Ezekiel 18

CHAPTER 18.

THE RETRIBUTIVE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF GOD.

Ezekiel 18:1. And the word of Jehovah came to me, saying,

Ezekiel 18:2. Why do ye use this proverb upon the land of Israel, saying, The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge?

Ezekiel 18:3. As I live, saith the Lord Jehovah, ye shall no longer use this proverb in Israel.

Ezekiel 18:4. Behold, all the souls are mine; behold, as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine; behold, the soul that sinneth, it shall die.

Ezekiel 18:5. And when there is a man that is righteous, and does judgment and justice:

Ezekiel 18:6. On the mountains has not eaten, nor has lifted up his eyes to the idols of the house of Israel, and has not polluted the wife of his neighbour, nor drawn near to an unclean woman;

Ezekiel 18:7. And has not oppressed a man, has restored his debt-pledge, has practised no robbery, has given of his bread to the hungry, and the naked has clothed with raiment;

Ezekiel 18:8. Has not given forth on usury, nor has taken increase, has withheld his hand from iniquity, has executed true judgment between man and man;

Ezekiel 18:9. Has walked in my statutes, and kept my judgments to deal truly; righteous is he, he shall surely live, saith the Lord Jehovah.

Ezekiel 18:10. And should he beget a son a robber, a shedder of blood, and a doer of any one of such things,

Ezekiel 18:11. But does none of all those, yea, besides, has eaten upon the mountains, and polluted his neighbour's wife,

Ezekiel 18:12. Has oppressed the poor and needy, has practised robbery, has not restored a pledge, and to the idols has lifted up his eyes, working abomination,

Ezekiel 18:13. Has given forth on usury, and taken increase; shall he live? he shall not live; he has done all these abominations; he shall surely die; his blood shall be upon him.

Ezekiel 18:14. And, lo, shall he beget a son, that sees all the sins of his father which he has done, yea, shall see and not do according to them,

Ezekiel 18:15. Shall not eat upon the mountains, nor lift up his eyes to the idols of the house of Israel, nor pollute his neighbour's wife,

Ezekiel 18:16. And shall not oppress a man, take no pledge, practise no robbery, give his bread to the hungry, and clothe the naked with raiment,

Ezekiel 18:17. From the poor shall not turn back his hand, shall not take usury and increase, execute my judgments, walk in my statutes; he shall not die for the iniquity of his father; he shall surely live.

Ezekiel 18:18. His father, since he did most unjustly, fraudulently spoiled his brother, and did what is not good in the midst of his people, behold, he shall die in his iniquity.

19. And ye say, Wherefore? Does not the son bear the iniquity of the father? Nay, should the son do justice and righteousness, keep all my statutes, and do them, he shall surely live.

Ezekiel 18:20. The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, nor the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him.

Ezekiel 18:21. And if the wicked shall turn from all his sins which he hath done, and shall keep all my statutes, and do judgment and righteousness, he shall surely live, he shall not die.

Ezekiel 18:22. None of his transgressions which he has done shall be remembered against him; in his righteousness that he has done he shall live.

Ezekiel 18:23. Have I any pleasure at all in the death of the wicked? saith the Lord Jehovah; and not that he turn from his way and live?

Ezekiel 18:24. But when the righteous turns from his righteousness, and commits iniquity, doing according to all the abominations which the wicked does, shall he then live? Nothing of all his righteousness which he has done shall be remembered; in his trespass that he has trespassed, and in his sin that he has sinned, in them shall he die.

Ezekiel 18:25. Yet ye say, The way of the Lord is not equal. Hear now, house of Israel, is not my way equal? are not your ways unequal?

Ezekiel 18:26. When a righteous man turns from his righteousness, and committeth iniquity, and dies upon them (i.e. on account of his acts of iniquity), for his iniquity that he has done he dies.

Ezekiel 18:27. And when the wicked turns away from his wickedness that he has committed, and does that which is just and right, he shall save his soul alive.

Ezekiel 18:28. And should he see and return from all his transgressions that he has committed, he shall surely live, he shall not die.

Ezekiel 18:29. But the house of Israel say, The way of the Lord is not equal. Are not my ways equal, house of Israel? are not your ways unequal?

