epcblog

Devotional thoughts (Monday through Thursday mornings) from the pastor of Exeter Presbyterian Church in Exeter, NH // Sunday Worship 10:30am // 73 Winter Street

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Ezekiel 23

God calls us His holy bride. We know the promise of God concerning His church. We will be without spot or blemish or any such thing, the perfectly radiant bride of our great God and King. Despite this glorious future, the Lord is very aware of our heritage of ugly depravity. When He speaks about His Old Covenant people and even about His church in this age, we hear the Lord’s honest assessment of our sinful patterns. Both of these true messages stand side by side in the Scriptures. We are to be the perfected bride of Christ, and we have been the depraved prostitute who repeatedly rebelled against the Lord. Only God can bring us from our old filthy condition to our final glorious hope.

Ezekiel 23 is one of the most memorable parables in the Scriptures, forcing us to face up to the sin of God’s beloved people. They are presented as two whorish sisters named Oholah which stands for Samaria or the northern kingdom of Israel, and Oholibah which stands for Jerusalem or the southern kingdom of Judah. Long before they were divided into southern and northern peoples, even before they were delivered out of bondage in the days of Moses, they were unfaithful to God in their youth during their time of captivity in Egypt. The names of the sisters given in this chapter are both based on the word for tent. Our bodies are called “tents” in the Scriptures. Israel and Judah have defiled their tents with their idolatry and immorality.

The northern kingdom was the first of the two sisters to fall. She lusted after Assyrian idols, and God gave her over to the Assyrians. The men she so desired ended up destroying both her and her children. The other sister, Judah, was not far behind Israel, and she soon surpassed her in lewdness. She too wanted the Assyrians and suffered their abuse, but she then became impressed with the Babylonians, and they also defiled her. God turned in disgust from Judah. If Judah had returned to God at some point and truly cried out to Him for help, surely He could have pushed away these foreign enemies. Instead they came against her from every side. They judged God’s nation, but in that judgment, it was God Himself who was actually directing His jealousy against His own people. Foreign armies disfigured the faces of survivors of Judah, and seized the descendants of God’s people and killed them. Judah followed in the way of her northern sister Israel, and she was forced to drink her sister’s awful cup. What was in that cup? It contained drunkenness, sorrow, horror, and desolation. At root, the problem for both sisters came down to this: They had forgotten God. They had cast Him behind their back like a religious statue that no longer brought them any luck. Therefore they needed to bear the consequences for their spiritual adultery.

They violated the Lord’s commandments and turned to false gods, though they claimed to follow the Lord. They sacrificed their children to idols and then came into the Lord’s sanctuary on the same day. They made themselves attractive for their horrible works of seduction and lewdness. The day had to come when they would be declared to be what they obviously were. They were adulteresses and murderers, and they had brought much trouble upon themselves and others.

What would the Lord do to His beloved bride? As He had warned them for centuries, He would bring a vast host against them, and they would be destroyed. They would feel the weight of stones upon their flesh, and the cut of sharp steel upon their bodies. They were willing to give up their children to their lust for idols, and now their young ones would be killed in judgment and their houses burned with fire. In this way the Lord would put an end to their wicked behavior. By this horrible sentence, an example would forever be set for us to warn us to flee from idolatry and immorality. By this frightening discipline, many people would see that the Lord is a righteous and holy God.

The fact of God’s judgment in this life and the next is somewhat more complex than we might first imagine. There is discipline that we experience here on earth, and there is an eternal judgment that will come at the return of the Messiah. During our lives now, there is a covenant community, and we are to be a part of it. That covenant community is stained with serious sin, yet the Lord is always bringing people to repentance. Many are exercising faith day by day, and despite our defiling sin, we experience real forgiveness and are kept by God through the righteousness of our Redeemer.

Nonetheless, not everyone in that covenant community will have eternal safety. God will separate those who are recipients of His mercy from those who will only know His justice. All seemed to profess faith, but not all have genuine faith. All were also guilty of enough sin to justly condemn them forever, but some are credited with the perfect righteousness of Christ. How will the Lord make the distinction between the holy and the profane? Israel and Judah in the Old Testament age, and the Lord’s church in the current age, may face His discipline and even death now, yet could it be that may of those same souls that face temporal judgment today will be saved for eternity? Others may live peaceful, long, and happy lives, but will some of these be turned away as evildoers on the Day of Judgment, never really having the true gift of saving faith?

If we had all the specific and personal answers to these questions than we could do what only the Lord and His angels will be able to do when Jesus returns: perfectly separate the wheat from the chaff. For now, it must be enough for us to know that today is still the right day for God’s people to turn away from our base spiritual adulteries and all our immoral thoughts and actions that defile God’s people. May the Lord fill us with His Spirit, grant to us repentance day by day, and keep us for the life to come, where His bride will be perfectly pure and eternally blessed through the blood of our righteous husband, Jesus Christ.

posted by Pastor Magee @ 7:00 AM

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