It started out innocently enough. A week or so ago, not having read Ezekiel for awhile, I thought I’d wander through the exilic prophet just to reacquaint myself with his message and refresh my recollection of some verses. He’s been called the prophet of personal responsibility and, since I’m big on that, I like what he has to say and how he says it.

I never made it past chapter 16, though, and keep getting pulled back to chapter 6. God seems to be trying to get my attention about something.

I’m not sure I know the extent or the depth of the message He is trying to impress upon me, but at least part of it seems clear. What follows are the impressions and thoughts that have surfaced from a couple of weeks of reading and re-reading the sixth chapter. I’ll reproduce critical sections of the passage here, making comments as I go.

I’ll start with a little background, first about me (and likely some of you) and then about the author and the book itself.

My personal sitz im lieben: Three-plus decades ago, when I became a Christian, I learned a lot of things – some good, some not-so good. One of the good things I learned was about the eternal security of the believer: having been born again, I was rescued from the wrath of God, my sins – past, present, and future – were paid for by the sacrifice of Christ, and I would never be eventually and eternally separated from Him. I was signed, sealed and delivered – I’m His.

A not-so-good thing I heard was that the “fear of the Lord” really just meant a reverential awe of God. The phrase does, of course, mean precisely that at times: it also means “fear” as in “terror” in other places but, as a believer, I didn’t have to worry about the latter. It was an either/or situation: it either meant “awe” or “fear.”

I’m not completely sold on that anymore. I do believe that the Hebrew and Greek words can mean “reverential awe” and “fear,” but it’s an “and” situation and not an “or” situation. That is, fear is intermingled with reverential awe; reverential awe has an element of fear in it.

I am finally fearful. Or, more accurately, reverentially terrified.

I don’t fear loss of salvation or eternal condemnation: after three decades of walking with Christ, if I’m not “in” by now I’m never going to be “in.” No, I’m secure with the eternal stuff: thankfully, Jesus Christ died for me: my sins have been imputed to Him and His righteousness has been credited to me. It’s hard to fathom the love that would precipitate such a sacrifice and transfer, but I believe it. I’m secure in His commitment to me even though my trust ebbs and my doubts flow.

What scares me, er, makes me fearful, I mean, fills me with reverential terror is what God may choose to do in this lifetime in order to purify me and conform me to the image of Jesus Christ. I firmly believe that God’s glory is the greatest good, not my personal comfort or happiness, and that He will do whatever is necessary to finish as much of the work in me as is reasonable in this lifetime. I don’t conceive of God as some sort of Celestial Ogre hammering away at me without regard for my well-being or feelings, but I do think that His love is such that although He takes me where I am, He does not leave me where He found me. It is purifying. It is holy. It is relentless.

Like a lot of Western evangelicals, I’ve gotten pretty lackadaisical and complacent about things in my life. I’ve become so callused to some of my habitual sins that I don’t even notice them anymore or, when I do, I don’t see them as a big deal anyhow. You’ll have to trust me on this but they really aren’t big sins – like adultery, stealing, lying, murder or such. It’s just a little gossip here, a little envy there, an infrequent (I tell myself) failure of love when I’m too busy. No big deal.

Ezekiel’s milieu: To say the times of the prophet were turbulent is misleading: our own times, in contrast, are tranquil and stable. The empire of Assyria, which had conquerored the Northern Kingdom and taken the inhabitants captive, had begun to crumble. The balance of power was shifting to the emergent Babylonians: by the time of the writing of the Book of Ezekiel, the Babylonians had already carried off thousands and thousands of Israelites from Judah, the southern kingdom, to captivity.

Although he wrote about the inevitable fall of the city of Jerusalem, Ezekiel lived in Babylon with other Jews that had been transported from their promised land. Jerusalem remained intact – for now – but was not safe from judgment – God’s judgment – through His instrument Babylon, the new power in the Middle East. The citizens of the city believed that the presence of the Temple of God would assure its perpetuity and integrity: surely God would not allow infidels and pagans to ravish His holy domicile . . . even if the Israelites had already done it themselves!

According to Ezekiel, He would do exactly that.

The Israelites were God’s chosen people, selected by Him to be His representatives on earth and to serve as a gateway through which all the nations of the earth would come to a knowledge of Him. They were to be a holy nation – that is, a nation set apart from worldliness and sin – and to corporately reflect the greatness and glory of God to their unbelieving neighbors. Their privilege of being God’s elected people was great; their responsibility equaled their election; the consequences for failure or disobedience were proportional to their privileges and responsibilities.

It is to these two situations and environments – first the Israelites, then my own – that the prophet writes.