Ezekiel 18:30. Therefore every man according to his way will I judge you, house of Israel, saith the Lord Jehovah. Return, and come back from all your transgressions, and iniquity shall not be your ruin.

Ezekiel 18:31. Cast away from you all your transgressions, by which ye have transgressed; and make you a new heart and a new spirit; and why will ye die, house of Israel?

Ezekiel 18:32. For I have no pleasure in the death of him that dies, saith the Lord Jehovah; therefore (The vau here must plainly be taken as an example of the inferential use of the conjunction so then therefore (Ges. Gr. sec. 152, Id).) return and live ye.

THE prophet passes from the purposes of God respecting the future establishment of his kingdom and glory in the world as disclosed in the preceding chapter to an expostulation with the people on account of sin, and an earnest pleading on behalf of righteousness. He wished them to understand that, however gracious the intentions of Heaven might be, and however certainly they would reach their destined accomplishment, they were not to move as in an orbit of their own, independently of the condition of the people; nor might the people expect any benefit from them, if wedded to the love and practice of sin. While, on the one hand, God might confidently be expected to do what he had promised, they, on the other, should not be entitled to look for any blessing, unless they applied themselves in earnest to do what he required at their hands.

The chapter preserves throughout the form of a controversial pleading; because the people are contemplated by the prophet as in a self-righteous condition, disposed to shift off themselves the blame of what was evil in their lot, and lay it partly on their fathers, partly on God himself. We suffer, it is true, they were complacently saying among themselves, under the rod of chastisement, but that we do so is our misfortune, rather than our sin; it is not we, but our fathers, who ate the sour grapes, and now, inheriting what was justly due to their transgression, our teeth are set on edge. What was it but in effect to say, God can have no proper quarrel with us? We are dealing faithfully by the commandments of his law, and we can no otherwise account for his subjecting us to punishment than on the principle of our being made to bear the iniquities of those who have gone before us.

The mere fact of their taking up such a view of their case, and putting it forth in vindication of themselves, was obviously a proof of some sort of reformation having been accomplished. The feeling could not have sprung up, and taken shape in their minds as a ground of defence, without at least an ostensible justification in the present, as compared with the past. To what extent this might actually be the case, either with the remnant at Jerusalem, or with the captives on the Chebar, we have no very specific data for ascertaining. Reckoning from the period of Manasseh's reign, when the practice of all manner of corruption seemed to have reached its climax, we can have no reasonable doubt that in both divisions of the Jewish people a visible reform had taken place more particularly with the captives, as their actual experience of God's judgments would naturally have forced on them a more serious and thoughtful examination of their ways. But ample grounds exist, both in this prophet and Jeremiah, for holding that in each division alike there still was no thorough and general renunciation of iniquity. The partial improvements that had been made were chiefly of a superficial nature, and seem to have had no other effect than in fostering the self-righteous spirit, which induced them to seek elsewhere than in themselves the cause of their troubles and calamities. Therefore, in a word of severe expostulation and rebuke, which, if called forth by what then existed, has been no less applicable to succeeding generations of the Jewish people, the prophet exposes the vanity of their imaginations, and declares them to be still at war with the principles of God's righteous administration. (How little the Jews of modern times have learned from what was spoken to their ancestors, may be gathered from the defence Orobius makes, as noticed by Warburton in his Dedication to the Jews, for the evils of their long dispersion: “They suffer,” says he, “not for their own sins, but for the sins of their forefathers.”)

In doing this, Ezekiel first announces the general principle of God's righteousness as a principle of fair and impartial dealing with each individual according to his actions; then he explains and illustrates the operation of this principle in a series of supposed cases; and finally calls the people to repentance and amendment of life, as being still far from righteousness, and in danger of perdition.

1. There is, first, a general announcement made of the principle of God's righteousness; which is declared to be a principle of fair and impartial dealing with each individual, according to his actions:” As I live, saith the Lord God, ye shall no longer use this proverb in Israel. Behold, all the souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine; the soul that sinneth, it shall die” (Ezekiel 18:3-4); it alone shall die, as having, through sin, incurred the law's penalty; others, who have lived righteously, shall be treated according to their desert, not as persons appointed to die, but rather as entitled to the blessings of life. And this on the broad and comprehensive ground that God is alike the maker of all, and can have no reason for adjudging some to a punishment from which he exempts others, except the different manner in which they conduct themselves toward him.

