The Bible in a Year – 4 June

If this is your first viewing, please see my Introduction before reading this.

4 June. Ezekiel chapters 16-17

When Ezekiel was not acting out the prophecies he received, he couched them in terms of allegories or parables, much as Jesus did with his teachings.  The first of these chapters pictures the nation of Israel/Judah as a prostitute, or adulterous wife, who left her husband (the true god) who had loved her as an abandoned child, married her as a young woman and brought her up into a royal household.  She left him and slept with all her neighbours and strangers, even paying them for love.  This could be seen as relating to Israel’s political alliances or the people’s worship of false gods – probably both.  The use of this imagery is found elsewhere in the Bible, but never in such an extended form.

 

Chapter 17 pictures those who had been taken into captivity in Babylon in a very different way, as a cutting from a cedar (a very large, useful and long-lived tree, often used in the Bible as another image of God’s love).  The cutting was planted in Babylon by God’s will but tried to transplant itself again to Egypt (with which Judah had tried to form an alliance), but the attempt was doomed to failure.  The only successful transplant would be that initiated by God, who would take a further cutting and re-establish it to become a mature tree back in Jerusalem.

 

Whether you prefer the gentle gardening imagery of a tree and its cutting, or the bloodier and more shocking image of the prostitute, the lesson is clear: unfaithfulness to God is every bit as bad, or worse, than unfaithfulness to your own husband or wife; and no attempt at saving yourself will succeed, as God is the only one who can save you.