Ezekiel 15:1-16:14

15:6-8 | Although God had intended for Israel to be a fruitful vine, showing the world how righteousness exalts a nation and thereby blessing the nations and encouraging them to seek the Lord, it had become dead and useless, fit only for burning. The deportations that occurred in 605 and 597 BC were meant to be warnings (They will go out from one fire), but the warnings were unheeded. So God would totally destroy Jerusalem in 586 BC (Another fire shall devour them). Persistent unfaithfulness always carries serious consequences.

16:2 | Many of the exiles apparently did not believe that Judah and Jerusalem had become as corrupt as Ezekiel insisted. So God instructed the prophet to make the nation’s desperate sin very clear to the remnant of His people. While God’s grace always should remain our focus, people – especially those living in a corrupt society – need to see why they need that grace so desperately.

16:5-6 | The practice of eliminating unwanted babies by abandoning them to the elements and letting them die by exposure is attested in records from the ancient world. God compares Jerusalem to one of these infants left to die under the open sky: unwanted, unlovely, unwashed, unpitied, and loathed. The metaphor alludes to Jerusalem’s pre-Israelite past. Before David conquered the city centuries before, it had been a Canaanite outpost named Jebus.

16:7-8 | The Lord lavished His love and grace upon Jerusalem, even though it lacked anything to attract His attention, and in the time of David and Solomon He made the city into a place of beauty and renown. He chose Jerusalem to be the place where He Himself would dwell and interact with His people – the City of Zion, the Lord’s own resting place (Ps. 132:13-17).

16:9-14 | God did for Jerusalem what every loving husband in the ancient Near East did for his bride: He washed her, anointed her, clothed her, gave her expensive presents to highlight her beauty, and fed her with the very best. As the result of God’s lavish attention, Jerusalem gained great fame and foreign dignitaries came to pay their respects. And yet all of this beauty merely reflected the glory and splendor of the Lord.