Chapter 7:

God tells Jeremiah to go to the gates of Jerusalem and tell people to change their ways.

They shouldn't feel safe just because they're in the city where God's temple is located.

The people are abusing God's temple, claiming it as a sanctuary when they're really polluting it with all sorts of sins: adultery, Baal-worship, stealing, murder, and false oaths.

God tells the people to think about what happened to Shiloh in northern Israel: God checked out and the people were conquered and exiled.  He'll do the same thing to Jerusalem and treat them the same way he treated the northern Kingdom, so remember and learn.

God instructs Jeremiah and any righteous people not to pray for mercy for Jerusalem. The people keep going about their sinful ways: they pour drinks to offer to other gods and bake cakes to offer to the "queen of heaven." It's definitely wrath time.

God says people might as well go ahead and eat up their burnt offerings, because he never demanded sacrifices from them when he brought them out of Egypt. He just wanted obedience—love and justice and morality.

The people have brought foreign gods into God's own temple, and they've built an altar at Topheth to sacrifice their own children in fire—something God clearly didn't want.  Judah will be a wasteland when God gets done with it.

Chapter 8:

God proclaims that there will come a time when the bones of all the unrighteous dead—kings, priests, officials, prophets, and average citizens—will be dug up and spread around under the open sky.

This is because the people worshipped the host of heaven, the different gods located in the sky, like the sun and moon and the planets and stars, instead of Israel's God.

Those who are still alive will wish they were dead.

The so-called wise people aren't really wise, because they don't know what they're talking about.

The people have pretended that peace would come, when there was never any peace to begin with.

Jeremiah says that the best that people can do is retreat into the fortified cities. It's going be a time of big-time terror and wrath.

The land quakes at the noise of Babylonian stallions. God says he's sending serpents to bite his people.

Jeremiah feels sorry for the people of Judah. They can't understand why God is punishing them.

Jeremiah bemoans the fact that there's no spiritual physician or "balm in Gilead" that can restore his people to a state of goodness. He's crying his eyes out over all this.