Ezekiel 18

Ezekiel 18:1-32

Section 5 (Ezekiel 18:1-32).The righteous ways of God. We have now another chapter after the manner of, and according to the line of things committed to Ezekiel -the affirmation of God’s righteous ways in government. These governmental ways form the matter of his whole prophecy hitherto. And they are ways that need to be affirmed; for in God’s government of the world, clouds and darkness are round about Him, and we have here that in which the whole law given to Israel finds its explanation. Even now, with His face fully seen, as Moses yet could not see it, we are in some sense upon the mount with Moses still hearing Him say: “Thou canst not see my face.” And though we may be consciously hidden and safe under His hand while His glory passes by, yet still what we see is just the glory of the back parts -glory after it is passed. The apostle says of the chastening Hand (which so often is like a cloud encompassing the throne), “Afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness to them that are exercised thereby.” Faith, therefore, is the requisite all through; but it is faith, now, in One who has fully manifested Himself in Christ, so that as to what He Himself is there should be henceforth no rightful question. But His ways may still perplex us; and the exercise which we have under them is intended as part of the wholesome discipline under which we are. With Israel under the law, the glory was under a covering; and here we have to look at things necessarily from the standpoint of men in those days. The chapter before us deals with the unbelief which prevailed so much in Israel, which argued from what was but the consequence of their own sin, against the righteousness, as well as the goodness, of God’s chastening hand.

1. The statement of the chapter is very full, and we see easily God’s earnestness about it. It is not of little account to Him what man, the creature He has made, may make of Him. He is saying here, as in the opening words of another prophet: “Come, let us reason together;” although upon His side, there is here little of what we might call reasoning. He reasons in fact upon that in man which should be obvious upon the mere statement of it, which if denied would mean there was no God at all, none worthy to be called that. On the other hand, man’s arguments are but those of unbelief, of self-ignorance; for he who knows not God, we may be sure, knows not himself to begin with.

We must come to ourselves in order to come to Him. As surely as we have taken our true place before Him, so surely will His glory shine upon us. “And the word of Jehovah came unto me saying, What mean ye that ye use this proverb in the land of Israel, saying, The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge?” It is to be noted that it was in the land of Israel that this proverb was being used; the land of God’s gift to them, the land that was emphatically “a good land,” a land into which God had brought them by the display of most wonderful miracles, beating down the haughtiest power on earth existing then, to give them deliverance, and executing judgment upon Egypt’s false gods in a way which rang in the ears of the nations around for long. It was in this good land they could speak of “sour grapes” which their fathers had eaten, and their children’s teeth were set on edge through no failure of their own! How little need of argument, one would say, against a proverb of this sort in the land and among the people of Israel! All the more, and because these people are the objects of His love, for whom He has shown Himself mighty, must He silence this talk forever: “As I live, saith the Lord Jehovah, ye shall not have any more to use this proverb in Israel.” In fact, throughout all the judgments which the prophet had had to announce, we have heard echoing again and again the assurance that He is Jehovah, the One who took them up under this Name. How plainly His heart is in the answer: “Behold, all souls are mine. As the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine.” Will they take from Him the souls of those He has created?

