Scripture Daily

Context No. 647 of 4322 · Ezekiel

Context · Reflection

Ezekiel 20:45-49: in context

45The LORD’s word came to me, saying, 46“Son of man, set your face toward the south, and preach toward the south, and prophesy against the forest of the field in the south. 47Tell the forest of the south, ‘Hear the LORD’s word: The Lord GOD says, “Behold, I will kindle a fire in you, and it will devour every green tree in you, and every dry tree. The burning flame will not be quenched, and all faces from the south to the north will be burned by it. 48All flesh will see that I, the LORD, have kindled it. It will not be quenched.”’” 49Then I said, “Ah Lord GOD! They say of me, ‘Isn’t he a speaker of parables?’”

God gives Ezekiel a hard word to deliver, a prophecy of fire against the south that will devour the green tree and the dry alike, an image of coming judgment. And at the end of the passage, Ezekiel lets slip a note of real frustration that is easy to relate to. Ah, Lord GOD, he says, they are saying of me, is he not just a maker of parables? His hearers have found a convenient way to avoid his message: they wave it off as riddles. He speaks obscurely, they say, in figures and images we cannot be expected to take seriously, and so they do not have to reckon with what he is actually saying. Dismissing the word as mere parable becomes their strategy for not obeying it.

That is a very human move, and I make it more than I would like to admit. When a part of God's word presses uncomfortably close, one of the easiest escapes is to declare it unclear. That passage is obscure, I tell myself; it is hard to understand, open to interpretation, probably not meant for my situation, so I set it aside without ever having to obey it. And sometimes that is honest; parts of Scripture genuinely are difficult. But often the appeal to obscurity is a dodge. The meaning is clear enough to make me uncomfortable, and calling it a riddle is simply how I avoid the claim it is making on me. Like Ezekiel's hearers, I hide behind is he not just speaking in parables.

That asks me to be honest about where I actually hide behind that. Are there commands and warnings in God's word that I have quietly filed under too obscure to worry about, when the truer reason is that I understand them well enough and do not want to obey them? Ezekiel's hearers dismissed a clear word as a riddle to escape it. Where am I calling a part of God's word obscure or not-for-me, when I grasp its meaning perfectly well and am using its supposed difficulty as a way to avoid doing what it plainly asks?

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