Ezekiel 16
Butler15-34. In these verses we have an account of the great wickedness of the people of Israel, especially in worshipping idols, notwithstanding the great favors that God had conferred upon them, by which, one would think, they should have been forever engaged to Him. This wickedness of theirs is here represented by the lewd and scandalous conversation of that beautiful maid which was rescued from ruin, brought up and well provided for by a kind friend and benefactor, that had been in all respects as a father and a husband to her. H.
The prophet now describes the idolatries of the time of the kings. The earlier offences in the time of the judges are not noticed, that being an unsettled time. The conduct of the people after they had prospered into a kingdom is to be described.
15. Because of thy renown. Thou didst make use of thy renown to court idolatrous nations. The marriages of Solomon with heathen wives, and his consequent idolatries, are a clear instance of such misuse of glory. B. C.
18. Mine oil and Mine incense. The oil was the product of the land, the incense received in exchange for such produce, and so both were the gifts of Jehovah, and belonged to Him. Besides, the oil and the incense prepared for the service of God were used in idol worship. Oil was a special ingredient in the offerings prescribed in the service of the Temple; for anointing, for lights, and for the meal-offering. B. C.
20,21. Was this crime of making and serving other gods too small a thing to satisfy thy wicked heart, that thou shouldst needs go on to more horrid guilt, and burn thine own sons and daughters in the fire to these cruel idols? With equal force and beauty the Lord says, “Thou hast slain My children”—as if His parental heart yearned over the innocent little ones hurled by their unnatural fathers and mothers into the deadly fire to Moloch and Saturn! H. C.
God’s covenant with Abraham was “with him and his seed after him.” The severest charge against Israel which Ezekiel was commissioned to utter was this: “Thou hast taken thy sons and thy daughters whom thou hast borne unto Me, and these hast thou sacrificed unto them. Thou hast slain My children.” Take now these facts and principles: Christian families as families are in covenant with God; God claims the children in such families as His children; the family is, practically, whatever may be our theories, the unit of organization in the Church as in the commonwealth, lying as it does at the foundation of them both. These principles furnish strong a priori or presumptive evidence that the children of believing parents are to be acknowledged as members of the Christian Church. T. P. Stevenson.
22. It had aggravated her guilt all along that she would not suitably remember the goodness of her God manifested toward her in the early days of her national life. In this chapter (verses 4-14) the Lord has been pressing this urgently upon her attention. This was the burden of many an earnest exhortation from the Lord through Moses and the prophets. (See De. 8:2; 5:15; 15:15; 16:12; 24:18, 22.) She did not love to remember how abject and forlorn she was in the day when the mercy of the Lord met her in Egypt. So sinners are slow and reluctant to remember the special favors shown them by that Great Benefactor whose name they revile, whose law they discard, and whose love to them they will not think of requiting with responsive love in return. H. C.
27. The Philistines, occupying the southern borders of the land of Canaan, were from the first, and continued through the whole of Israel’s history, thorns in the sides of the people; in the times of the judges, of Samuel, of Saul, of David, and in much later times (see Isa. 14: 29) they were the instruments employed by the Lord to punish His disobedient people. (See 2 Chron. 28:18.)
35-43. The punishment of Judah is represented by the same figure as her sin. She has been portrayed as an adulteress and a murderess. She is now represented as undergoing the punishment adjudged to an adulteress and murderess. The scene is a court of justice, before which the Lord Himself appears to arraign the guilty woman. There are present those who are now her lovers, and those whom she has loved and deserted (the idolatrous nations with whom Judah has had guilty intercourse), to witness, to share, or to exult in her disgrace. In proportion to her former honor shall be her present shame. As a woman suspected of infidelity to her husband had her head uncovered, by way of disgrace, so this convicted adulteress shall be stripped bare, exposed to utter shame, shall be stoned and slain, and her house shall be made desolate. Only in her utter destruction shall the wrath of the Lord, the jealous God, cease. B. C.
In this passage, verse 38 alludes with terrible power to the jealousy and fury with which men often avenge the crime of adultery when their own hearts are torn and their own homes ruined by it. So God will shed the blood of Jerusalem in His fury and jealousy! What could be more fearfully expressive! He will make an example of her before many cities and nations. H. C.