Will they doubt His care and goodness toward those whom He had created? Will they think, in the face of the goodness which He has lavished upon them, that those for whom He has thus provided are of no concern to Him? And as the apostle asks long after, “Is God the God of the Jews only? Is He not also of the Gentiles?” As surely as man is man, wherever he is, so surely must God be God to them all. Clouds and darkness may be round about Him, but is the sun less bright because it is hidden? And are the clouds that encompass it of heaven or of earth? We must remember that Israel was brought into special relationship with God as Creator. As such the very opening of their inspired oracles declare Him; and if Israel had special nearness to Him, yet, even where this is declared, there is careful remembrance of His relation to all others on the same ground. Thus, if God says to Pharaoh: “Israel is my son, even my first-born,” the first-born son implies there are other sons. And if there be a special promise to Abraham and to his seed, that promise (indirectly, but as truly) takes in others: “In thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.” Thus the relationship of the Creator to His creatures is especially insisted on in the Old Testament. So the Psalmist (Psalms 139:13-16), if troubled at the omniscient eye of God ever upon him, has but to go back and consider how that same eye watched over him before ever he was born, while gradually that delicately interwoven body of his was forming. How could he do other than welcome the eye of such an One to search him through and through? So, pitiful even in His anger, God says in Isaiah 57:16 : “For I will not contend forever, neither will I be always wroth: for the spirit should fail before Me, and the souls that I have made.” True, death has come into the old creation, and God does not forget it here. It is His own penalty, and He cannot overlook it. It is meant to have meaning for man. The very law is the ministration of it; and if all souls are His, the soul of the son as of the father is an object of emphatic interest to Him; none the less is it true that “the soul that sinneth, it shall die.” It is solemnly affirmed that it is for his own sins that man dies -not for the sins of another. We must pause a moment here to consider (what has been considered elsewhere and in various places) what the “soul” is that is intended here, and what death. The “soul that sinneth” is so constantly assumed to be the immortal part of man, and therefore the death, with which it is immortal death, as it were, that we must stop to consider the Old Testament’s constant speech as to this, and the law which is in a special way the spirit of the Old Testament. It has often been said that if it is the judgment of eternity that is affirmed in the law, and its death-judgment eternal death, then God has pledged Himself that every sinner shall receive eternal condemnation. But we know this is contrary to every principle that Scripture declares. God has not thus bound Himself as to be unable to show grace; nor could He play fast and loose with what He has declared. “The soul that sinneth, it shall die” is the patent fact before all men, and pressed upon them by what is itself the ministration of death. It is the undeniable reality of this fact, that all men are under the sentence of death, which makes the law a true and full test of man’s condition -shows his inability to stand before God in judgment.

It says, “The man that doeth these things shall live in them.” Is it not plain that the man who really doeth these things, in a way absolutely according to God, could not be under the sentence of death at all? How could God put such a sentence upon one who is altogether according to His mind? Ah, but that is the contention. Does God really mean that all must be according to His mind? Does He not know, do we not all know and confess, that men are sinners? And if we be so, why any test of man in this way at all? The answer is, that man will ever mix up God’s mercy and man’s righteousness, so as to get credit for himself for whatever partial righteousness he thinks he can furnish; and God did, in fact, in the second giving of the law, contemplate this very thought which was in man’s heart. With the first giving of the law no promise of forgiveness was attached; the trial was soon over, as we know. The golden calf was the end of that; and the tables of the covenant as first made were simply broken under the mount, and never reached the people. In the second giving of the law God declares that He is not only righteous but “merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth . . . forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin.” Here, then, is a provision made for those who are allowed -what, in fact, the first trial proved them so clearly to be -sinners. God was ready to forgive sins -though the ground of it is not yet stated -with regard to every one who truly turns to Him. Yet, according to this, man is under a legal system still; and it is of the essence of a legal system that God should say that He can “by no means clear the guilty.” How reconcile this with the forgiveness which He has just declared?

Where shall the line be drawn? How much sin will God forgive?

And where will He put the limit? Here man would interpret in the easiest way according to the measure of his own light thoughts, making God such an one as himself. It is of all importance, therefore, to show precisely what God means, and to declare also from His side what must be the issue of such a trial. And this is not held back at all. The ten commandments are the measure of the righteousness God requires. But who can yield to Him this requirement?

And if that be the measure (however often God may come in to cancel the past, and bid him begin again) will man, in result, be anything else but guilty, at any time God comes in? and then how can God clear him? Thus, clearly, it is of this second giving of the law that the apostle asserts it is “the ministration of death and condemnation.” No need to say so as to the first.

