Scripture Daily

Context No. 1198 of 4322 · Ezekiel

Context · Reflection

Ezekiel 5:13-17: in context

13“‘Thus my anger will be accomplished, and I will cause my wrath toward them to rest, and I will be comforted. They will know that I, the LORD, have spoken in my zeal, when I have accomplished my wrath on them. 14“‘Moreover I will make you a desolation and a reproach among the nations that are around you, in the sight of all that pass by. 15So it will be a reproach and a taunt, an instruction and an astonishment, to the nations that are around you, when I execute judgments on you in anger and in wrath, and in wrathful rebukes—I, the LORD, have spoken it— 16when I send on them the evil arrows of famine that are for destruction, which I will send to destroy you. I will increase the famine on you and will break your staff of bread. 17I will send on you famine and evil animals, and they will bereave you. Pestilence and blood will pass through you. I will bring the sword on you. I, the LORD, have spoken it.’”

God continues the judgment on Jerusalem, but the language turns toward its purpose and its end. My anger will be spent, he says, and my wrath will rest, and I will be satisfied; and they will know that I, the LORD, have spoken in my zeal, when I have finished pouring out my wrath. Jerusalem will become a desolation and a reproach among the nations, a warning and a horror, when God sends famine, wild beasts, plague, and sword against it. I, the LORD, have spoken it.

Two phrases lift this hard passage above mere destruction. First, my wrath will rest. God's anger is not an endless, boundless rage; it has a limit, a point where it is spent and comes to rest. Even in the terrible language of judgment, there is the promise that the wrath is not eternal fury but has an appointed end, that it will finish and be satisfied. That matters, because it means judgment, however severe, is bounded; God's anger has a stopping place in a way his mercy does not. Second, the repeated purpose: they will know that I, the LORD, have spoken. The aim of even the judgment is that people come to know God, to recognize that he is the LORD and that his word is real and not empty. God does not send wrath simply to punish; he sends it so that a people who had ignored him would finally know he had spoken, would come to reckon with the reality of the God they had dismissed. Even the darkest passages aim, in the end, at knowledge of God, at people finally taking him seriously. His wrath rests, and its purpose is that they know him. The hardest word is still, at bottom, aimed at bringing his people back to knowing who he is.

Can I hear even in God's hardest words the two truths, that his wrath has a resting place and that its aim is that people come to know him, rather than reading only endless anger?

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