Here, of course, the question naturally arises, whether such has always been the principle of God's dealing? or, whether the announcement made by the prophet marked a change in the Divine administration? There can be no doubt that the law did sanction the principle of a certain visitation of the sins of the fathers upon the children: “I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me, and showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me and keep my commandments.” But then this principle, it would seem, remained still in active operation, neither suspended, nor in any way materally affected, by what is written here. For the prophet Jeremiah expressly connects the judgments which were shortly afterwards to alight upon Judah and Jerusalem with the sins of Manasseh's time in the preceding generation (Jeremiah 15:4); and again in Lamentations 5:7, after the judgments had actually been inflicted, “our fathers have sinned, and are not; and we have borne their iniquities.” Even in gospel times we find our Lord speaking of the principle as still in force, nay, as ready to be acted on with such fearful severity in the case of that generation, that upon them was to be charged and visited the righteous blood shed in all preceding ages of the Church's history (; Ezekiel 40:27) are given as the measures of the whole breadth of these, and contending that they apply only to the distance between one gate and another in the same court. I cannot concur in this, for I think the natural supposition is, that the gates between which the distances in question lay were simply those of the two courts respectively. But if by rejecting that method of relief we seem to have far too much space on hand, by adopting the smaller measures of cubits instead of rods we should have decidedly top little. I think this might be proved by reckoning up the different items of the several measures connected with the temple itself and the separate place. But as we should thus inevitably get into intricacies where few would follow, we prefer establishing our position by a simpler process. In the central part to the east of the temple there was a square of 100 cubits, the court of the priests. But if on three sides of an entire square of 500 cubits you take off first 100 cubits for the outer court, then 100 for the inner, with nothing intervening, there would be left precisely this square of 100 more for the court of the priests. But where, then, was the space to be found for the broad outermost wall, outside of which the measurement of 500 was made six cubits all round? Where, again, for the seven steps leading up to the gate of the inner court, and the breadth of the wall dividing it from the outer? And where, once again, space for the eight steps leading up to the court of the priests, and the buildings of many chambers for them? There is evidently no room for these on the cubit hypothesis, which would require the different courts to be enclosed, and separated from each other by strictly mathematical lines; so that the objection of too much ground by the measurements of the text may fairly be met by the too little of the hypothesis.

In truth, we have here another of those traits which render manifest, and, I believe, were intended to render manifest and palpable, the ideal character of the whole description. It is of a nature throughout which defies all attempts to bring it within the bounds of the real. Those who have endeavoured so to deal with it have always been obliged to resort to numberless arbitrary suppositions and violent adjustments. And, in particular, the vast compass the prophet so explicitly and distinctly assigns to the whole area, involving a sort of natural incongruity, like the promise of the new David in the prophecies of the restoration, must ever be regarded as an inseparable obstacle to their superficial literalism. It is an incontrovertible evidence that the prophet had something else in his eye than the masonry of stone and lime erections, and was labouring with conceptions which could only find their embodiment in the high realities of God's everlasting kingdom.

We abide, then, by the Hebrew text as the true handwriting of the prophet, the very difficulties of which are a proof of their correctness; and we regard the immense extent of the sacred area as a symbol of the vast enlargement that was to be given to the kingdom of God in the times of Messiah. It was immeasurably to surpass the old in the extent of its territory, and in the number of its adherents, as well as in the purity of its worship. The wall that surrounded the sacred buildings is expressly said, in Ezekiel 42:20, to have been for separating between the holy and profane; not, therefore, as in Revelation 21:12, and very commonly elsewhere, for defence and safety, as indeed its comparative want of elevation might seem to render it unfit for such a purpose. But its square form, and the square appearance of the entire buildings (as in John's city, Revelation 21:16), betokened the strength and solidity of the whole, along with a vast increase in extent and number. A perfect cube, it was the emblem of a kingdom that could not be shaken or removed. And thus every way it exhibited to the eye of faith the true ideal of that pure and glorious temple which, resting on the foundation of the eternal Son, and girt round by all the perfections of Godhead, shall shine forth the best and noblest workmanship of Heaven.