It was of the time when God had declared His mercy, and thus His glory, which made the face of Moses to shine, that the apostle is speaking; and how important it is to realize that God here actually cuts off all hope as to the issue. No man can stand before Me and live, He says. How far does that go? Moses himself, the mediator of this covenant, can in no wise behold His face, as He declares. After He has gone by, God will take away His hand and let him see His back parts; but this is God turned -His back, not the face. And this is the constant tenor of the law. Man misreads it because he is anxious to maintain his own righteousness in whatever fragment of it he thinks himself able. But grace was always in God’s heart; and grace is the only possible hope for any. “But if it be of grace,” says the apostle, “it is no more of works, otherwise grace is no more grace.” You cannot mix these principles at all. The legal system could not but be a ministration of death to man. And this yet has its use, as is also plain. The law becomes in this very way the handmaid of the gospel, cutting off all hope derived from human effort, and thus making us debtors to God’s grace alone. How suited to this character of it, then, that the law should affirm, not the penalty of eternity (unseen as yet), but the penalty which man can plainly see exacted from man day by day, the penalty which in its universality is designed to cut off hope absolutely from all on that ground. Thus the death must be the present death; and God can maintain the penalty here and now, while holding to His own grace as to the eternity that follows. All is absolutely clear and perfectly consistent. The death here in Ezekiel, then, is not what we think of as the death of the soul. It is “the soul that sinneth” that dies, true; but what is the soul in this Old Testament language? Just the person himself, the man who was made “a living soul.” The soul of the father and the soul of the son is just the person of the father and of the son, and this use is retained in our common language.* And it is well to see how perfectly all this unites with the whole character of Ezekiel’s prophecy, which contemplates the world and God’s judgment of the nations as nations, of Israel as a nation, judgment executed by special instruments, as here by Nebuchadnezzar. Eternal judgment is entirely out of the question. It is not Nebuchadnezzar who inflicts eternal penalty.
Another difficulty must also be considered here. It will be said, and rightly, that the penalty of death, of which God speaks by Ezekiel in, “The soul that sinneth, it shall die” can scarcely be a penalty resting upon all, when God Himself positively exempts the righteous from it. “The soul that sinneth, it shall die” is but in contrast with the righteous man who shall not die, but live; and that God is not speaking of absolute righteousness, but of those who in heart are His own, who are constantly spoken of, in the Old Testament especially, as “the righteous.” Nor that it means the righteous by faith, as it was not the principle yet clearly announced. We acknowledge this to be true. It is the man righteous in character of whom God is speaking, distinguished in this way from the wicked, even while he “the righteous” lays no claim to any absolute righteousness. Yet he escapes death as it is spoken of here. We can easily see how some at once would say: Here, at least, it must be eternal death that is intended. But, whatever the implication, that is not what is meant. It is death, no question, but as a special judgment of God -not as what comes upon man so universally that he thinks of it as the law of nature with him; but it is a cutting off before the time, in such a way as declares God’s wrath upon the person so cut off. It is the same here as ever in the Old Testament therefore; just what we call natural death, but as a special infliction. For instance,we have no difficulty in understanding what the apostle means when he says to the Corinthians (because of their profanation of the Lord’s supper). “For this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep.” And he adds as to it: “For if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged,” while at the same time carefully preserving the grace in which the Christian stands by the declaration, “But when we are judged, we are chastened of the Lord, that we should not be condemned with the world.” Thus there is a death in judgment here which is, nevertheless, not eternal judgment, but which is God’s open manifestation of what departure from Him naturally leads to. So the apostle John speaks again: “If any one see his brother sin a sin which is not unto death, he shall ask, and he shall give him life, for them that sin not unto death. There is a sin unto death: I do not say that he shall pray for it.” This is perhaps more than what is necessary to be said upon the matter, but Christians and commentators have so largely gone astray with regard to just such things. As already said, Ezekiel keeps constantly in view what the law has in view, the tribunal of God in His providential dealings with men upon earth. He is, through all this, contemplating the issue and the end of this very legal covenant; and thus the penalty which He announces is the penalty in human history. In the first place, then, the Lord speaks of His way with a righteous man -not absolutely such, as already said, but distinctively so: “If a man be righteous, and do judgment and justice, he hath not eaten upon the mountains, nor lifted up his eyes to the idols of the house of Israel, . . . he hath walked in my statutes and kept mine ordinances to deal faithfully; he is righteous; he shall surely live, saith the Lord Jehovah.” This was entirely subversive, therefore, of the proverb which Israel was using. There is no question about their ancestry; each one was responsible for himself; and this is the basic principle of all that follows. 2. In the second place we have the son of the righteous, or the son of the wicked, as he is himself righteous or wicked. First, as to the son of the righteous: If this righteous man “have begotten a son that is violent, a shedder of blood . . . shall he live because of his father’s righteousness?” This was an important question for the Jew, and especially for the Jew of the captivity, who with the nation under God’s dealings, cut off from their land and temple, more and more learned to fall back upon the merits of Abraham, which Rabbis pressed to the extent of involving in some sense the acceptance of all his natural seed. The question is turned back upon them. Here was a father who had not eaten sour grapes; did it prevent his children having their teeth on edge? God was dealing with them for their own sins; and all the privileges they had through Abraham were necessarily forfeited, if in their own character they were not the true seed of Abraham.*
Next comes the question of the son of the wicked man, who “sees all his father’s sins which he hath done, and considereth, and doeth not such like.” This should ever be the result with one who has had such an object lesson before him. If he read it aright, so as to turn from his father’s iniquity and to walk in the divine statutes, should he die for the iniquity of his father? Nay, he should surely live. Father and son are thus judged according to their own personal character. But they raise the objection: “Why? Doth not the son bear the iniquity of his father?” Spite of many commentators, the second commandment of the law is evidently in question here. It was that which gave a seeming excuse for the proverb itself. For God had declared that He was “a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate Me, and showing mercy unto thousands of them, that love Me and keep my commandments.” It seems evident that the resentful thought that is in the mind of those overtaken by the present calamities of the nation, is that the third and fourth generations were suffering for faults that were in no wise their own. Allowing the wickedness of former generations -which is not so hard to confess as one’s own -they admit that their fathers indeed ate the sour grapes, but not themselves. But the commandment speaks quite otherwise than this; for those who love God and keep His commandments have in it the definite assurance of mercy to be shown them, and could not come, therefore, under the contradictory law of inheriting their father’s sins. This is quite plain as to the law. But it may be argued, Is there not a testimony of fact, however, which we cannot help taking as an interpretation of the commandment? Is there not a law of heredity entailing the most serious consequences? What do we all inherit from Adam? There is but one answer to this. We certainly inherit both a sinful nature and its consequences; but the nature is not in question here.

