THE WORD OF THE LORD came to me: 2“Son of man, set your face against the mountains of Israel; prophesy against them 3and say: ‘O mountains of Israel, hear the word of the Sovereign LORD. This is what the Sovereign LORD says to the mountains and hills, to the ravines and valleys: I am about to bring a sword against you, and I will destroy your high places. 4Your altars will be demolished and your incense altars will be smashed; and I will slay your people in front of your idols. 5I will lay the dead bodies of the Israelites in front of their idols, and I will scatter your bones around your altars. 6Wherever you live, the towns will be laid waste and the high places demolished, so that your altars will be laid waste and devastated, your idols smashed and ruined, your incense altars broken down, and what you have made wiped out. 7Your people will fall slain among you, and you will know that I am the LORD.
8“ ‘But I will spare some, for some of you will escape the sword when you are scattered among the lands and nations. 9Then in the nations where they have been carried captive, those who escape will remember me—how I have been grieved by their adulterous hearts, which have turned away from me, and by their eyes, which have lusted after their idols. They will loathe themselves for the evil they have done and for all their detestable practices. 10And they will know that I am the LORD; I did not threaten in vain to bring this calamity on them.
11“ ‘This is what the Sovereign LORD says: Strike your hands together and stamp your feet and cry out “Alas!” because of all the wicked and detestable practices of the house of Israel, for they will fall by the sword, famine and plague. 12He that is far away will die of the plague, and he that is near will fall by the sword, and he that survives and is spared will die of famine. So will I spend my wrath upon them. 13And they will know that I am the LORD, when their people lie slain among their idols around their altars, on every high hill and on all the mountaintops, under every spreading tree and every leafy oak—places where they offered fragrant incense to all their idols. 14And I will stretch out my hand against them and make the land a desolate waste from the desert to Diblah—wherever they live. Then they will know that I am the LORD.’ ”
Original Meaning
LIKE THE EVER-WIDENING circle of ripples that come from dropping a stone into still water, Ezekiel 6 builds on the previous judgment oracle and expands it.1 Whereas before the prophet addressed the city of Jerusalem, the political and religious center of the land, now he is told to set his face against the mountains of all Israel. The geographical boundaries of judgment have been widened.2 The focus on judgment is clear from the structure as well as the content. The chapter divides into two parts, verses 2–10 and 11–14, each of which begins with a hostile gesture on the part of the prophet (“set your face,” v. 2; “strike your hands together and stamp your feet,” v. 11) and concludes with the recognition formula (“they will know that I am the LORD”). The Lord’s wrath has been aroused and he will not be ignored.
There is more at stake in Ezekiel’s choice of the expression “the mountains of Israel” for the central region of Israel than a mere nostalgia for the lost mountain grandeur of their homeland among the exiles living in the flat terrain of Babylon.3 While the borders of Israel expanded and contracted at different times in Israel’s history, the hill country was always Israel par excellence. It was the Lord’s “home turf,” as the Arameans recognized (1 Kings 20:28), though they were also to discover that he could win fixtures “on the road” just as easily!4 Moreover, Ezekiel’s preference for phrases combined with the patronym “Israel” (“mountains of Israel” [hārê yiśrāʾēl], “land of Israel” [ʾadmat yiśrāʾēl]) emphasizes the fact that this land will always be Israel. Even though the people may be in exile and another nation rule the territory, they can never own it, for these are in a special way “my [the LORD’s] mountains” (Isa. 14:25; 65:9; Ezek. 38:21), which he has irrevocably given to his people Israel.
Yet it is precisely into that home turf that idolatry has penetrated. Ezekiel 6 expands the accusation of the previous chapter with clearer accusations of the nature of Israel’s offenses. For the hill country is also the location of “high places” (bāmôt, 6:3). These are “high places” not necessarily in the sense of geographical elevation, for they can be located in a valley as easily as on a hilltop (Jer. 7:31; 32:35), but in the sense of a raised stone platform on which an altar and other cultic objects are constructed.5 Alongside the altars for animal sacrifice are frequently buildings for the associated festivities (ḥammānîm),6 which may also have housed idols (gillûlîm).
