May 7, Ezekiel 23
"Therefore says the Lord GOD, Because you have forgotten me and cast me behind your back, you yourself must bear the consequences of your lewdness and whoring." The LORD said to me, "Son of man, will you judge Oholah and Oholibah? Declare to them their abominations. For they have committed adultery, and blood is on their hands. With their idols they have committed adultery, and they have even offered up to them for food the children they had borne to me." - Ezekiel 23:35-37
God told a story about two promiscuous sisters to illustrate how Israel and Judah had forgotten him. The story described how the people had defiled themselves and brought humiliation and ruin upon themselves. He named the sisters Oholah (which means "her tent") and Oholibah (which means "my tent is in her”).
Northern kingdom Israel was never faithful to God from its beginning when God tore ten of the twelve tribes away from Rehoboam and gave them to Jeroboam. That Israel’s kings were never from the house of David. Their priests were never legitimate priests of the tribe of Levi. And the Lord God was not their god. They were idolaters from the beginning, when Jeroboam set up idols at two convenient locations for the people to worship instead of returning to Jerusalem to worship God.
Judah had Davidic kings and Levitical priests,
but they still quickly turned to idolatry. Solomon made alliances with many nations, took wives from the foreigners and worshiped his pagan wives' gods. God had dwelled among the people in Jerusalem. But he withdrew his presence when they turned to idolatry and would not return to him. They saw how idolatry had brought an end to Israel in the north. But they persisted in their idolatry and grew even worse than Israel, until they suffered the warned and promised consequences of their own ruin.
God told the indelicate story of the sisters' infidelity to show how distasteful and disgusting their sins were to him, and to depict how they defiled and degraded themselves by their sinful conduct. If the language is shocking, it was meant to be. God used the images of the promiscuous sisters to show the people that their actions were serious breaches of their covenant with God, and to describe the magnitude of heir wickedness.
As a consequence of their sins, God would allow the foreigners with whom Israel had adulterated her covenant with God to become her tormentors. They would take the broken people of Israel and judge them by their laws about adulterous wives. They would humiliate, torture and kill the people of Israel who had prostituted themselves with them. God was disgusted with his incorrigible people who would not listen or change. The consequences were about to come and they would be severe.
The people of Judah and Israel rebelled against God on different levels in different ways. They made alliances with people around them when they felt threatened instead of turning to God. Their leaders intermarried with pagan rulers' families to seal those treaties, and the people followed suit. They began to worship the idols of their illicit allies and engage in shameless acts of sexual perversion. They even killed and offered their own children to the idols as human sacrifices. God categorized all their covenant breaking, idolatry and immorality as lewdness and forgetting him. And he punished them severely for their sinful acts.
Can we see a lesson for ourselves in our time and place from all of this? Yes, it's true that sexual immorality is serious sin that turns what God intended to be a blessing into a curse. But beyond that, let's remember all our sins are sins not only against others, but also sins against God. When we compromise with the world, behave like the world and embrace their idols of selfish pleasure and materialism, God sees it and takes it as unfaithfulness to him and forgetting him. Let's not be deceived or enticed into doing what is an affront to our holy, loving God. The consequences are not worth any short-lived selfish pleasure we might get from being unfaithful to God. With this chapter in mind, is God calling you and warning you about something in your life? Is there some compromise we are making that leads us to betray and deny our affection for the Lord? What in my life needs to change so the awful consequences of disobedience will not fall on me?
Copyright © 2024 by Michael B. McElroy. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Today in God's Word—May 2024
East Tallassee Church of Christ
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