It is the penalty, of which the popular proverb here is speaking. A fallen nature we all have, truly -though we must remember that man is not as a beast to be bound by his nature, nor to be excused by it. Let a man argue as he will about what he has inherited from Adam, he knows in his own soul, as to every sin that he has committed, that he is responsible, and why he is responsible for it. He cannot put his sins to Adam’s account. They are his own. Theology may complicate matters for him, indeed, but we are not concerned with that now -it is looked at elsewhere. (See Romans 5:12-21, Notes.) As to penalty, the apostle plainly declares that “by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men” (not, for that Adam sinned, but) “for that all have sinned.” Any one who can say he has not sinned, may justly argue that he should be free from a penalty which comes to him simply from his fathers. But let us look at this in the light of some examples that may help us. The Christian at least is free from wrath. He is accepted in Christ before God in all the fulness of Christ’s own acceptance. With regard to him the Lord distinctly states: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on Him that sent Me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into judgment (as the word is), but is passed from death unto life” (John 5:24). In this thought of judgment (not as the holy discipline of God with His people, as in 1 Corinthians 11:30-32, but) as true penalty, the Christian is wholly free; yet he dies as others do (unless the Lord comes before), for death came into the world through Adam.

Plainly, we must carefully distinguish here. Death for the Christian has changed its character. The Lord has pronounced with regard to this that he who believeth on Him, though he were dead, yet shall live, and whosoever liveth and believeth in Him shall never die (John 11:25-26). Yet we must admit a death which is the result of chastisement. Discipline, so far from being penalty merely, is that which secures our being partakers of God’s holiness (Hebrews 12:10). It is a proof thus of sonship, as the apostle says. An Old Testament example is of great value to us here. The book of Job gives an account of the trial of a man who had not his like upon the earth; a man that feared God and eschewed evil. Yet Job is permitted to be in Satan’s hands in such a way that his suffering through it is proverbial. His friends argue, as men so commonly do, that this must be the visitation of God for sins in his life, thus detected and exposed, in spite of all his righteous seeming. Of the suffering there was no doubt. Of its being distinctly from God there can be no proper doubt either.

