Ezekiel 22

God puts Jerusalem on trial and lists her crimes: bloodshed, idolatry, abuse of the weak, sexual sin, greed, and contempt for His Sabbaths. He then pictures the city as a furnace where worthless metal is melted down. Last, He names the guilt of princes, priests, prophets and people, and says He looked for one person to stand in the gap and found no one.

Ezekiel 22:1-2

God calls Ezekiel to act as a judge and to present the case against Jerusalem. She is called the city of bloodshed. Ezekiel is to make her face her abominations, the detestable things she has done. God’s judgment begins with an honest naming of the sin.

BSA: abominations (“disgusting things, idolatry”): The word points especially to the idol worship that God finds revolting.

See also: Ezekiel 20:4.

Ezekiel 22:3-4

Jerusalem’s two great sins are shedding blood and making idols. Both leave her guilty and defiled. Her own deeds have brought her days to an end. As a result she has become a reproach, an object of scorn, among the nations around her.

BSA: defiled (“made unclean, polluted”): Sin is pictured as a stain that spoils a person or a city before God.

Ezekiel 22:5

Neighbors near and far will mock her. Her name is spoiled, and she is known for turmoil, meaning confusion and lawlessness. The city meant to show God’s glory has become a byword for disorder.

BSA: infamous (“unclean, defiled”): Her reputation is that of a defiled place, one that carries a bad name everywhere.

Ezekiel 22:6-7

The princes use their power, literally their arm, to shed blood. Parents are treated with contempt, and the foreigner, the orphan and the widow are crushed. God’s law specially protected these helpless people, so abusing them is a direct insult to Him.

BSA: power (“arm”): The arm is a picture of strength, which these rulers use to harm rather than to protect. foreign resident (“sojourner, stranger, or temporary inhabitant”): This is the outsider with no family or land to protect him, whom God commanded Israel to care for.

See also: Exodus 22:21-22.

Ezekiel 22:8

The people have treated God’s holy things as if they were common and have profaned His Sabbaths. Their wrongs against neighbors flow from this contempt for Him. When God’s holiness is not honored, other people soon go unhonored too.

BSA: profaned (“desecrated, made common”): To profane something is to treat what God has set apart as though it were ordinary.

See also: Exodus 20:8.

Ezekiel 22:9

Slanderers carry tales, and false testimony could send an innocent person to his death. Others eat at the mountain shrines, meaning idol worship at high places, and commit acts of indecency. Lies, false worship and lewdness are listed together.

BSA: indecency (“wickedness, lewdness, zimmah”): The Hebrew word zimmah describes shameless, planned wickedness, especially in sexual matters.

Hebrew: זִמָּה (zimmah, H2154) — “lewd scheming, shameful plan.” The word suggests more than a slip. It describes sexual wrongdoing that is deliberate and shameless.

Ezekiel 22:10-11

Sexual sins run through the city, within families as well as between neighbors. They include incest, adultery, and relations during menstrual impurity, all forbidden in the law. The home, which should be the safest place, has become a place of shame.

BSA: nakedness (“shame, exposure”): To uncover nakedness is the law’s phrase for forbidden sexual relations, which dishonor the family.

See also: Leviticus 18:6-20.

Ezekiel 22:12

Money has corrupted the city too. Judges take bribes, and lenders squeeze the poor with usury and excess interest. Behind all of it stands the root sin: Me you have forgotten. Forgetting God leaves a person free to wrong everyone else.

BSA: forgotten (“completely forgotten, ignored”): This is a deliberate setting aside of God, not an accidental lapse of memory.

See also: Exodus 22:25.

Ezekiel 22:13-14

God strikes His hands together, a gesture of anger and of judgment about to fall, against their dishonest gain and their bloodshed. He asks whether their courage and strength will hold when He deals with them. The answer is plain. He has spoken, and He will act.

BSA: courage (“inner strength”): The word points to the heart’s strength, which will melt away when the judgment comes.

Ezekiel 22:15-16

God will scatter them among the nations, and the exile will burn away their uncleanness. Even in their disgrace before the nations, they will come to know that He is the LORD. Judgment is meant to end in knowing Him.