Prior to the building of the Jerusalem temple, the people were permitted to use the high places as locations for offering sacrifices to the Lord (1 Kings 3:2). Once that structure was completed, however, the worship of Israel was to be centralized in Jerusalem (Deut. 12). But in practice old habits died hard, especially when the old ways offered more convenient locations and more flexible rules. These local high places became the entry points for Canaanite religious ideas and images, whether the figures of Baal and Asherah or the practices that went along with Canaanite fertility religions.7 For that reason, the repeated failure of the reigning monarch to suppress the high places in both the northern and southern kingdoms is a major concern in the book of Kings; only Hezekiah and Josiah attempted to destroy them. Syncretism was at some times actually officially encouraged, while at other times the authorities simply turned a blind eye to it.
But Israel’s rulers were not free agents in their choice of worship location; they were vassal kings under the rule of God. Though the vassal kings might ignore the breach of covenant that this false worship involved, with the people serving other gods instead of the one true God, the Great King would no longer tolerate it. Once more, as in Ezekiel 5, an echo of Leviticus 26 is unmistakable, as the covenant curses fall on the rebellious people.8 Leviticus 26:30 threatens: “I will destroy your high places [bāmōtêkem], cut down your incense altars [ḥammānêkem] and pile your dead bodies [pigrêkem] on the lifeless forms of your idols [gillûlêkem].” Similarly in Ezekiel 6:3–5 the Lord says: “I will destroy your high places [bāmōtêkem] . . . and your incense altars [ḥammānêkem]. . . . I will lay the dead bodies of the Israelites [pigrê benê yiśrāʾēl] in front of their idols [gillûlêhem].”
It was not uncommon in the ancient world to defile altars by burning corpses on them, putting the profane in the place of the holy (1 Kings 13:2; 2 Kings 23:16). Here, however, the corpses are not burned on the altar but scattered around the altar so that they surround (sābab) it. This acts as a macabre parody of the ritual dances around (sābab) the altar, which served to sanctify it as a sacred place (Ps. 26:6; 118:27).9 The effect is nonetheless the same: The places of idolatry will be rendered unfit, and the idolaters themselves will be put to death (cf. Deut. 13:9). God will do what successive generations of kings failed to do and put an end to this abomination.
When God acts decisively in this way, the result will be that Israel “will know that I am the LORD” (Ezek. 6:7). This so-called “recognition formula” is characteristic of Ezekiel and occurs no fewer than four times in this chapter (6:7, 10, 13, 14).10 It stresses the fact that the knowledge of the Lord comes about not through self-examination and navel-gazing but rather as a direct result of God’s actions in history.11 A remnant will survive the coming judgment, who will look back from exile and recognize that the Lord is the God who acts in history and that the fate suffered by his people is no more than just. There in exile they will become aware of their sinful state and God’s righteous judgment. His words, whether those brought by Ezekiel or the covenant curses of Leviticus 26 or both, are not empty threats (Ezek. 6:10). They will know that the Lord is there and is not silent, to quote Francis Schaeffer’s memorable phrase.12
This raises the question, however, as to what kind of knowledge of God they will attain in exile. Is it the forced knowledge of the rule of God in the world such as the Egyptians received, when after plague upon plague, they saw their horses and chariots drowned in the Sea of Reeds? The purpose of that power encounter was so that “the Egyptians will know that I am the LORD” (Ex. 14:4, 18), yet the knowledge they received is the knowledge of despair, not hope. Or is it the knowledge of God that comes to the repentant, whose attachment to sin is broken through discipline?
Both possibilities seem present in this passage. “To remember” in the Old Testament is never simply the recalling to mind of the past, but includes the idea of a present action that flows from that recollection.13 Remembering the Lord seems to be universally positive in the Old Testament and elsewhere can clearly be used to describe repentance (e.g., Jonah 2:7). The content of what the people will remember about the Lord is his grief at their adulterous actions,14 and the result flowing from that remembrance will be self-loathing at their evil ways (Ezek. 6:9). This seems to imply the possibility on the part of at least some of the exiles of a repentant return to the Lord. This provides a model to Ezekiel’s exilic audience, “overhearing” his words directed to the distant mountains: Even now they can act the part of the righteous remnant by remembering the God who acts and repenting of their sin and the sins of their fellow countrymen in going after dead idols who cannot save (Isa. 44:6–20). As much as their sin of idolatry delighted them in the past, now it will become an object of horror in their eyes.
