saying He is a faithful husband who demands and deserves exclusive loyalty. In this passage, God holds up a mirror to Israel, and what they see, if they have eyes to see, is the pathetic shame of a thief caught in the act, the absurdity of worshipping things they made with their own hands, and the hypocrisy of a heart that only turns to God when the bill for their sin comes due.
The Text
As the thief is shamed when he is found, So the house of Israel is shamed; They, their kings, their princes, And their priests and their prophets, Who say to a tree, ‘You are my father,’ And to a stone, ‘You gave me birth.’ For they have turned their back to Me And not their face; But in the time when their evil comes they will say, ‘Arise and save us.’ But where are your gods Which you made for yourself? Let them arise, if they can save you In the time when your evil comes; For according to the number of your cities Are your gods, O Judah.
(Jeremiah 2:26-28 LSB)
Caught Red-Handed (v. 26)
We begin with the central emotion that their sin ought to produce: shame.
"As the thief is shamed when he is found, So the house of Israel is shamed; They, their kings, their princes, And their priests and their prophets," (Jeremiah 2:26)
Shame is a powerful thing. In a healthy society, shame is a moral guardrail. It is the painful awareness of having violated a shared standard of goodness and honor. Guilt says, "I did something wrong." Shame says, "I am exposed as a wrongdoer." The thief isn't shamed because he stole; he is shamed when he is found out. The light hits him, his hand is in the cookie jar, and he is seen for what he is. This is precisely God’s accusation against Israel. They have been caught.
Notice the comprehensive nature of this shame. It is not just a few bad apples. It is the "house of Israel." And then Jeremiah lists the leadership, the very people who were supposed to be the guardians of the covenant: kings, princes, priests, and prophets. When the leadership of a nation goes rotten, the whole nation follows. The kings who should have enforced God's law were breaking it. The princes who should have administered justice were perverting it. The priests who should have taught the people about the true God were facilitating idolatry. And the prophets who should have been speaking God's word were speaking their own lying divinations. The corruption was total, from the top down. This is what happens when a nation's elite abandons God. They become not a source of blessing, but a source of systemic shame.
This is a picture of our own nation. The very institutions that were built on a Christian foundation are now the primary engines of our apostasy. Our universities, our halls of government, our courts, and tragically, many of our pulpits, are leading the charge away from God. And the result is a pervasive, national shame. But the problem is that we, like Israel, have lost the capacity to blush. We glory in our shame, calling evil good and good evil. The first step toward repentance is to feel the shame of being caught.
The Folly of Materialism (v. 27a)
Next, God exposes the sheer stupidity of their idolatry.
"Who say to a tree, ‘You are my father,’ And to a stone, ‘You gave me birth.’" (Jeremiah 2:27a)
This is divine sarcasm, and it is devastating. The people were carving idols out of wood (a tree) and stone, and then bowing down to these inert objects and ascribing to them the power of creation. They were giving the glory that belongs to the transcendent, living God, the Father of all, to a block of wood. They were attributing the miracle of life, of being brought forth into the world, to a rock they pulled out of the ground. This is the essence of paganism. It is the worship of the creature rather than the Creator.
Paul diagnoses this exact spiritual disease in Romans 1. Men suppress the truth about God in unrighteousness, and "exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things...they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator" (Romans 1:23, 25). This is not intellectual progress; it is a profound intellectual devolution. It is to look at a painting and praise the canvas. It is to read a book and give all the credit to the ink and paper.
And we do the very same thing. Our modern, sophisticated paganism doesn't say to a literal tree, "You are my father." It says it to the impersonal cosmos. It says that we are the result of blind, pitiless indifference. We are cosmic accidents, stardust that got lucky. We have exchanged our Father in Heaven for Father Time and Mother Nature. We have traded the God who gave us birth for the blind, grinding process of evolution. But it is the same fundamental error. It is looking at the material world and declaring it to be the ultimate reality, the source of all things. It is a worldview that cannot account for its own ability to think about worldviews. It is, at root, absurd.
Fair-Weather Religion (v. 27b)
The second half of the verse reveals their deep-seated hypocrisy. Their affection for their idols is only a peacetime luxury.
"For they have turned their back to Me And not their face; But in the time when their evil comes they will say, ‘Arise and save us.’" (Jeremiah 2:27b)
Here is the posture of the rebellious heart. In times of peace and prosperity, when things are going their way, they turn their back on God. They want His blessings, but they don't want Him. They want to be left alone to enjoy their sin. God is an inconvenience, a cosmic killjoy. His law is restrictive. His presence is demanding. So they show Him their back. They face their idols, their pleasures, their ambitions.