1 And the word of the LORD came to me saying,
2 ‘Son of man, set your face toward the mountains of Israel, and prophesy against them
3 and say, “Mountains of Israel, listen to the word of the Lord GOD! Thus says the Lord GOD to the mountains, the hills, the ravines and the valleys: ‘Behold, I Myself am going to bring a sword on you, and I will destroy your high places.
4 ‘So your altars will become desolate and your incense altars will be smashed; and I will make your slain fall in front of your idols.
5 ‘I will also lay the dead bodies of the sons of Israel in front of their idols; and I will scatter your bones around your altars.
6 ‘In all your dwellings, cities will become waste and the high places will be desolate, that your altars may become waste and desolate, your idols may be broken and brought to an end, your incense altars may be cut down, and your works may be blotted out.
7 ‘The slain will fall among you, and you will know that I am the LORD.’”‘”

God has the prophet speak to the mountains, hills, ravines, and valleys of Israel because these were generally the sites of their idolatrous altars. He is saying, in effect, that nothing was going to be left unjudged, that there was no place safe from His wrath. Yahweh was coming to remove the high places – the idolatrous sites – and He was bringing His sword with Him. The altars and incense altars were going to be utterly destroyed – but that wasn’t all.

I will make your slain fall in front of your idols. I will also lay the dead bodies of the sons of Israel in front of their idols; and I will scatter your bones around your altars.”

Having the bodies and bones strewn about the altars to idols had two effects: first, it defiled the altars and made them unclean. To touch a dead body was to become ritually unclean and for an altar to be touched with a dead body was to render it useless until it was cleansed.

Second, and more importantly, God was laying bare the impotence of the idols of Israel: surely if the idols had any substance or power they would be able to protect the people from Him! But they couldn’t and Yahweh was going to provide the Israelites with a first-hand, in-your-face object lesson of the futility of trusting in other gods. No one, nothing can stand before Him or thwart His purposes.

The effect and purpose is made clear:

The slain will fall among you, and you will know that I am the LORD.”

If you’re like me, the words “you will know that I am the LORD” just kind of lie there on the page, not really communicating much other than a fact of which we are already aware: God is Yahweh, Yahweh is God; there is no other. With apologies to Tim and others, I’ll offer the following rendering of the phrase as offered up by Samuel L. Jackson in the movie Pulp Fiction. (You’ll need the sound turned up for this; hopefully it will work on your system.) Whether you like the movie or not, there is power and fear in his delivery of the line:

Ezek 25.17

Maybe it’s just me, but I believe the prophets were pretty passionate fellows when it came to God’s holiness and the proclamation of His words and judgments upon the nation of Israel. God was out to prove a point – that He is the LORD – and He was going to extreme lengths to do so. I doubt that Ezekiel announced this as though he were describing additional toppings for your double cheeseburger.

9 Then those of you who escape will remember Me among the nations to which they will be carried captive, how I have been hurt by their adulterous hearts which turned away from Me, and by their eyes which played the harlot after their idols; and they will loathe themselves in their own sight for the evils which they have committed, for all their abominations.
10 “Then they will know that I am the LORD; I have not said in vain that I would inflict this disaster on them.”

God is very serious about two things: sin and His holiness. He is not going to tolerate the sins of His people indefinitely and He is not going to compromise His holiness. God is serious about sin because He is serious about His holiness: He will purge the evil in His people no matter what it takes or what it costs them in temporal terms. By His terrible acts of judgment upon His people, God will (1) remind His people that He – and He alone – is God and that He will not share His glory with another, and (2) demonstrate to the unbelievers nearby that He is deathly serious about these things even if His people are not. If they will not reflect His holiness, then He will make them an object lesson by which others may learn to fear Him.

13 Then you will know that I am the LORD, when their slain are among their idols around their altars, on every high hill, on all the tops of the mountains, under every green tree and under every leafy oak—the places where they offered soothing aroma to all their idols.
14 “So throughout all their habitations I will stretch out My hand against them and make the land more desolate and waste than the wilderness toward Diblah; thus they will know that I am the LORD.”

Israel was severely disciplined not in spite of the fact that they were the chosen people of God, but because they were the chosen people of God. At the present time that responsibility has been transferred to the Church: we are now the elect of God and we are charged with reflecting His glory and proclaiming His salvation. The privilege, the responsibility, the consequences are all enormous.

The people of Jerusalem were lulled into a false sense of safety because of the Temple in their midst. Everything would be all right, they thought, because the dwelling place of God was in the city. The Church dare not make the same foolish assumption: our eternal salvation may indeed be secure, but we fool ourselves if we think that we are safe from the same kind of discipline experienced by the people of Israel.

We tell ourselves that we are not guilty of idolatry, that we have erected no altars to foreign gods, that we would never sacrifice our children as did some of the Israelites. But God sees our hearts, and He will later say through Ezekiel,

Son of man, these men have set up their idols in their hearts and have put right before their faces the stumbling block of their iniquity. Should I be consulted by them at all?” – 14.3

An idol of the heart – that which we serve, pursue, desire, and trust in – is no less offensive to God, no less sinful than something carved from wood or constructed of stone. Whatever our security may be, whatever the passion of our heart, whatever the purpose we serve – God will not tolerate it if it is anything other than Him.

The day for the church will one day come when the bodies of Christians will be scattered before the idols of their hearts – banks, governments, stadiums, schools – in a demonstration of the utter inability of any of these things to save. Perhaps not literally slaughtered, but certainly just as effectively crushed. Eternally secure; temporally undone and destroyed.

There is but one God; there is but one Savior. God will have His way and will make certain that all of His children know without doubt:

“I am the LORD.”


2 Cor 1:13