Ezekiel 14:23

And they shall comfort you, when ye see their ways and their doings: and ye shall know that I have not done without cause all that I have done in it, saith the Lord GOD.

They shall comfort you - not in words, but by your recognizing in their manifest guilt that God had not been unjustly severe to them and the city.

Remarks:

(1) God will not answer the inquiries of those who come before His presence in hypocrisy. So long as any idol is secretly set up in the heart, as well as when it is outwardly put before the face (Ezekiel 14:3), the Lord will not regard the prayer of such a hollow professor. The kind of answer which God gives to the hypocrite accords with the dissimulation with which he tries to vail his idolatries (). The hypocrite's sin is in righteous retribution made his punishment. God in wrath gives up the hollow self-deceiver to a strong delusion, so that he should believe his own lie.

(2) Yet even in the case of such self-deceivers and hypocrites God wisheth not their destruction; nay, he urges them most lovingly, "Repent, and turn yourselves from your idols." But then He requires a complete change of heart: "Turn away your faces from all your abominations" (). If there be lurking idolatry in the heart, which is sure to find for itself some outward mode of manifestation, so as to "set the stumblingblock of iniquity before the face," God will answer the hypocritical inquirer by direct judgments on him, making him a signal warning to others of the fatal end of insincerity in one's approaches to the Lord (Ezekiel 14:7).

(3) It is the most awful of all the judgments which God inflicts on a nation or on individuals, when God makes the ministers of Satan subserve his righteous judgments by deluding the willfully blind (). As they have tried to deceive God, so shall they, in God's judicial displeasure, be given over to be deceived by the lying prophets whom they consult. These blind leaders of the blind reflect back to their inquirers the self-deceits of the latter (). The very presence of such divining liars among a people is of itself a penal scourge from God: and the end of both deceivers and deceived alike shall be, "They shall bear the punishment of their iniquity" ().

(4) The ultimate issue to Israel of all the judgments of God shall be, "They shall go no more astray from the Lord, but shall be His people, and He shall be their God" (). How wonderful is the love of God to His people, which "many waters cannot quench, neither can the floods drown it"! ( .) (5) Meanwhile judgment must take its course. So utterly guilty are the Jews, Ezekiel declares, according to the word of the Lord, that not even if there were among them men so eminently righteous as Noah, Daniel, and Job (; ) were, could their presence avail for the warding off of judgment from the people. Had ten righteous men been found in Sodom it would have been spared; but ten such men in Judea should deliver neither sons nor daughters, but only their own souls by their righteousness (Ezekiel 14:14; ; ).

(6) When those less highly privileged in spiritual things transgress, they bring down on themselves one or more of God's judgments; but when those most highly favoured of all by God transgress, and that with a presumptuous and high hand, what else can they expect but that all God's "sorest" judgments shall descend on them? (.) Having filled the full measure of their guilt, they must drink the full cup of God's wrath; nor can the few intercessors or righteous men among them avert it. When they escape one judgment another shall be waiting for them, so that they cannot escape ().

(7) Even the remnant that was to escape from Jerusalem was so guilty that the exiles at the Chebar would be constrained to acknowledge, that God's heavy judgments on Jerusalem were "not without cause" (). This is the preparatory stage to mercy. Not until God's ways with the guilty are vindicated and recognized as just, can there be scope for the exhibition of His everlasting love. Let us adore at once His justice and goodness, and, as monuments of His mercy, show forth His praises forever.