Jeremiah 32:30-35: in context

God recounts the long history of his people's sin: from their youth they have done evil, provoked him, turned their backs and not their faces to him, though he taught them again and again. They defiled his temple with idols. And they descended to a horror: they built high places to Baal in the valley of Hinnom and passed their own sons and daughters through the fire to Molech, a thing, God says, which I did not command, nor did it come into my mind, that they should do this abomination.

The most chilling phrase in this recital is God's word about the child sacrifice: which I did not command, nor did it come into my mind. God is saying that the people had descended to an evil so great that it was beyond anything he had commanded or even conceived, a horror so far outside his will that it had never entered his mind that his people would do such a thing. And how did they come to it? Not all at once, but by a long descent, from the ordinary idolatry of their youth, provocation upon provocation, turning their backs, refusing instruction, defiling the temple, until at last they were passing their own children through the fire. Sin has a trajectory, and this is its terrible witness: how far the human heart can descend once it sets out on the path of forsaking God. There is a sobering warning here about the direction sin takes when it is not checked. No one begins by sacrificing their children; they begin with smaller turnings, ordinary idolatries, refusals to listen, provocations that seem minor. But sin, unchecked, has a downward trajectory; it does not stay where it starts; it descends, step by step, to depths we would never have imagined at the beginning, to things that, at the start, would never have come into our minds. The people who ended by burning their children in the valley of Hinnom did not set out to do so; they arrived there by a long road of unchecked sin. This is why the beginnings of sin matter so much, why the small turnings are dangerous: not because they are the worst in themselves, but because of where the road leads if it is not turned from. Sin conceived, James says, brings forth death; and the seemingly small sin, left to grow, leads by a trajectory of its own toward horrors we could not have conceived at the start. The warning is to check sin at its beginnings, to turn from the road early, remembering that the human heart, once it sets out on forsaking God, can descend further than it ever imagined, to things God never commanded and that should never have come into our minds.

Do I treat the small turnings and ordinary sins as harmless, forgetting that sin has a downward trajectory and does not stay where it starts, and can this sobering recital, of a people who descended by a long road to horrors God never even conceived, warn me to check sin at its beginnings and turn from the road early, before it leads where I never imagined going?