The question is, how these two, God is love and God is a consuming fire, are to be harmonized. And the answer is, that the vinculum is found in this conception of the jealousy. Through that medial factor, the wrath is seen to be of love or accordant with it. The capital passage here is De. 4:24, where the one is given as exegetical of the other: “The Lord thy God is a consuming fire, even a jealous God;” and other passages (Zech. 8:2; Ezek. 16:38; 36:6; 38:19, etc.) place the two in such juxtaposition that sometimes they appear well-nigh synonymous, and sometimes the jealousy seems given as the operative cause of the wrath. This jealousy is, therefore, the Divine love bearing no rival, demanding a perfect response, asserting its disowned claims; in short, the love that will be loved, and that with an undivided affection, in turn. Salmond.
46,47. To humble the national pride of Jerusalem and set forth her monstrous guilt, she is compared to Samaria as her sister on the left hand, and to Sodom, her sister on the right. Jerusalem sits geographically between these two cities, with her face to the east. “She did not walk after their ways,” for she had done indefinitely worse than they. So utterly had her crimes surpassed theirs, as to throw them quite into the shade. In verse 47, the original word, rendered “a very little thing,” means a thing of disgust, as if it disgusted her as too small sinning. Jerusalem piques herself upon sinning on a grander scale, with more daring, horrible impiety!
48-50. This comparison with Sodom is full of intense significance and power. There stood the history of Sodom and her fearful doom before the very eyes of the Jewish people. The record of it lifts up its columns of smoke and flame before the generations of history, standing on their own sacred page, and it would seem that they must have learned from their childhood to abhor such crimes and dread such a doom! Yet here the burning tongue of their prophet puts it to them that their own guilt is indefinitely greater! H. C.
49. Abundance of idleness. In places where there is least work the worst sins do most prevail; and idleness therefore is by the prophet reckoned one of the three great sins of Sodom, parents of the rest. It seldom happens in any way of life that a sluggard and a profligate do not go together, or that he who is idle is not also dissolute. Isaac Barrow.
51,52. Jerusalem in her abominations had justified Samaria only in the sense that her greater crimes made the sins of Samaria appear to be almost virtues. Verse 52 might be translated, “Bear thou (Jerusalem) that disgrace which thou hast adjudged to thy sisters, for thy sins in which thou hast been more abominable than they,” etc. Jerusalem had condemned her sisters, Sodom and Samaria, adjudging to them deep disgrace. Let her bear all this herself and more, for her greater abominations. H. C.
53. When I shall bring again their captivity. The meaning is, When the fulness of the Gentiles shall come into the Church (some of whom may be compared to Sodom for wickedness), then will I also remember you who are My ancient people. The conversion of the Gentiles is expressed in Jeremiah by the returning of the captivity of Moab, Ammon and Elam (chaps. 48:47; 49:6, 39); and by the Egyptians, Ethiopians and Syrians acknowledging themselves His servants in the prophecy of Isaiah (chaps. 19:24, 25; 23:18). And by the same analogy we are to understand the returning of “the captivity of Sodom,” here, of the Gentiles coming into the Church. Abp. Newcome.
56-59. Her guilt in despising her oath and breaking her covenant with her God was that especially which so greatly surpassed the guilt of Sodom and Samaria, and which made her doom so dreadful. H. C.
60-63. Here in the close of the chapter, after a most shameful conviction of sin and a most dreadful denunciation of judgments, mercy is remembered, mercy is reserved for those who shall come after, as was when God swore in His wrath concerning those who came out of Egypt, that they should not enter into Canaan. “Yet,” says God, “your little ones shall;” so here. This mercy should take rise from God Himself and His remembering of His covenant with them (verse 60). Nevertheless, though they had been so provoking, and God has been so provoked, to that degree that one would think they could never be reconciled again, yet “I will remember My covenant with thee, that covenant which I made with thee in
the days of thy youth, and will revive it again. Though thou hast broken the covenant (verse 59), I will remember it, and it shall flourish again.” H.