Scripture Daily

Context No. 1682 of 4322 · Ezekiel

Context · Reflection

Ezekiel 23:22-27: in context

22“Therefore, Oholibah, the Lord GOD says: ‘Behold, I will raise up your lovers against you, from whom your soul is alienated, and I will bring them against you on every side: 23the Babylonians and all the Chaldeans, Pekod, Shoa, Koa, and all the Assyrians with them; all of them desirable young men, governors and rulers, princes and men of renown, all of them riding on horses. 24They will come against you with weapons, chariots, and wagons, and with a company of peoples. They will set themselves against you with buckler, shield, and helmet all around. I will commit the judgment to them, and they will judge you according to their judgments. 25I will set my jealousy against you, and they will deal with you in fury. They will take away your nose and your ears. Your remnant will fall by the sword. They will take your sons and your daughters; and the rest of you will be devoured by the fire. 26They will also strip you of your clothes and take away your beautiful jewels. 27Thus I will make your lewdness to cease from you, and remove your prostitution from the land of Egypt, so that you will not lift up your eyes to them, nor remember Egypt any more.’

In the allegory of the unfaithful sister Oholibah, standing for Jerusalem, God announces judgment. I will stir up against you your former lovers, from whom you turned away, he says, and bring them against you on every side: the Babylonians and Assyrians you once courted. They will come with weapons and fury, and deal with you cruelly. This is a hard passage, its imagery violent and its judgment severe; through it God declares that the very nations Jerusalem chased after will become the instruments of her ruin.

The passage does not spare us its severity, and there is a terrible logic in it worth facing. Jerusalem had chased after foreign nations and their gods, courting Babylon and Assyria, seeking security and satisfaction in these alliances and idolatries rather than in God. And God's judgment is to hand her over to the very lovers she pursued: the nations she chased become the nations that destroy her. What she ran to for life became the agent of her death. There is a sobering pattern here, and not only for ancient Jerusalem. The things we chase after in our unfaithfulness to God, the idols we court for satisfaction and security, have a way of turning on us. What we pursue instead of God to fill and protect us often becomes, in the end, the very thing that wounds and enslaves us; the lover becomes the destroyer. The pleasure sought outside of God sours; the security found in something other than God fails at the moment of need; the idol we served demands more and gives less, until it consumes us. This is not arbitrary cruelty on God's part but the built-in consequence of forsaking the source of life for substitutes that cannot sustain and will not stay kind. And notice, even here, the strange aim stated at the end: that her destructive unfaithfulness might cease, that she would no longer be enslaved to the idols that were ruining her. The severity is real; but its purpose is to end the ruinous pattern, to break the hold of the lovers that were killing her. The hard mercy is that God will not let his people go on being destroyed by what they chase in place of him.

What am I chasing after in place of God, for satisfaction or security, that may in the end turn on me, the lover becoming the destroyer, and can I heed the sober warning of Oholibah, that the idols we pursue instead of God tend to consume the very ones who serve them?

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