However, in keeping with the focus on the dark side in these chapters, Ezekiel does not end his oracle on this happy thought. Instead, he returns to the theme of judgment on the house of Israel because of their abominations (Ezek. 6:11–14). The threefold judgment of sword, famine, and plague is once again unleashed on the land (v. 11). This fearsome trio is familiar from Leviticus 26 and Ezekiel 5, and they are three of the four “horsemen of the Apocalypse” in Revelation 6. The comprehensiveness of their activity is underlined in Ezekiel 6:12: Normally the two categories of “he that is far away” and “he that is near” comprehensively include everyone (e.g., Isa. 57:19), but here a third category is added: “he that survives and is spared.” Even those seemingly fortunate ones who fall into this last category and escape immediate destruction will be subject to death, just as some of the hairs that Ezekiel preserved in Ezekiel 5:3 were later taken out again and thrown into the fire. Then, when the people are slain around their idolatrous altars and the entire land from south to north15 is turned into a desolate waste, the knowledge of the Lord will be established.
This twofold ending to the two oracles seems to envisage two opposite possibilities: repentance and return to the Lord (Ezek. 6:8–10), or the total devastation of the land and the wiping out of the entire people (6:11–14). Both are indeed possible endings to Israel’s story; in either event, the Lord’s justice will be seen and known. Both are likewise possible endings to the story for each individual in Ezekiel’s audience: They can remember the Lord and find hope, or they can simply continue on their present course and be utterly destroyed. By including both endings, Ezekiel invites his hearers to ponder their own condition. By choosing to end with the picture of total destruction, however, he underlines the dark future for the land of Israel: total desolation from one end to the other.
Bridging Contexts
ATTITUDE TOWARD OTHER religions. To a contemporary pluralistic society, Ezekiel’s words of judgment seem unduly harsh. Indeed, even that statement may be too mild. For Ezekiel’s favorite word for idols, gillûlîm, appears to be deliberately offensive, artificially formed out of the words for “to roll” (gālal) and “detestable objects” (šiqqûṣîm).16 This imagery of round, rolling objects that defile evokes the idea of excrement and amounts to calling the idols “sheep droppings,” only in rather less polite terminology.17
Such is not the typical language of interfaith dialog in our culture. We are used to seeing the practice of different religions and the operation of cults of one kind or another all around us, and are typically tolerant of their practices, provided they will be tolerant of ours. We do not normally expect judgment to fall on our nation as a result of the proliferation of differing religious viewpoints and practices. In the light of Ezekiel’s words, is this a mistake? Ought we instead, as Christians, be working to ensure that the true worship of God alone is legally enforced in our land?
To do so would, I think, be to misunderstand the special position that Israel held as a nation in the Old Testament. She was uniquely God’s chosen nation, called at Mount Sinai into a special covenant relationship with God. Part of that special relationship was a commitment on the part of Israel to be separate from the nations, belonging to the Lord alone. He would be their God and they would be his people, as the repeated covenant refrain goes. That special relationship was not in effect in the same way prior to Sinai, with the result that the patriarchs lived with a quite different attitude towards the religious beliefs of the surrounding nations. As Gordon Wenham characterizes it:
Though the patriarchs are faithful followers of their God, they generally enjoy good relations with men of other faiths. There is an air of ecumenical bonhomie about the patriarchal religion which contrasts with the sectarian exclusiveness of the Mosaic age and later prophetic demands.18
Nor does the relationship between God and his people carry over in the same way in the New Testament era of redemptive history. Thus, while Paul is distressed by the rampant idolatry of the Athenians (Acts 17:16), he addresses the assembled Areopagites in relatively complimentary terms, saying, “I see that in every way you are very religious” (17:22). He does not threaten the immediate judgment of God on their nation for their idolatry, though he urges them in no uncertain terms to abandon their futile idols and turn to the true and living God (17:30–31). The reason for Paul’s different approach from Ezekiel is that Athens as a city-state was not in covenant with God and therefore not subject to the blessings and curses of the Sinai covenant.
