Sermon Tone Analysis

There are always two sides to every story.

Unless we hear them both, we suspect that we have not really found out the truth.

Last week, we discussed the ways in which Israel had rebelled against God.

When God’s people lose confidence in his word, believing it to be irrelevant, misunderstanding it, or finding it insufficient for their lives, they end up as rebels against the will and ways of God.

Today, as we look at the rest of Ezekiel 14 as well as chapters 15-16, we consider the problem of Israel’s rebellion against God from God’s perspective.

The word that best captures this is the word sin.

We find it here in Ezekiel 14:13.

Ezekiel has used this word previously only in Ezekiel 3:20-21.

As you know, it is an important word in Christian theology, so it is critical that we understand it.

So let’s talk today about sin.

What is sin?

What does it bring?

What can be done about it?

What Is Sin?

First, let’s ask a basic question for Christian theology.

What is sin?

Now to be sure, we could pose an answer to that question in a few different ways.

I’m not asking for the definitive definition here.

But let’s consider the question from how it is presented in our passage today.

Sinning Against God

We understand that the word sin refers to doing something bad.

That’s how we use it, anyway, in our common vernacular.

But we also have a sense that this is a theological word.

It is a religious word.

In verse 13, God says to Ezekiel, “Son of man, when a land sins against me...” Stop right there.

To sin is not just to do something bad or morally wrong.

It is to do something morally wrong in the eyes of God.

That’s all true, of course, but we really need to say more.

Because the problem here is that when we talk about sin, we assume we are dealing here with only a religious word.

That is the meaning of the word in our cultural understanding.

So, we ask things like, “Is this a sin according to Christianity?” or “Is this a sin according to the Koran?”

And this just won’t do when we are trying to understand the Bible.

Covenant Infidelity

Keep reading in verse 13. “Son of man, when a land sins against me by acting faithlessly.”

This last phrase is a translation of a key word for Ezekiel.

The Hebrew word refers to an act of infidelity or defection from a contract or covenant.[1]

In other words, what we see here is that to sin against God is not the violation of his rules that we are obligated to keep simply because he is God and, well, God gets to make the rules.

No, sin is much more personal than that.

On the one hand, we can think of sinning as breaking our obligation to God since he is the Lord.

That is to say, we can think of ourselves as his subjects who live under his rule and reign, so sinning is essentially rebelling against his authority.

Again, that is not wrong.

But it is insufficient to see the whole picture.

Let me put it this way.

The word used here that describes sin as infidelity is never used in reference to unbelievers.

It only refers to those who are in a covenant relationship with God.[2]That’s not to say that unbelievers can’t sin.

It is to say that the real problem with sin is not the sins of unbelievers but rather the sins of believers.

God’s concern here is not that pagans have sinned but that his own people have sinned.

Sin’s Abomination

The sixteenth chapter of Ezekiel is the longest chapter in the book.

It is a retelling of Israel’s history, framed like a dispute between God and the nation’s capital city, Jerusalem.

We’re not going to read through the whole chapter, but let’s take a quick glance.

In verses 1-5, God reminds Israel of her origins from “the land of the Canaanites.”

Israel’s father “was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite.”

Again, Ezekiel is telling Israel’s story from the perspective of the history of Israel’s capital city, and to speak of the city as coming from the Canaanites, Hittites, and Amorites is to say that the historical roots are not pious but pagan and that Israel comes from stock that represents the worst of human depravity.[3]

And it is from this stock that God took them and made them his own.

In verses 6-14, we read of how it is that Israel went from rags to riches, from pauper to princess.

It is all owing to God’s covenantal love.

Here we need to point out something important.

As you read through a chapter like this one with its rather explicit wording, there are all kinds of possible misconstruals of the meaning that you will sense are possible.

This chapter does not justify the abuse of women.

It does not tell us how prostitutes and adulterers are to be treated.

What we need to understand here is the rhetorical effect that the prophet intends to make in his telling of the story.

He uses graphic images and exaggeration in order to shock his listeners into a positive response.[4]

The shock comes especially in verses 15-34.

After all that Yahweh had done for them with his love, the nation had “played the whore” with “any passerby.”

Were we to slowly read these verses from God’s perspective, we would surely agree with his assessment in verse 30: “How sick is your heart, declares the Lord GOD.”

The abomination of Israel is even worse than we think, as verses 33-34 communicate:

Men give gifts to all prostitutes, but you gave your gifts to all your lovers, bribing them to come to you from every side with your whorings.

So you were different from other women in your whorings.

No one solicited you to play the whore, and you gave payment, while no payment was given to you; therefore you were different.

(Ezek 16:33-34)

The biblical concept of sin can only be explained in the context of a relationship of love between God and his people.

Sin is not a black mark on an otherwise blank slate.

It is the abomination of the most unimaginable acts of infidelity one could commit against his committed lover.

It simply cannot be justified.

There is no excuse for it.

What Sin Brings

The prophet is describing sin in this way in order to help us see the harm that sin has caused.

Like the definition of sin, we could describe sin’s awful effects in different ways, but Ezekiel has framed it in such a way that we might summarize it with one word: shame.

Israel’s sin has brought shame on themselves, on the land, on others, and on God.

Shame on Yourself

In the retelling of Israel’s story, we have seen the shame their sin had brought on themselves.

In verse 23, God interjects, “Woe, woe to you!” Israel had heaped more and more shame on themselves by their treacherous acts against Yahweh.

This is what sin does to the sinner.

Romans 3:23 tells us not only that “all have sinned” but also that by sinning we all “fall short of the glory of God.”

That is to say, it is because of our sin that we are not the divine image bearers God intends for us to be.[5]Sin dehumanizes us and robs us of the God-intended glory we were meant to possess.

Shame on the Land

This understanding of sin’s effects helps us understand why, back in chapter 14:13, God could speak about “a land” sinning against him and acting faithlessly.

Surely it is the people who live in the land, not the land itself, that sins.

Why does he speak this way?

The reason is because the consequences of sin are experienced not just on people but on all creation.

In verse 15 we read of God bringing wild beasts that pass through the land and ravage it, making it desolate and uninhabitable.

The other judgments (sword, famine, pestilence) also affect not just the people but also the land and the beasts.

God’s judgment against human sin shows the scope of sin and its effects.

When we sin, it is not just we human beings who suffer its shame.

It is all creation with us.

Recall that the consequence for Adam’s sin was not just his own death, returning to the dust of the ground at the end of his life.

God brought judgment against the ground that Adam was created to tend to and to have dominion over (Gen 3:17-19).

This is why, as Paul says in Romans 8, “the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now” (Rom 8:22).

The prophet Joel can write about “How the beasts groan!” and how “the herds of cattle are perplexed” and “the flocks of sheep suffer” (Joel 1:18).