Reading Jeremiah 7 helps me make sense of Jesus’ saying that He speaks in parables expressly to obfuscate the truth for some of His hearers. If my children have been acting up for so long that I’m about to punish them, I will stop giving them instructions meant for their nourishment for the time leading up to their punishment lest they get the idea that they can just always push me to the edge but I’ll always relent immediately upon their tidying up their act. If I never delivered a punishment, we have impunity, and impunity is bad.