The Dung Heap of Idolatry Text: Jeremiah 8:1-3
Introduction: The Unsentimental God
We live in a soft and sentimental age, an age that has tried to domesticate God. The modern god is a therapeutic deity, a celestial affirmation machine whose chief end is to make sure we all feel good about ourselves. He is a god who would never raise his voice, a god who would never offend, a god who would certainly never, ever judge. He is, in short, a god made in our own weak and effeminate image. And he is a liar. He is an idol.
The prophet Jeremiah does not deal in such sentimental nonsense. He brings us face to face with the living God, Yahweh of hosts, who is a consuming fire. And in our text today, God pronounces a sentence so graphic, so visceral, so utterly contemptuous that it makes our modern sensibilities recoil. But we must not recoil. We must look squarely at it, because in this horrifying judgment against ancient Judah, we see the true nature of sin, the terrible logic of idolatry, and the holy character of the God we have to do with.
Judah had turned its back on the living God. They had committed cosmic treason. They had taken the good gifts of the Creator, the sun, the moon, the stars, and they had turned them into gods. They gave their love, their service, their worship, their very lives to the creature rather than the Creator. This is the foundational sin of mankind, and it is our sin just as much as it was theirs. We may not bow down to the moon, but we worship our careers, our political parties, our sexual identities, our bank accounts, and our own inflated egos. The names of the idols change, but the adultery remains the same. And God will not be mocked. What a man sows, that he will also reap. Judah sowed idolatry, and here, they reap the whirlwind of cosmic humiliation.
The Text
"At that time," declares Yahweh, "they will bring out the bones of the kings of Judah and the bones of its princes, and the bones of the priests and the bones of the prophets, and the bones of the inhabitants of Jerusalem from their graves.
And they will spread them out to the sun, the moon, and to all the host of heaven, which they have loved and which they have served, and which they have walked after and which they have sought, and which they have worshiped. They will not be gathered or buried; they will be as dung on the face of the ground.
And death will be chosen rather than life by all the remnant that remains of this evil family, that remains in all the places to which I have banished them," declares Yahweh of hosts.
(Jeremiah 8:1-3 LSB)
The Great Desecration (v. 1)
The judgment begins with an act of ultimate violation.
"At that time," declares Yahweh, "they will bring out the bones of the kings of Judah and the bones of its princes, and the bones of the priests and the bones of the prophets, and the bones of the inhabitants of Jerusalem from their graves." (Jeremiah 8:1 LSB)
In the ancient world, the sanctity of the grave was paramount. To be buried with your fathers was a sign of a life well lived, a peaceful end, and a place within the covenant people. To have your tomb desecrated and your bones disturbed was the greatest possible dishonor, a curse that extended beyond death itself. And this is precisely what God decrees. The "they" here are the invading Babylonians, but they are merely the instrument of Yahweh's wrath. God is the one doing this.
Notice the roll call of the damned. It is a comprehensive list of the entire social order. Kings and princes, the civil authorities. Priests and prophets, the spiritual authorities. And the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the common people. This is total judgment because the apostasy was total. The rot began at the top, with wicked kings and false prophets, and it seeped down until the whole nation was a spiritual corpse. They were united in their rebellion, and so they will be united in their shame. There is no special treatment for the elite. In the face of God's holy judgment, all the petty distinctions of rank and status are obliterated. They are all just bones in a pile.
This is a postmortem on a dead culture. Their sin had been hidden, buried under layers of religious hypocrisy and civic pride. God says He will now bring it all out into the open. He will exhume the evidence of their rebellion for all the world to see. There are no skeletons in God's closet, but He is more than willing to drag ours out of the ground.
Cosmic Mockery (v. 2)
Verse two reveals the terrifying, poetic justice of this judgment.
"And they will spread them out to the sun, the moon, and to all the host of heaven, which they have loved and which they have served, and which they have walked after and which they have sought, and which they have worshiped. They will not be gathered or buried; they will be as dung on the face of the ground." (Jeremiah 8:2 LSB)
This is one of the most savage ironies in all of Scripture. The very objects of their worship will now become the silent witnesses of their ultimate humiliation. They prayed to the sun for blessing; now it will do nothing but bleach their bones. They looked to the moon for guidance; now it will cast a cold, indifferent light on their disgrace. They worshiped the stars, and now they are exposed beneath them, helpless and dishonored.
Look at the cascade of verbs Jeremiah uses to describe their idolatry: they loved, served, walked after, sought, and worshiped these things. This was not a casual flirtation. This was a deep, passionate, all-consuming spiritual affair. They gave the devotion that belonged to Yahweh alone to created things. And what can their celestial lovers do for them now? Nothing. They are impotent. They are not gods. They are just things, created by the very God Judah rejected.
And so the verdict falls. "They will not be gathered or buried; they will be as dung on the face of the ground." Dung. Excrement. Filth to be trodden underfoot. This is the divine evaluation of a life given to idolatry. When you worship the creature instead of the Creator, you do not elevate the creature; you degrade yourself. You violate the fundamental order of the universe, the Creator/creature distinction, and the result is that you become spiritual refuse. God is simply making their inward reality an outward, physical fact. They treated His covenant like dung, so He will make them dung.
The Despair of the Damned (v. 3)
The final verse describes the psychological state of the survivors, and it is a glimpse into hell itself.
"And death will be chosen rather than life by all the remnant that remains of this evil family, that remains in all the places to which I have banished them," declares Yahweh of hosts. (Jeremiah 8:3 LSB)
The judgment is so complete, so suffocating, that the natural human desire for life is inverted. The survivors will envy the dead whose bones are scattered on the ground. To continue living under the unrelenting pressure of God's curse will be a torment worse than death. This is the endpoint of all sin. Sin promises life, freedom, and fulfillment, but its wages are always death. And when that payment comes due, life becomes an unbearable burden.
This is a picture of utter hopelessness. This is what it means to be abandoned by God. It is to exist in a state where non-existence is preferable. Notice they are called "this evil family." Their identity is corporate. They are the family of Adam, the family of rebellion, and their shared sin leads to a shared despair. Even in exile, scattered among the nations, the curse will follow them. There is no escape from the presence of the Lord. You can either be in His presence as a beloved child or in His presence as a condemned criminal, but you will be in His presence.
The Only Tomb That Matters
This is a hard word. It is meant to be. It is a holy warning. We are all idolaters by nature. We are all members of "this evil family." We all deserve to have our hypocrisy exposed and our bones scattered in shame. So what is our hope?
Our hope is that God, in His mercy, provided a substitute who endured this very curse for us. Jesus Christ hung exposed on a cross, an object of public shame and humiliation. He was made a curse for us. In the eyes of the world, He was treated like dung, cast out of the city to die. He endured the ultimate despair, crying out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" He experienced the torment of life under the full weight of God's wrath, a torment so great that He sweat drops of blood in anticipation of it.
He was then taken down and buried. His bones were laid in a tomb. And had they stayed there, we would have no hope. We would still be in our sins, awaiting the day of our own shameful exhumation. But on the third day, the stone was rolled away. The tomb was empty. God did not allow His Holy One to see corruption. Jesus Christ rose from the dead, victorious over sin, death, and the grave.
Because His tomb is empty, our tombs can be places of rest and hope. The only way to escape the judgment of Jeremiah 8 is to be found in Him. It is to be buried with Christ in baptism and raised to walk in newness of life. It is to confess that our own righteousness is as filthy rags, as dung, and to cling only to His perfect righteousness. For those who are in Christ, their bones will not be scattered in shame. They will be gathered, and they will be raised in glory on the last day, to live forever in the presence of the God who loved them and gave Himself for them.