Two weeks ago we saw Ezekiel’s first vision of God on his throne and read about Ezekiel’s call to be a prophet – and a whistle blower commanded to expose the sins of the priests of Israel who were his father’s peers and the men to whom he had looked for wisdom and guidance. “The priests have desecrated the Temple and have not spoken for God. People without leadership from their priests will always begin to follow idols. They will fall into the sins of greed and corruption but it is even worse when the religious leaders join and encourage them in their idolatry.”
It’s one thing to accuse people with whom you have no relationship but completely another to be called to criticize your own. “It is easier to be Jonah sent with a message for strangers than it is to be sent to your own who will pull out all the stops. He is not being sent to a people of obscure speech but to his own. You need to be made “unyielding and hardened as they are with your forehead like the hardest stone, harder than flint.” That is what God will do with this young man.
Last week we read how one year later the “burning man” lifted Ezekiel by his hair and took him to the Temple where he saw first hand the corruption of the priests and leaders and the gradual departure of God from the Temple and the city. We considered what happens when the Lord leaves and there is nothing remaining to constrain the hearts of darkness in a nation and we turned to Second Thessalonians to talk about the dual role of the Church to be both triumphant in some ways but also to be the restrainer of evil.
“At a certain point God will take the Church out of the world. And that is the time when there will be no law, no restraint, no truth, no hope, no pleasure. Only complete delusion. The smirk and disguise of evil will be removed and the mask peeled off. Evil that has been boiling below and ever present in the world will be revealed. What has been hidden will be obvious. That is the meaning of the word “apocalypse” – it is a revealing of what has been hidden. It is not an invasion from the outside but what has always been present but restrained.
And just what was true then is true now. What you do to resist evil affects me and what I do affects you. Every time you tell the truth when you could have lied, every time you forgive instead of remaining angry, every time you pray or act with integrity you are restraining the power of hopelessness and lawlessness. No good act is neutral. It is one more sandbag stacked against the flood.”
This morning we are going to look at only one chapter that strips away the glory and the pride of the people. It leaves nothing to be imagined.
Every nation has a founding story. We sometimes call that a myth. It’s simply a way to capture symbolically the founding of a people. The most famous is likely the founding story of Rome. Romulus and Remus are twin infants abandoned on the banks of the river Tiber to die. They were saved by the god Tiberinus and survived with the care of others – including a she-wolf.They had a falling out over the selection of the site of a new city and Remus was killed by his brother Romulus who became the founder of Rome and ruled for many years.
Some people take actual historical facts and embroider them in such a way that there is also a good deal of fable. For example, do we think it’s literally true that George Washington chopped down a cherry tree or that he threw a silver dollar across the Potomac? Not likely, but that does not detract from his being the Father of our country and a great man.
Then there are some stories that are so embedded that to attack them is to attack the people themselves. Look at the reaction of people to the taking down of statues and memorials to some of our country’s founders and many of the Confederate heroes. What is the reaction of many to the 1619 Project which is a series of articles published to prove that the real starting point of our history as a nation begins with the first slaves arriving in Virginia and not the Revolutionary War. It literally reframes the history of the country around slavery.
How we understand our history shapes how we see ourselves as inheritors and descendants of that history. Where we put the emphasis on facts is important. Take our own city, for example. We could choose to describe ourselves as a place that was once considered for being the State capitol and known as the Athens of Texas or we could put the emphasis on our being the last place in Texas that a black man was hanged in public. It matters and it shapes us.
That is exactly what Ezekiel is doing here in this chapter. He is attacking the founding stories of Israel. What do they think their story is? Abraham, the father of faith. Jacob, the brilliant patriarch. Joseph, the second most powerful man in Egypt. Moses, the liberator and founder of the nation. David, the warrior king. Solomon, the wisest and wealthiest man of his time who built the great Temple. It was easy to avoid some of the seamier parts when you have these examples of greatness.
But what does Ezekiel say to them? “Your ancestry and birth were in the land of the Canaanites; your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite.” There could have been no pride in that those were totally disreputable roots. That would have made them no better than anyone else – maybe not even as good. I don’t imagine our own members of the Society of Mayflower Descendants or Daughters of the Confederacy would appreciate being told that their families were descended from foreigners, horse thieves, common criminals, and devil worshippers. In essence, that is what Ezekiel was doing. It is dangerous to attack a group’s pride of legacy and identity they have carefully guarded. He was saying they were not who they thought they were and their founders were nothing more than what we would call white trash. God could have chosen other pagans just as easily and they should have no pride in the history they had embroidered for themselves. Israel’s own origins were just as pagan as any of the nations they so despised. They had no special claim on God – no reason for their election. They were determined to protect their special status just as there are those today who conveniently forget their own roots and origins. They had rewritten their own history and standing with God.
It is not pleasant to be given the responsibility for telling people the truth about themselves once they have created their own version. You don’t tamper with stories without upsetting people. That was Ezekiel’s assignment. We talk today about deconstructing faith or deconstructing history. That is what God called Ezekiel to do – to deconstruct the lies that had grown up over centuries in Israel and had become part of the fabric of their beliefs. They did not want anyone questioning those. They needed to hang on to their fiction that they were exceptional people.
So, what is their true history? Was there something about them that made God love them?
“On the day you were born your cord was not cut, nor were you washed with water to make you clean..No one looked on you with pity or had compassion enough to do any of these things for you. Rather, you were thrown out into the open field, for on the day you were born you were despised. ‘Then I passed by and saw you kicking about in your blood, and as you lay there in your blood I said to you, “Live!”
Had it not been for the compassion of God for an abandoned child left to die there would be no Israel. There was nothing special about them. They were thrown out and despised. An unwanted baby saved by a passer-by who took pity on a helpless child.
