Scripture Daily

Context No. 1678 of 4322 · Ezekiel

Context · Reflection

Ezekiel 22:6-12: in context

6“‘“Behold, the princes of Israel, everyone according to his power, have been in you to shed blood. 7In you have they treated father and mother with contempt. Among you they have oppressed the foreigner. In you they have wronged the fatherless and the widow. 8You have despised my holy things, and have profaned my Sabbaths. 9Slanderous men have been in you to shed blood. In you they have eaten on the mountains. They have committed lewdness among you. 10In you have they uncovered their fathers’ nakedness. In you have they humbled her who was unclean in her impurity. 11One has committed abomination with his neighbor’s wife, and another has lewdly defiled his daughter-in-law. Another in you has humbled his sister, his father’s daughter. 12In you have they taken bribes to shed blood. You have taken interest and increase, and you have greedily gained of your neighbors by oppression, and have forgotten me,” says the Lord GOD.

Through Ezekiel, God lays out an indictment of Jerusalem, a long catalog of her sins. The princes shed blood; children treat father and mother with contempt; the foreigner is oppressed, the orphan and widow wronged. God's holy things are despised, his Sabbaths profaned. There is slander, and violence, and sexual corruption of every kind, and bribery, and usury, and extortion of neighbors. And the whole list ends with a single, telling phrase: and you have forgotten me, says the Lord GOD.

The catalog is grim and wide-ranging, covering violence, contempt for parents, exploitation of the vulnerable, sexual sin, dishonest gain. But the diagnosis comes in the last phrase, which names the root beneath them all: and you have forgotten me. All these evils, the writer is saying, grow from one soil, the forgetting of God. When God is forgotten, when he is no longer held before the eyes and honored in the heart, everything else comes loose. The vulnerable, the foreigner, the orphan, the widow, are oppressed, because the God who commands their protection is out of mind. Faith is broken, blood is shed, greed and corruption spread, because the God who forbids these things has been forgotten. The moral disintegration is not random; it traces back to a people who let God slip from memory, and found that when he was gone, everything unraveled. There is a sobering truth here for us, both individually and as a society. The way we treat the vulnerable, the honesty of our dealings, the integrity of our relationships, all of it rests, finally, on whether God is remembered, held before us, honored. When God is forgotten, when he becomes irrelevant to how we actually live, the fruit is exactly the kind of catalog Ezekiel lists: the strong preying on the weak, faith broken, corruption normalized. And the remedy runs the same way: to remember God, to hold him before us and honor him, is the root from which right treatment of others grows. Forget him, and the rest corrodes; remember him, and there is a foundation for justice and faithfulness.

Where I see my own life or my society drifting into the mistreatment of the vulnerable, broken faith, and corruption, can I trace it to its root, the forgetting of God, and does it press me to remember him, to hold him before me and honor him, as the foundation from which right treatment of others actually grows?

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