Self-interest makes a man acquire by excessive labor, by excessive trade, by certain injustices in commerce and contracts, by unjust usury, and the like. Yet when someone resolves to seize what belongs to another, it is clear that his greed has passed every limit. Likewise, when the fornicator flees from his own wife to another, his sensuality has plainly become unrestrained. Sacrilege is a fruit of greed, but in spirit it is a fruit of contempt for all and everything. Contempt is an essential feature of pride.
The Apostle’s words about theft and adultery are clear, but the words about sacrilege are not entirely plain. “You who abhor idols, do you rob temples?” Ίεροσυλεϊς means, “you commit sacrilege.” Before the captivity the Jews often fell into idolatry. After the captivity they were free from this greatest sin. It is therefore right to say of them that they abhorred idols. But what does “you rob sacred things” mean? Whose sacred things, and how? Where and how did they commit sacrilege?
Judging from the fact that idols are mentioned here, one may think that the sacred things stolen were also idol-sacred things, taken from idol temples. Our interpreters understand it this way. Through this the Jew was defiled, for everything sacrificed to idols and through them to demons is unclean. If he stole what was dedicated to idols as something sacred, then he came into contact with idolatry. His abhorrence of idols was only apparent. In practice he did not regard them as nothing, but as something. If so, then, turning thought away from idols and fixing attention on the single act of seizing sacred things, we see in this action contempt for God, opposition to God, and proud boldness against God in general.
Yet to others it seems that, since the sin of plundering idol temples was not known as a practice among the Jews, the theft of sacred things is better understood as theft from their own temple. Since even this was not so general that such a vice could be ascribed to every Jew, some began to understand sacrilege here as the irreverence of the Jews toward their own temple and toward what was dedicated to it. Or they take it as appropriating to themselves what ought to have been given to the temple. What he was bound to give to the temple, he withheld. By this he stole it from the temple. It is as though the Apostle says: you abhor idols, yet you do not honor even your own sacred things at all.
Among Jews living outside Palestine, offenses against their established relation to the temple and the sacred rites could very commonly occur. Perhaps the Apostle calls this nonfulfillment sacrilege. Or perhaps the Apostle used the name sacrilege for their lack of fear of God, their forgetfulness of God, and their failure to render Him due worship from the heart. You abhor idols, but you do not honor the true God as you should. You steal from Him the heart that ought to be dedicated to Him, and you give it over to earthly and created things. The Apostle’s following discourse concerns how the Jew dishonors God, and how God’s name is blasphemed among the nations through him. Is this not an interpretation of the sacrilege mentioned here?
THEOSIS