BSA: purge (“consume, put a stop to”): God will end the filth, the sinful behavior that had become their way of life.

See also: Deuteronomy 28:64.

Ezekiel 22:17-18

A new message begins with a picture from metalworking. Israel should have been precious silver, but she has become dross, the waste left when metal is refined. God finds nothing worth keeping. They are the leftover scum of silver and base metals.

BSA: dross (“waste, impurities”): Dross is the worthless residue that rises to the top when metal is melted.

See also: Isaiah 1:22-25.

Ezekiel 22:19-22

God will gather the people into Jerusalem as metal is gathered into a furnace. He will blow on them with the fire of His wrath, and they will melt. This probably describes the siege, when people crowded into the city. The result is that they will know the LORD has poured out His wrath.

BSA: melted (“poured out, softened”): The people lose their shape and strength under the heat, like metal turned to liquid. gather (“collect, assemble”): God Himself brings them together, so the crowded city becomes the furnace.

See also: Malachi 3:2-3.

Ezekiel 22:23-24

A third message is given: the land is uncleansed and has had no rain in the day of indignation. The picture is of a country dried up and unfit, with no cleansing from God. Their sin has left the land without blessing.

BSA: cleansed (“purified, made holy”): The land has not been washed from its guilt, so it stays unclean before God.

Ezekiel 22:25

The princes plot together like a roaring lion tearing its prey. They devour people, seize wealth, and leave many widows behind. Leaders who should protect the flock instead feed on it.

BSA: conspiracy (“unlawful alliance, plot”): The leaders act as a united gang, not as single offenders.

See also: Zephaniah 3:3.

Ezekiel 22:26

The priests were to teach the difference between holy and common, clean and unclean. Instead they do violence to God’s law, and they ignore the Sabbaths. When teachers blur right and wrong, God is profaned among His people and not honored.

BSA: distinction (“separation, difference”): The priests’ task was to keep apart what God had separated, and they failed. violence (“injure, harm”): They wound the law itself by twisting it to suit themselves.

See also: Leviticus 10:10-11.

Ezekiel 22:27

The officials are compared to wolves tearing their prey. They shed blood and destroy lives for dishonest gain. Power was turned into a tool for profit at the cost of human life.

BSA: wolves (“ferocious, ravaging”): Rulers who should guard the sheep are shown as savage predators.

Ezekiel 22:28

The prophets cover the nation’s sins like a coat of whitewash, hiding cracks without mending them. They claim to speak for the Lord, but He has not spoken. A false word that comforts sin is among the most dangerous things in a nation.

BSA: whitewash (“cover up, plaster over”): The prophets paint a pleasing surface over a wall that is about to fall.

See also: Ezekiel 13:10-12.

Ezekiel 22:29

Ordinary people have joined in. They practice extortion and robbery, oppress the poor and needy, and wrong the foreigner without justice. From the palace to the street, every level of society shares in the guilt.

BSA: extortion (“used oppression, acted cruelly”): The word describes taking by pressure what has no right to be taken.

Ezekiel 22:30

God looked for a single person to repair the wall and stand in the gap, interceding for the land. A breach in a city wall lets the enemy in, and one faithful person could have stood there. He found no one. The verse shows His readiness to spare when someone pleads.

BSA: gap (“breach, a break”): This is a broken place in the wall where judgment can rush in. found (“discovered, came upon”): God searched diligently, which shows He wanted a reason to spare.

Hebrew: פֶּרֶץ (perets, H6556) — “breach, break.” It is the word for a broken place in a wall. The intercessor is pictured as a person standing in that opening to hold back the attack.

See also: Psalm 106:23; Genesis 18:32.

Ezekiel 22:31

So God’s anger is poured out and their own ways come back on their heads. The judgment is just and not arbitrary. Yet the chapter shows a God who searched for any reason to spare them, and it points forward to the One who would stand in the gap fully.

BSA: indignation (“intense anger, fury”): This is God’s settled anger against evil, poured out after long patience.

See also: Isaiah 59:16.