Jeremiah 5:19

(Verse 19) But if you shall say: why has the Lord our God done all these things to us? You shall say to them: Just as you have forsaken me and served foreign gods (or foreign deities) in your land, so you shall serve foreigners in a land that is not yours. It is a great folly not to know why they have suffered, since they have sinned so greatly. And a brief response to those who are doubting: just as you have served foreign gods, that is, Baal, or the foreign gods of all the nations in the land of Judah, so you shall serve foreign gods in a land that is not yours, undoubtedly Babylon and Chaldea. For if a foreign religion delights you, why is it necessary to embrace distant error? Dwell with such people, indeed serve those whose gods you worship. This can also be understood about heretics, of whom it is written: They went out from us, but they were not of us. For if they had been of us, they would no doubt have remained with us (1 John 2:19), that the Lord may cast out heretics from the Church, who for a long time under the name of it have worshiped the idols of their lies, so that they may worship outside what they formerly worshiped within, so that the chaff may be separated from the wheat.

"And it shall be, when you say, 'For what reason has the Lord our God done to us all these evils?' — and you shall say to them, 'Because you forsook me and served other gods in your land, so shall you serve in a land not your own.'" Let the letter be understood, and it suffices for the present to set forth the reminder from the letter for those able to hear. So then, the sons of Israel had the holy land, the temple, the house of prayer. They ought to have served God. But transgressing the divine commandments, they both practiced idolatry and took up the idols of Damascus, as it is written in the books of Kingdoms, and they took up other idols of the nations into the holy land. Through the idols of the nations which they took up, they made themselves worthy to be cast down into the land of the idols, to end up there where they worshiped the idols. So the word says to them according to the letter: "Because you forsook me and served foreign gods in your land, so shall you serve foreign gods in a land not your own." Everyone who deifies anything serves foreign gods. Do you make a god of foods and drinks? Your god is "the belly." Do you honor silver as a great good, and the wealth here below? Your god and lord is mammon. For Jesus called it lord of the lovers of money, saying: "You cannot serve God and mammon; no one can serve two lords." Therefore the one who honors silver and admires wealth and considers it to be a good, and welcomes the rich as gods, while despising the poor as not having their God — this one deifies silver. If anyone, being in the land of God, the Church, worships foreign gods, deifying the things not worthy to be deified, he will be cast out into a foreign land, and let him worship the gods whom he worshiped within. Let the lover of money be outside, cast out from the Church; let the glutton be outside, having been put out of the Church. These things according to one figurative interpretation, so that I may not now busy myself with what is beyond me — concerning the land, about which the Savior said, "Who will give you what is our own?" — and that, when worship has taken place in someone's land, God so arranged that some should be cast out from his own land and come to the land about which it is written: "Hear, O Israel, why is it that you are in the land of your enemies? You were reckoned together with those going down into Hades. You…