Scripture Daily

Context No. 3797 of 4322 · Ezekiel

Context · Reflection

Ezekiel 16:15-19: in context

15“‘“But you trusted in your beauty, and played the prostitute because of your renown, and poured out your prostitution on everyone who passed by. It was his. 16You took some of your garments, and made for yourselves high places decked with various colors, and played the prostitute on them. This shouldn’t happen, neither shall it be. 17You also took your beautiful jewels of my gold and of my silver, which I had given you, and made for yourself images of men, and played the prostitute with them. 18You took your embroidered garments, covered them, and set my oil and my incense before them. 19My bread also which I gave you, fine flour, oil, and honey, with which I fed you, you even set it before them for a pleasant aroma; and so it was,” says the Lord GOD.

Through Ezekiel, God brings a grieved complaint against Jerusalem, pictured as one he had lavished with gifts, fine garments, gold and silver jewels, rich food, and who then took those very gifts and used them to serve idols and other loves. We read the passage's stark language soberly, hearing beneath it a pain that is really about betrayed love and misused generosity.

The heart of the charge is this: everything they turned to false worship, the gold, the garments, the bread, had been God's own gift to them. He had given the very things they used against him. There is a sobering truth here that touches all of us. The good gifts God gives, our resources, our abilities, our very lives, can be taken and turned to serve things other than the Giver. To lavish on lesser loves the gifts God gave for his glory is a kind of ingratitude that wounds. God calls us to use his gifts in devotion to him, not to turn his own generosity into a means of forsaking him.

Am I using the good gifts God has given me, my resources, abilities, and time, in devotion to him, or am I turning his own generosity toward things that draw my heart away from him?

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