Ezekiel 23:22

In Ezekiel 23 the Lord justifies His judgment on Jerusalem. He points to the wickedness and unfaithfulness of her walk. Her unfaithfulness with the nations brought her early course to mind. The same conduct showed the same nature. She has ended as she began, because at heart she was the same. Samaria's fate would be hers.

Ezekiel 23 describes the sins of Samaria (Israel) and Jerusalem (Judah) in the most solemn terms. In each case forbidden dealings with the nations are the ground of the Lord's judgment. They were sisters in sin, and God would judge them alike. He defends His judgment: "Because you have forgotten me and cast me behind your back, therefore you yourself must bear the consequences of your lewdness and whoring." They were to reap what they had sown.

When her day of lawless self-will is past, the day of the Lord finds all her former lovers gathered against her. The gathering has come now. The sons of Babylon head the list with all the Chaldeans. Assyria too follows with Babylon, under the power of Nebuchadnezzar.

These qualities once spoke of the energy and ability that carried away the hearts of the Israelites. The same terms describe them here, but now they work in an opposite interest. How a person's old attractions face them in the day of reckoning that comes for each one! They work their will without mercy, though they are only the instruments of God's judgment, as He declares.

Not content with Assyria, she longed for the Chaldeans and their idol worship. The sons of Babylon defiled her; but even as they defiled her, her mind turned away from them. So it always is where the favour and the will of God are absent. Closeness in evil soon turns to mutual disgust. But there is worse. "My mind," says the Lord, "was turned away from her, as my mind was turned away from her sister." Jerusalem was given over to a corrupted mind.

Ephraim's history here is plain to read: "I gave her into the hand of her lovers, into the hand of the sons of Assyria, on whom she doted. These uncovered her nakedness; they seized her sons and her daughters, and they killed her with the sword, and she became a byword among women, and they executed judgment upon her."

Judah was morally worse than Israel. Yet God raised up some righteous kings there, to keep His visible connection with them. In the end He had to judge, and the kingdom of Judah was carried away captive, as Israel had been. They took no notice of the judgment that fell on the sister kingdom. The many mercies they received from God did not humble them. He waited long over the place where His name was recorded, even while He declared the sin of Judah to be greater than the sin of Israel. Their cup of wrongdoing was not yet full, but it was filling fast. At last the king of Babylon carries out the decree of God.

Yet on God's part all this severity is not mere judgment. As He puts it here, the effect is to make the lewdness of Oholibah stop, and to make her turn away in disgust from the things that once attracted her. A person must come to himself before he can come to God, and this is the process through which God was now bringing Israel.