Modern nation-states are likewise no longer in a covenant relationship with the Lord.19 Instead, it is the church that is the covenanted people of God. For this reason, Paul’s harshest language is reserved for those who claim to be Christians but actually are preaching a false gospel. With such people there can be no polite dialog; for them, Paul is willing to envisage eternal condemnation (Gal. 1:8; cf. also the strong language of 5:12). They are no better than “dogs” (Phil. 3:2; Rev. 22:15), a term whose strong emotive content is not easily conveyed in our context.20 Jude is similarly scathing in his verbal assault on false teachers (Jude 8–16). Therefore, our application of this passage should be in terms of the faithfulness (or otherwise) of the church rather than the state. We should explore the dominant idolatries that readily invade the church and are advocated and encouraged by some within the church itself, and be ready to condemn them in the strongest possible terms.
Contemporary idolatry. What kind of idolatries is Ezekiel addressing, however, and how do they relate to the contemporary situation? The idolatries of the high places, with their representations of Baal and Asherah and altars for offering sacrifices, seem distant and foreign. Bowing down to stone and wood seems a mark of ancient credulity to us. Yet if you analyze the appeal of Baal and Asherah, it is possible to see that their hold continues down to the present, even though their form has changed. Baal was the storm god, the chief god of the pantheon, the god of power and fertility, who if appeased could deliver victory in battle, and in peacetime the rain so vital to cultivation in Canaan. Asherah, his consort, was the goddess of fertility, perhaps better known to us in her Greek form as Aphrodite. By worshiping these gods, the Israelites sought to impose order on the chaos of the world around them and to invoke the aid of a higher power on their behalf. The idols promised power and security.
In addition, the sexual practices of ritual prostitution that were probably associated with the fertility cult needed little theological justification. To put it in the contemporary vernacular, Baal and Asherah were in effect the patron saints of sex and guns and rock ’n’ roll, promising to deliver a potent mixture of satisfaction to the desires for power, success, and pleasure. This promise remains as attractive to people of the contemporary world as it was to those of ancient times, as any quick review of the recent offerings from Hollywood will demonstrate. However, the security and satisfaction that these sources offer is both illegitimate and ephemeral. God alone deserves the worship that these idols demand from us, and he alone is able to deliver the lasting satisfaction that we seek. Though our hearts restlessly wander from one idol to another, they will never find rest until they submit to the one true and living God.
But could Israel ultimately have been totally destroyed by God, no matter what their sin? God had set his name on her, allying his reputation intimately with her fate. This consideration had saved Israel before in the time of Moses when they worshiped the golden calf (Ex. 32:9–14). This remains a powerful and valid argument down into New Testament times, where Paul regards as unthinkable the possibility that God has rejected his own people (Rom. 11:1). But the ultimate certainty that God will be faithful to his covenant promises to redeem his people must never be transposed into a complacent attitude toward the threats he makes concerning those who break the covenant. Though God will preserve for himself a remnant for the sake of his name, yet he may equally definitively judge those who continue to rebel against him, be they Abraham’s children or not, for our God combines in himself both kindness and severity (11:22).
Contemporary Significance
A MATTER OF life and death. How many times have you heard people say, “It doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you are sincere”? That is not an idea Ezekiel would have endorsed. According to him, judgment was coming on Israel, a judgment that was nothing less than the outpouring of God’s wrath from heaven, which would level everything in its path. It was not coming because the Israelites had mistreated one another (although, as we will see, they had). Nor was judgment coming because they had taken advantage of the poor or been unfaithful to their wives, or even because they had robbed each other and filled the land with violence, but essentially because they held to a false religion. For them, what they believed would literally be a matter of life and death.
