From the Open Field: What Ezekiel 16 Says About Grace

I was reading Ezekiel 16 when the Lord’s description of Jerusalem moved me. I realized that as I read this beginning passage and the verses that follow through a personal lens—what my spiritual life looked like before Jesus—those detestable practices described later are much more heartbreaking. In fact, the language used elsewhere in this chapter is far less offensive when you realize the depth to which Israel sank.

If you consider how human hearts ebb and flow between love and hatred, between hyperbolic passions, then the graphic language used later in this chapter is much easier to understand. Certainly, I can’t be the only one to have loved so deeply as to want the moon for someone and then, after betrayal, to declare they are dead to me.

The key to recognizing how the beginning of Ezekiel 16 spiritually relates to salvation is in verse 3:

Tears

remain,
beds
of
pain,
on
streaked
faces.

When God Hasn’t Spoken

I was struck by this passage from Ezekiel 13:

“Now, son of man, set your face against the daughters of your people who prophesy out of their own imagination. Prophesy against them and say, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Woe to the women who sew magic charms on all their wrists and make veils of various lengths for their heads in order to ensnare people. Will you ensnare the lives of my people but preserve your own? You have profaned me among my people for a few handfuls of barley and scraps of bread. By lying to my people, who listen to lies, you have killed those who should not have died and have spared those who should not live.

Ezekiel 13:17-19 (NIV)

What caught my attention was the charge, “you have killed those who should not have died and have spared those who should not live.”

Words

written
on
torn
pages,

ripped
and
scattered

lifted
twirling

carried
by
gusts
of
longing
and
desire.