Scripture Daily

Context No. 1299 of 4322 · Ezekiel

Context · Reflection

Ezekiel 23:35-39: in context

35“Therefore the Lord GOD says: ‘Because you have forgotten me and cast me behind your back, therefore you also bear your lewdness and your prostitution.’” 36The LORD said moreover to me: “Son of man, will you judge Oholah and Oholibah? Then declare to them their abominations. 37For they have committed adultery, and blood is in their hands. They have committed adultery with their idols. They have also caused their sons, whom they bore to me, to pass through the fire to them to be devoured. 38Moreover this they have done to me: they have defiled my sanctuary in the same day, and have profaned my Sabbaths. 39For when they had slain their children to their idols, then they came the same day into my sanctuary to profane it; and behold, they have done this in the middle of my house.

Ezekiel is delivering a harsh allegory of two unfaithful sisters, Oholah and Oholibah, representing Samaria and Jerusalem, whose idolatry is portrayed as adultery. In this section God's charge cuts deep: because you have forgotten me and cast me behind your back, you bear the consequences of your unfaithfulness. And then a horrifying specific: on the same day they sacrificed their children to idols, they came into God's sanctuary to profane it. They defiled the temple and profaned the Sabbaths, mixing the worship of the true God with the murder of their own children before idols, all in the same breath.

Two charges anchor this hard passage. First, the root: you have forgotten me and cast me behind your back. Idolatry begins with forgetting, with pushing God out of view, behind the back, out of the center of attention, until other things take his place. The sin is not usually a dramatic renunciation but a quiet forgetting, letting God slip from mind until he is behind us rather than before us. Second, the shocking hypocrisy: they came into the sanctuary the same day they had sacrificed their children to idols. This is the horror God names, that his people could commit the most terrible sins and then walk straight into his house to worship as though nothing were wrong, compartmentalizing their lives so that idolatry and temple worship coexisted on the same day. It is a grotesque form of religious hypocrisy, keeping up the outward worship of God while the heart and the life are given to other gods. And God is not deceived by the divided life; he sees the same person who came to the sanctuary was the one who had bowed to the idol. There is a searching warning in it against the compartmentalized life, the one that maintains its religious observance while giving the real allegiance of the heart elsewhere. God will not be one compartment among others; to forget him and cast him behind our back while keeping up the appearance of worship is exactly what this passage exposes.

Have I forgotten God and cast him behind my back while keeping up the appearance of worship, living a compartmentalized life where my real allegiance goes elsewhere, and does the hypocrisy this passage exposes describe me?

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