In the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, a secret team of Nazis sets out to discover the ancient ark of the covenant and use the power within to make their armies invincible. If you’ve seen the movie, you know it didn’t work out so good for them (faces melting and all that). Those Nazis should have known better—no one manipulates the Lord.

Ancient Israelites held similar views. They felt as long as the temple stood in the middle of Jerusalem, God protected them. But the Lord clarified the situation:

Will you steal and murder, commit adultery and perjury, burn incense to Baal and follow other gods you have not known, and then come stand before me in this house, which bears my Name and say, “We are safe”—safe to do all these detestable things?

Religion as talisman, of power or luck, appeals to our sense of control and safety. If God is in the house, I can run there when I need him. When I’m finished I close the door and leave. My therapeutic god available 24/7.

But does God live in a house made of stone? Does God reside in religious traditions or a cross around my neck? Does God salve my wounds while turning away from my heart of theft and murder and adultery and lying and chasing after the gods of today’s world?

Annie Dillard in her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek describes God as a maniac. Unpredictable, far beyond any of our control, unknowable in so many ways. This is a better idea of the Lord to wrestle with than much I hear today. And it takes wrestling. No one goes deep in the Lord merely with surface beliefs in a benevolent god.

Go deeper. Seek the Lord. Maybe your face won’t get melted off when you do so—but it just might.

Jeremiah 7 in reading the Bible cover to cover in 2022