Scripture Daily

Context No. 3701 of 4322 · Ezekiel

Context · Reflection

Ezekiel 16:43-48: in context

43“‘“Because you have not remembered the days of your youth, but have raged against me in all these things; therefore, behold, I also will bring your way on your head,” says the Lord GOD: “and you shall not commit this lewdness with all your abominations. 44“‘“Behold, everyone who uses proverbs will use this proverb against you, saying, ‘As is the mother, so is her daughter.’ 45You are the daughter of your mother, who loathes her husband and her children; and you are the sister of your sisters, who loathed their husbands and their children. Your mother was a Hittite, and your father an Amorite. 46Your elder sister is Samaria, who dwells at your left hand, she and her daughters; and your younger sister, who dwells at your right hand, is Sodom with her daughters. 47Yet you have not walked in their ways, nor done their abominations; but soon you were more corrupt than they in all your ways. 48As I live,” says the Lord GOD, “Sodom your sister has not done, she nor her daughters, as you have done, you and your daughters.

This is part of a severe and painful indictment of Jerusalem, and we read it soberly, not dwelling on its hardest imagery. The heart of it is a startling charge: Jerusalem had become more corrupt in her ways than even Sodom, the very byword for wickedness.

The people who had God's law and God's presence, who should have been holier than the pagan nations around them, had exceeded even those nations in sin. Their great privilege had become their great condemnation, for they sinned against far more light. There is a sobering warning here, one Jesus himself echoed when he said it would be more bearable for Sodom than for the towns that saw his works and would not repent. To whom much is given, much is required. Those who have known God's truth and grace, and then turn from it, bear a heavier guilt than those who never knew it. Privilege before God is not a shield but a call to greater responsibility.

Do I recognize that the truth and grace I have received raise my responsibility, so that privilege before God is a call to greater faithfulness, not a shield against accountability?

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