Ezekiel 23:30

Here the holy city is compared with Samaria. They are two sisters of one parent, the Jewish people — sisters too in their idolatrous wickedness. The evil is traced back to its earliest appearance. The idols that seduced them in Egypt exposed them at last to Assyria and to Babylon... Their symbolic names here are Aholah the elder and Aholibah, her sister; the first meaning "her own tent," the second, "my tent is in her." The worship of Samaria was self-willed, at best an imitation, but really independence of Jehovah. But in Jerusalem Jehovah Himself arranged the divine service as His own appointment. Still, not one only but both were His.

Was Jerusalem warned? Did the sight of Aholah do Aholibah any good? On the contrary, "she was more corrupt in her lust than her sister." The younger and more favoured sister followed the elder and was even coarser in her idolatry... Not content with Assyria, she longed after the Chaldeans and their idol worship. And the sons of Babylon defiled her; but even though they defiled her, her mind turned away from them. So it always is where the favour and the will of God are absent. Close contact with evil is quickly followed by mutual disgust.

The same qualities that once spoke of the energy and ability that carried away the hearts of the Israelites are listed again here in the same words. But now they serve the opposite interest. How a man's old attractions face him in the day of reckoning that comes for each one!

If the children of Israel would abandon Jehovah to serve idols, they are themselves given up by Jehovah to serve idolaters. It is so with us. If we sin, this sets the measure and shape of our chastisement. And so grace works repentance when we turn and cry to the Lord in our distress.

In a worldly course, the world in fact outdoes the people of God, whose own things fail them at the very start the moment they seek the world. In the outside world there is full room for all the energy, ambition, luxury and self-enjoyment that the words here speak of. They speak of youth, vigour, and the keen pursuit of what man counts as riches — riches that make him all he can hope to be. These things attract — alas, how much — the people of God themselves!

And let us also never forget this. As believers, God has brought us into such close and intimate relations with Him that if we play Him false and enter into guilty alliance with the world, only one sin among mankind can compare with it — the very terrible sin of adultery.

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