Closing the Church Doors in 2020

Churches today are struggling to reopen and regather while government mandates remain in place to a greater or lesser extent in different states and countries.  The sight of a lone pastor preaching online from a pulpit to an empty hollow sanctuary brings on a somewhat sinking feeling that God has abandoned His people.  But, let's put that emotion aside for a moment to listen to a message God may be trying to communicate to us over these many lockdown Sundays of 2020.

...I will now destroy this Temple that bears my name, this Temple that you trust in for help, this place that I gave to you and your ancestors.  And I will send you out of my sight into exile... 

Jeremiah 7:14-15

Jeremiah 7,  I believe, speaks of a spiritual condition that also exists in 2020 - a condition Oswald Chambers calls "Degraded Devotion".  God warns us in this passage that the first peril in our spiritual life is to seek a place instead of a Person.  And to sentimentalize over places where God has met us is the beginning of a spiritual twist.  

The Israelites were fooled into thinking that God would always overlook their moral wrongs as long as the Temple was there.  God confronted them through the prophet Jeremiah: Do you really think you can steal, murder, commit adultery, lie, and burn incense to Baal and all those other new gods of yours and then come here and stand before me in my Temple and chant, "We are safe!" - only to go right back to all those evils again?

Could it be that God has closed the church sanctuary doors for a season to bring this same truth home to His people in 2020? Perhaps God has chosen to bolt the church doors and send us into "exile" with a pandemic in order to jolt us out of relying on the very same principle saving us from our own moral wrongs. Beware of allowing those emotional sentiments toward a place where you met God to replace a profoundly real relationship with God.  

Self-deception always arises by ignoring the personal relationship with God, a relationship based on forgiveness of sin and nothing else.  A personal relationship to a personal Savior is the only power that can shield the soul from moral peril.  The golden rule is, my personal Savior in every place, not that in certain places I meet my Savior.