But then trouble comes. The Hebrew is literally "in the time of their evil." This refers to the calamity and disaster that is the direct consequence of their sin. The Babylonians are on the horizon. The economy is collapsing. The crops are failing. Suddenly, their homemade gods seem less impressive. A block of wood is not much help in a siege. And in that moment of desperation, they pivot. They turn back to the God they have ignored and cry out, "Arise and save us."
This is the religion of the foxhole. It is crisis-driven pragmatism, not true repentance. They are not sorry for their sin; they are sorry they are getting caught and are about to experience the consequences. They don't want God; they want a divine handyman to fix their problems so they can go back to ignoring Him. This is a deep insult to the character of God. It treats Him like a cosmic vending machine or an emergency service to be dialed when all else fails. But God is not a means to an end. He is the end. He is not a tool to be used; He is a King to be worshipped, in season and out.
The Impotence of Idols (v. 28)
God’s response to their desperate plea is withering, sarcastic, and utterly just. He throws their idolatry back in their faces.
"But where are your gods Which you made for yourself? Let them arise, if they can save you In the time when your evil comes; For according to the number of your cities Are your gods, O Judah." (Jeremiah 2:28)
The logic is impeccable. "You didn't want me when things were good. You wanted these other gods. So go to them now. Let's see what they can do for you." God calls their bluff. He is essentially saying, "You made your bed, now lie in it." This is the terrifying moment when God gives sinners over to the consequences of their choices. He honors the reality they have created for themselves. You wanted gods you could control, gods you made for yourself? Fine. Let them save you.
The phrase "which you made for yourself" is key. An idol is a god that you can manage. It makes no demands you don't want it to make. It affirms your choices. It is a projection of your own will. But the one thing a god you made cannot do is save you from a power greater than yourself. It is as helpless as you are, because it is just an extension of you. As the Psalmist says, "Those who make them become like them" (Psalm 115:8). They make deaf and dumb idols, and they become spiritually deaf and dumb themselves.
And their idolatry was rampant. "According to the number of your cities are your gods, O Judah." This was not a minor flirtation. They had a god for every town, a different idol for every preference. They had customized their rebellion. This is the nature of all paganism, ancient and modern. It is polytheistic. It offers a thousand different saviors, a thousand different paths. You can worship the god of self-esteem in this city, and the god of environmentalism in the next, and the god of sexual liberation downtown. But what they all have in common is that they are gods "which you made for yourself." And when real trouble comes, when death and judgment arrive, they are all equally useless.
The Only God Who Can Arise
This passage is a brutal diagnosis of the human condition apart from Christ. We are all idol-makers by nature. We turn our backs on the true God and fashion gods for ourselves out of the good things He has made. And we think we can get away with it, until the day of our "evil" comes, the day we stand face to face with our own mortality and sin.
In that day, all our homemade gods will be exposed as frauds. Our money cannot save us from the grave. Our political ideologies cannot save us from judgment. Our philosophies cannot atone for our sin. We will be left with our shame, and our useless idols, and a just God whose back we have seen for a lifetime.
But the gospel is the good news that there is a God who can "Arise and save us," and who does so not because we deserve it, but because of His own mercy. The great irony is that Israel cries "Arise and save us" to God as a last resort. But God had already planned to arise and save them in the most unexpected way imaginable. He arose, not in wrath to consume them, but in flesh to redeem them.
The Lord Jesus Christ is the God who arose. He arose from the grave, having conquered sin and death, the ultimate "evil" that comes for every man. He is not a god we made for ourselves. We did not invent Him. In fact, when He came, we rejected Him and nailed Him to a tree, the ultimate expression of our idolatrous rebellion. We took the Lord of life and hung Him on a piece of wood. But God, in His infinite wisdom, turned our greatest act of idolatrous contempt into the very instrument of our salvation.
Therefore, the call of the gospel is to turn our face back to God. It is to confess the shame of our spiritual adultery, to smash our homemade idols, and to fall before the one true God who did not wait for us to cry out in desperation, but who came to seek and to save the lost. He is the God who does not turn His back on repentant sinners, but who welcomes them home, not because of their frantic promises in a moment of crisis, but because of the finished work of His Son, who is the only God who can truly arise and save.