“I made you grow like a plant of the field. You grew and developed and entered puberty. Your breasts had formed and your hair had grown, yet you were stark naked. Later I passed by, and when I looked at you and saw that you were old enough for love, I spread the corner of my garment over you and covered your naked body. I gave you my solemn oath and entered into a covenant with you, declares the Sovereign Lord, and you became mine.”
This is not just an objective history account, is it? It is not Romulus and Remus being cared for by a she-wolf. It is not an account of determined people migrating on their own and finding success in the new land. It is certainly not a story of waving a magic wand and turning a frog into a prince or an ugly duckling into a swan. It is not a version of Professor Higgins in “My Fair Lady” turning Eliza into a lady. This is a story of a God who patiently raises an unwanted infant and is caught up in his undying love for that child. It is the story of a discarded baby becoming a woman and then married to the one who saved her from dying. “I gave you my solemn oath and entered into a covenant with you and you became mine.”
The image of God being married to Israel is hinted at in Jeremiah but first fully developed in Ezekiel and then repeated all the way through the remainder of the Old Testament and into the New – all the way to Revelation. It is like the prophets and writers over time discovered an image that was perfect in describing the relationship. It could have been and was any number of images (Creator/creation, Father/child, Shepherd/Sheep, Master/Servant) but it was marriage that became the single most powerful description of God’s relationship to Israel and, later, the Church.
Ephesians 5: “In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church—for we are members of his body. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.”This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church.”
2 Corinthians 11:2 “I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy. I promised you to one husband, to Christ, so that I might present you as a pure virgin to him.”
Revelation 21: Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,”for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband…One of the seven angels who had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues came and said to me, “Come, I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb.” And he carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high, and showed me the Holy City, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God.”
God says through Ezekiel to Israel: “I dressed you in fine linen and covered you with costly garments.I adorned you with jewelry: I put bracelets on your arms and a necklace around your neck, and I put a ring on your nose, earrings on your ears and a beautiful crown on your head. So you were adorned with gold and silver; your clothes were of fine linen and costly fabric and embroidered cloth. Your food was honey, olive oil and the finest flour. You became very beautiful and rose to be a queen. And your fame spread among the nations on account of your beauty, because the splendor I had given you made your beauty perfect, declares the Sovereign Lord.”
But the Bride is not faithful. The Queen is not content with great beauty, fame and an adoring husband. She is not just unfaithful but an outrageous whore. And not just that but a nymphomanic in that she is never satisfied. She takes the wealth she has been given and uses it for idols. She is so corrupted by her worship of those idols that she sacrifices her own children to them. She forgets the one who saved her and “in all your detestable practices and your prostitution you did not remember the days of your youth, when you were naked and bare, kicking about in your blood.” She has abandoned the one who took her in and saved her.
Even then her promiscuity only increases. She gives herself to strangers and neighbors. She is “insatiable.”
“You adulterous wife! You prefer strangers to your own husband! Every prostitute receives a fee, but you give gifts to all your lovers, bribing them to come to you from everywhere for your illicit favors. So in your prostitution you are the opposite of others; no one runs after you for your favors. You are the very opposite, for you give payments and none is given to you.”
What is her future?
“This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Because you poured out your lust and exposed your naked body in your promiscuity with your lovers, and because of all your detestable idols, and because you gave them your children’s blood, therefore I am going to gather all your lovers, with whom you found pleasure, those you loved as well as those you hated. I will gather them against you from all around and will strip you in front of them, and they will see you stark naked..I will bring on you the blood vengeance of my wrath and jealous anger. Then I will deliver you into the hands of your lovers… They will strip you of your clothes and take your fine jewelry and leave you stark naked. They will bring a mob against you, who will stone you and hack you to pieces with their swords. They will burn down your houses and inflict punishment on you in the sight of many women. I will put a stop to your prostitution, and you will no longer pay your lovers. Then my wrath against you will subside and my jealous anger will turn away from you; I will be calm and no longer angry.”
It is an awful fate – even with the hope that afterwards God will no longer be angry and will remember his vows and his love for the Bride. Not only to be punished but to be humiliated by the lovers as well as the mob. To be exposed completely for what she has become.
“Yet I will remember the covenant I made with you in the days of your youth, and I will establish an everlasting covenant with you. So I will establish my covenant with you, and you will know that I am the Lord. Then, when I make atonement for you for all you have done, you will remember and be ashamed and never again open your mouth because of your humiliation, declares the Sovereign Lord.’”
I’d like to quote Christopher Wright again as he says what I am thinking and what I fear far better than I could:
“When the people of God woo the world and sell their soul for political power, financial profit, social influence or other temporal gains, the end result historically has always been that, at best, they become pathetic, scorned and treated with contempt, and at worst, the world turns with ferocious destructive power on the church itself. Sometimes such judgment may be purging; at other times, as Jesus warned the churches of Asia Minor, it may be terminal. As far as Old Testament Israel is concerned, we do well to remember Paul’s sobering reminder ‘Now these things occurred as examples to keep us from setting our hearts on evil things as they did… and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the fulfilment of the ages has come. So, if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall!’ The church, with its long history of unholy alliances with the world in all its forms, has little cause for any sense of superiority over Old Testament Israel.”
This is my concern for the evangelical church today. Have we traded our beauty, splendor and fame for being a prostitute who has gone whoring after power and traded our legacy for an insatiable desire? Have we worshipped the worthless idols of those around us? Will we one day be humiliated by those same lovers we paid and torn to pieces by the mob we helped create.
It’s a warning for us as well as Israel. I pray for God’s atonement and mercy.