Ezekiel 16:15-43

16:15-16 | Instead of recognizing that everything she had, she owed to the Lord, Jerusalem quickly forsook her heavenly husband, forgetting God’s warning given long before (Deut. 6:10-12), and began to seek the favor and protection of the pagan nations around her.

16:17-22 | The city quickly went from bad to worse. The more it sought close political, economic, and religious connections with its pagan neighbors, the more it began to resemble them, even in matters of religion. The city became a hotbed of idolatry, with its people sacrificing to various foreign gods. They even sacrificed their own children to Molech, “the detestable god of the Ammonites” (Lev. 18:21; 2 Kgs. 23:10).

16:23-26 | Jerusalem actually endorsed and even recruited heathen practices. Pagan shrines and groves of trees used for occultic practices began to pop up all over the city, causing its former beauty to degenerate into tawdry decadence. Along with this religious decline, and rather than look to the Lord for help and renewal, Jerusalem’s leaders turned to the very nation that had enslaved the Hebrews so long before.

16:27-34 | God’s judgment did not fall all at once on the idolatrous city but came progressively. First, the Lord allowed the Philistines to oppress the people and to reduce the amount of territory that Israel controlled. Rather than returning to God, however, the nation looked first to Assyria, and then to Babylon, for help (2 Kgs. 20:12-19; Isa. 20:5-6; 30:1-5).

16:35-43 | God would judge Jerusalem and the entire Israelite nation by using the very nations with which His people had committed spiritual adultery. In the end, Babylon would breach the city’s walls, ransack Jerusalem, strip it bare of its treasures, burn it, and leave it a smoldering heap. When the few descendants of the catastrophe’s survivors left Babylonian exile many decades later, God finally would have succeeded in banishing idolatry from His holy nation.