Yet Job could proclaim his blameless conduct without possibility of any one controverting it. But there was another cause, which the speech of Elihu (who alone has God’s mind with regard to it) brings into open view. There is often an inner condition of heart which has to be reached, and which Job’s very claim of righteousness, truthful as in a sense it was, clearly manifests. He has to come where, instead of any such claim to righteousness, he can only say: “I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth Thee; wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:5-6). By such examples as these we can see clearly how the fruits and consequences of sin -which is indeed penalty for the unrepentant sinner -may be found in the case of the righteous. If a man like Job needed the discipline through which he passed to open his eyes to his condition -to sin in his very nature -it is plain that no one could think of being exempt from these ways of a holy and merciful God with regard to him. And proportionately as we have little knowledge of ourselves, these ways may be mysterious to us. They were surely that to Job until they found their interpretation; and it is plain that the great point through it all is, as Elihu says, to turn man from his purpose, from all his own ends and ways, and to hide pride from man. Pride is that which, above all, obscures the ways of God with us, while it necessitates a severity of trial which, arguing from the mere outward conduct, when there is even a general desire to be right with God, is hard to penetrate. Thus we can see why, in a world like this, the righteous and the wicked seem often to fare so similarly; indeed, as the psalmist thought, the wicked may get on best. He found that he must be in the sanctuary to understand this. 3. We have now another case considered; which closes the account. It is that of the sinner turning to righteousness; or, on the other hand, the turning of the righteous outwardly to sin. In either case, the judgment must be according to the end of the trial. Former sin, or former righteousness, cannot be remembered; that is, the sin of the past will not make the present righteousness to which one has turned, unavailing; nor, on the other hand, the past righteousness make the present sin to be cancelled by it. We must remember in all this that it is not the final account in eternity that is spoken of, but the present entering into the favor or under the judgment of God in government.

Nor have we the grace of God’s mercy, as the gospel has shown it to us, spoken of at all. It is God’s ways in government that are before us, which is the constant theme of the prophet.

We must remember also how, in the case of sin like David’s, there might have to be, as far as outward experiences go, the remembrance of the sin, even when it had been forgiven and the soul was once more in the unclouded favor of God. The need in David’s case is explicitly given to us. Because he had made the enemies of the Lord to blaspheme, God must glorify Himself as to the sin, not merely on account of any disciplinary need on David’s part, but because God cares for His glory among men in general. He must maintain His character, and show that He cannot pass over evil in the lives of His own people because they are that. Thus the sword was never to depart from David’s house, and the sin that he had committed sprang up again and again in his own family history. How great the need that there should be no right question with regard to the holiness of Him who yet delights in mercy, abundant in goodness and in truth at the same time!

But with Him, “mercy rejoiceth against judgment,” and He emphatically declares, therefore, that He can have no pleasure in the death of the sinner. In fact, the nation of Israel as a whole were in such a state as necessitated judgment.

The darkness over the ways of God was with them the fruit of that darkened understanding which a heart turned away from Him will surely produce; and he closes here with an earnest appeal to their conscience and heart together. Their ways, not His, were unequal; of necessity therefore, judgment was at hand; but still He would have them turn from all their transgressions, that they might not be to their destruction. “Cast away from you all your transgressions wherewith ye have transgressed, and make you a new heart and a new spirit: for why will ye die, O house of Israel?” How fully is man’s responsibility for his whole condition recognized in this appeal! It is not, of course, what the Lord urged upon Nicodemus, when the new light was dawning upon him, that man must be born again; but it is responsibility pressed to the full, and man is fully recognized as one who ought to be master of himself, capable of such appeal as is made to him here: “For why will ye die, O house of Israel? For I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth, saith the Lord Jehovah; therefore, turn ye and live.”