If what you believe is indeed a matter of life and death, then it is not nearly enough to be sincere. It is intensely important to be right. When you jump out of an airplane, you are not content merely to believe sincerely that your parachute is strapped on correctly. Rather, you will check and double-check that it is really so, because you understand all too clearly the consequences of getting it wrong. Indeed, the lengths to which people go to check the correctness of their beliefs in a particular matter is an accurate marker of how important they believe the matter to be. The people who say, “It doesn’t matter what you believe about God as long as you are sincere,” are those to whom it doesn’t matter what you believe about God. But if, in fact, there is a God who designed the whole cosmic and human story with a purpose, so that the chief end of humanity is indeed to glorify this God and enjoy him forever, then what you believe becomes a matter of supreme and decisive importance.21
It matters intensely to God what his people believe about him. He entered a covenant with Israel at Mount Sinai, where he declared himself a passionate God, whose name is Jealous, who would not share his people’s affections with another (Ex. 34:14). His faithfulness to his covenant commitment meant a curse descending inexorably on those who broke the covenant and went after other gods, just as surely as it would mean blessing for those who faithfully sought after him (Lev. 26). Ezekiel’s warning is that the time is at hand for God’s jealousy to overflow into action as he judges his rebellious people.
A renewed people. But that outpouring of God’s wrath can never be the end of the story. Though God is faithful to his covenant commitment to bring judgment on the rebels, he is also faithful to his deeper purpose to establish a renewed people, a restored remnant. That is small comfort to the people of Judah, who live in the path of the oncoming storm. To them, the gestures of Ezekiel bespeak God’s settled attitude: God is determinedly against them and will not relent. But to the exiles, who overhear the conversation, there is a ray of hope. They are already in the situation described in Ezek. 6:9 and can identify with the remnant by remembering their own sin and recognizing God’s righteous judgment.
Today, we too live in a world full of idolatry. In our situation, the idols are not of wood and stone, but they are nonetheless real. Each of us has “personal centers,” areas of our lives in which we seek to find our identity and significance. These centers come in a variety of shapes and forms, ranging from pleasure and work to spouse and family. Even church can function as an idol, the place from which we seek approval and affirmation.22 Our “high place” may be the office, where we sacrifice our relationships to win the blessing of the god “career.” It may be the family room, where we consecrate our “prime time” to the god of entertainment, or the kitchen and laundry room, where we devote ourselves to ensuring that our children have all of their physical and material needs met perfectly.
We measure our value and success by the extent to which these gods smile on us and consider ourselves of little value when they frown. In that respect, nothing has changed between ancient Israel and us. Like the rich young ruler who came to Jesus and asked him, “What good thing must I do to get eternal life?” (Matt. 19:16), something other than God is driving our lives. How ashamed we will be to stand before the Maker of the universe and realize how much of our thinking has been controlled by and centered on things that are not gods, to which we attributed godlike significance! Of how many will it be revealed that they spent their lives mucking about in the sandpit of life, living for insipid pleasures and weak fancies instead of launching out in dependence on the only true God? Truly, we will all have much of which to be ashamed. As C. S. Lewis put it:
Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that the Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot understand what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.23
Not all of us will face the kind of judgment Ezekiel prophesied over Israel during our lifetimes, however. Many, like the rich young ruler, appear to prosper in their idolatry. But those whose idols are blessing them, in whose lives there is apparently no difficulty and disappointment, are more to be pitied than to be envied, for the judgments of God often serve as a wake-up call to our deaf ears. As Calvin comments: “The scourges of God are more useful to us, because when God indulges us, we abuse his clemency and flatter ourselves and so grow hardened in sin.”24
Two possible outcomes. Yet the judgments of God in this life do not work automatically. Two outcomes are possible, just as they were for Ezekiel’s hearers. We may be moved by the pain of the situation to remember God’s grace, and therefore to be disgusted over our sin and turn from it. Our eyes may be opened from our self-deceptive stupor to see the hatefulness of what we have given ourselves over to, so that we thrust it away from us as eagerly as we would a poisonous spider or a scorpion. Or we may continue unmoved, perhaps even further hardened in our sin, inexorably hastening towards final destruction. It is a sobering fact that those who fail to listen to God speaking to them become increasingly unable to hear God speak to them. But in either event, whether in the final destruction of those who continue to be rebellious against him or in the final salvation of those whom he brings to himself, God’s justice is vindicated.