Ezekiel 13

Ezekiel 13:2-6

According to their own inclinations and affections, they publish their own imaginations without any warrant from me: and are extremely crafty, covetous, hardened, and mischievous. But they never do any thing to reform the people, or to prevent judgments, or for the security and defence of church or state, which can enable them to hold out in the day of the Lord’s judgments. Yea, their visions are but false and counterfeit, though, by their high pretences to inspiration, they have made the credulous people to believe their predictions will be accomplished

Ezekiel 13:9-16

I will manifest my power in punishing these false prophets, and will expel them from among my people, and I will deny them a return from captivity, because some of them affirmed their seductions for truths, and others supported them by specious, but weak, pretences. Yea the Chaldeans, by their desolating ravage and fury, shall disprove their counterfeit omcles, and every argument used to support them

Ezekiel 13:18-21

They, by their signs of pillows and kerchiefs, and especially by their flattering predictions of peace and prosperity, lull all ranks into vain confidence and carnal security. By fitting their predictions to every one’s humour, they promote their destruction instead of saving them. For the most pitiful rewards, they pretend my name and authority to countenance their abominable flatteries, denouncing destruction to those in Babylon, whom I will preserve; and promising life and liberty to those in Jerusalem, whom I will destroy. Therefore will I so refute and expose their delusions, that no one shall be in danger of being ensnared thereby; and I will make them more abhorred than ever they were loved or feared

REFLECTIONS UPON CHAP. XIII.—God never places any in offices for which he does not qualify them. Nor have covetous and men-pleasing preachers any proper evidence of a divine mission. How daring and blasphemous is it to counterfeit commissions from God, or to father the devil’s falsehoods, flatteries, and impietics, upon him! Very dreadful shortly shall be the condition of such. And they who will not be awed by God’s threatenings, forfeit his promised blessings. Alas, how terrible are the winds and storms of vengeance that God has in readiness to plague his opposers! And none shall share more dreadfully in them than deceitful preachers, who have flattered their hearers in wickedness. Shamefully shall they be stripped of their usurped honour, and exposed to indignation and death. And all their acts of seduction, their tormenting of the godly and encouraging of the wicked, will at last redound to their own infamy and ruin. And it is a great mercy to be delivered from such as would impose on, or tyrannize over, our conscience