Sermon Tone Analysis

Summary

These two chapters in Ezekiel rehearse parts of Israel’s tragic history in different ways.

This episode discusses both chapters, but devotes more attention to several controversial and difficult passages in chapter 20.

Ezekiel 19 is a lamentation that uses animal and plant imagery to describe the demise of Israel’s last few kings.

Chapter 20 reviews Israel’s history of apostasy and Yahweh’s gracious refusal to abandon them altogether.

Inspiration

But I thought it was interesting and pointed it out for this particular reason: How does this help us think better about inspiration?

(I'm going to use that word "better.")

A lot of people have this notion that inspiration means that the writer's head is empty, that the writer's mind goes blank and then God sort of fills it with words.

This is the way verbal, plenary, full inspiration is taught to a lot of Christians: that the writer doesn't really have much to do with the process.

These are the words of God, and so God puts them in the writer's head.

The writer might not even be cognizant of what's going on.

They're not really even understanding what they're doing.

It's just God downloading it.

Chapter 20

Let's go into chapter 20.

We get some things in here that are going to take us into the kind of stuff that I like to look at: Israelite religion and maybe some of the darker elements of that.

There's some controversy here in this chapter when we get to Ezekiel 20.

I don't really want to take the time to read the whole thing, but we might end up doing that.

What we have here in chapter 20 is, in a nutshell, a description or overview (not necessarily a travelogue, but an overview) of Israel's past history.

Naturally, when Israel's history gets overviewed (especially if it's the prophets), it's going to be about how bad Israel was—their constant complaining and rebellion against the Lord.

This is going to be described either in prose narrative or it's going to have certain imagery associated with just being a pain in God's neck, so to speak.

Just this constant resistance and complaining and rebellion and—of course—apostasy as well.

Deuteronomy 32 is another one of these, where the chapter goes through Israel's behavior from Egypt on into the wilderness and how they went astray and worshiped other gods and so on and so forth.

That's kind of what you're going to get here in Ezekiel 20.

There are a number of repetitive themes.

One is, of course, the rebelliousness of Israel despite God's mercy.

That's going to be a thing that's repeated.

Another one is the wilderness wanderings themselves.

There's a constant reference to that.

And then, thirdly, the motive of Yahweh's concern for his own name.

In this chapter, this is going to be repeated a number of times and repeatedlyit's the reason why God acts to deliver them.

"I'm going to do this for the sake of my own reputation."

That language to us is familiar, either through preaching or our own reading of the Old Testament (God doing something for the sake of his name), but sometimes we don't situate that in the context of the Deuteronomy 32 Worldview, where God has decided to elect or choose his own nation, and it's not one of these other ones!

He abandons or disinherits the other nations to the lesser gods (to the sons of god in Deuteronomy 32:8), and then he creates Israel from Abraham right after the Babel incident.

These are all God's decisions—to disinherit this bunch and to create a new nation from the loins of Abraham (and, of course, Sarah).

This is God's decision to do that, so if he just sort of lets them die or fade into history, if he doesn't intervene, if he doesn't save a remnant, then the other nations, of course, and their gods (think about it) could look at Yahweh and think all sorts of things: "You were inept.

You were impotent.

You couldn't pull this off.

What a stupid idea."

So God acts in the interest of his own name, his own person.

I'll say a little bit more about that in a moment, because that's a recurring thing that's sort of a big deal in chapter 20.

But there are other things here.

We might as well just jump into it here.

We've seen something like this before.

We get the date formula and it works out to July or August of 591 B.C, so we're still a few years from the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple.

Ezekiel was taken in the second wave of captivity.

The elders who were there with him (the Jewish leadership that's there in Babylon)... they show up.

They've done this before (in chapter 14).

They come and sit at Ezekiel's feet.

If you recall the discussion back then, maybe they've come again here in chapter 20 in the hope of hearing some news about the homeland.

"What do you know?

Has God shown you anything, Ezekiel, about what's going on back there?

Has God said anything to you about how long we're going to be here?

When are we getting out of here?"

That sort of thing.

It's probably the latter, in terms of God's response in verse 3:

As I live, declares the Lord GOD, I will not be inquired of by you.

Basically, "My timetable isn't going to be arranged and carried out on the basis of what you want.

It's just not going to happen."

So God isn't very pliant here when the elders show up again.

We've seen earlier in chapter 14 and other chapters why that is.

It's because they're just as bad as the generations that have preceded them.

"Yeah, you're here and you're alive.

You should be thanking God that you're alive.

But that doesn't mean that God looks at you as though you're any better than the people who have lost their lives and the people who will lose their lives back in Jerusalem."

We talked about that a lot with Ezekiel 18 and the individual accountability issue.

Verse 4 is God, again, speaking to Ezekiel:

Now here we're back to this "sins of the fathers" thing, which we just talked about with Ezekiel 18, so the question here would be: does this contradict chapter 18, with its emphasis on individual accountability?

And the answer here is the same as it was in chapter 18: no! Remember when we talked about chapter 18, that the "sins of the fathers" language is part of why the exile was happening, but it wasn't the whole basis.

Chapter 18 also reminded us that the current generation of Israelites were just as much to blame.

So there would only be a contradiction if the current generation was innocent.

"Hey, why are we getting punished for the sins of our fathers?"

But that isn't the case!

They're also just as bad.

They aren't innocent.

Block writes a nice little summary here:

Yahweh’s disposition toward Israel is transparent; to him the nation has historically been merely one of the Canaanite nations.

In his development of this thesis the prophet will raise two primary arguments.

First, Israel’s total depravity is reflected in that the people have been idolatrous since their beginnings in Egypt.

Second, enraged by their response to his grace, Yahweh had decided already while they were wandering in the desert to scatter them among the nations (v.

23), but had delayed the punishment until the cup of iniquity was full.

“Hey, you were just like the other ones and I chose you, etc.”

That act of grace (choosing them when he had disinherited all the other ones) is making Yahweh angry because of their response to it.

What do we expect God to think?

God is basically saying, “Look, the whole nation in its whole history…” (and this is part of the point of chapter 20—rehearsing the whole history) “…from the day I brought you people out of Egypt up until now, this has been your pattern.

You are no more innocent than the generations that preceded you.

This has been the consistent, constant pattern."

So what you have in chapter 20, from this point at verse 5 all the way to verse 31 (which is going to be pretty close to the end of the chapter) is a wholesale arraignment or accusation or rehearsal of Israel's apostasy up to the present day.

That's the purpose of this chapter (to reiterate this point).

We'll pick up with verse 5:

So on and so forth.

This is the pattern.

"This is what you did, this is how you reacted to my grace, and I should have just sort of rid myself of you.

But I didn't because of the sake of my name."

This is the pattern you're going to get throughout the chapter.

A few things here before we jump back in.

Did you notice in verse 5 the wording "on the day when I chose Israel" and it was a reference to Israel being in Egypt there in verse 5 through 9? That takes us into a couple of difficulties, or maybe potential difficulties.

Perhaps a better way to say it would be several issues related to the names of God in Israel's history.

If you think, ", I don't know what you're talking about here"... Well, did God choose Israel when they were in Egypt?