SOME OF THE ELDERS of Israel came to me and sat down in front of me. 2Then the word of the LORD came to me: 3“Son of man, these men have set up idols in their hearts and put wicked stumbling blocks before their faces. Should I let them inquire of me at all? 4Therefore speak to them and tell them, ‘This is what the Sovereign LORD says: When any Israelite sets up idols in his heart and puts a wicked stumbling block before his face and then goes to a prophet, I the LORD will answer him myself in keeping with his great idolatry. 5I will do this to recapture the hearts of the people of Israel, who have all deserted me for their idols.’
6“Therefore say to the house of Israel, ‘This is what the Sovereign LORD says: Repent! Turn from your idols and renounce all your detestable practices!
7“ ‘When any Israelite or any alien living in Israel separates himself from me and sets up idols in his heart and puts a wicked stumbling block before his face and then goes to a prophet to inquire of me, I the LORD will answer him myself. 8I will set my face against that man and make him an example and a byword. I will cut him off from my people. Then you will know that I am the LORD.
9“ ‘And if the prophet is enticed to utter a prophecy, I the LORD have enticed that prophet, and I will stretch out my hand against him and destroy him from among my people Israel. 10They will bear their guilt—the prophet will be as guilty as the one who consults him. 11Then the people of Israel will no longer stray from me, nor will they defile themselves anymore with all their sins. They will be my people, and I will be their God, declares the Sovereign LORD.’ ”
Original Meaning
EVEN IN EXILE, the people were not left without leadership. The vacuum left by the absence of the old structures, built around the monarchy, was filled by “the elders,” the heads of the exiled families.1 Though they had presumably come to the prophet seeking an encouraging oracle from the Lord, Ezekiel turns on these elders with a sharp accusation of idolatry (see also chs. 8 and 20). The charge against them is given in 14:3: “These men have set up idols in their hearts and put wicked stumbling blocks before their faces.” The accusation of having set up their “idols in their hearts” is reminiscent of 8:10–12, where the elders are denounced for secret idolatry with “all the idols of the house of Israel.”
In other words, the elders in exile are tainted with the same fundamental sin as those left behind in Judah: internal idolatry. Even while externally willing to go through the orthodox motions of inquiring of the Lord, their hearts belonged elsewhere. The phrase “wicked stumbling block,” which occurs six times in Ezekiel, is also invariably linked to idolatry.2 Because the hearts of the exilic elders are divided between the Lord and idols, the Lord will give the elders no answer to their inquiry except an answer of judgment (14:4). By this means, the Lord will “seize” their hearts, arresting them for their sin (14:5).3 Seeking to serve two masters will result in judgment by the Lord, the only “master” with any real power to act.
The people in exile are equally implicated in this halfheartedness. They may not have given in to the flagrant idolatry going on in Jerusalem, but there was a more subtle form of assault that had affected even those in exile with the prophet in Babylon. They found themselves living in a broken and fallen world, where their regular experience was of dislocation and disorientation, where things were falling apart, where the center could not hold, and where life did not seem to make sense. The temptation they faced was to turn to the idols of this world as a means of, if not making sense out of the world, at least of numbing the pain.
Those who feel abandoned by God find that the pull of seeking out other gods increases, other gods whom they think can deliver the sense of security and significance they seek. If the Lord cannot deliver, why not try Marduk or one of the other Babylonian gods? Their hearts are torn between two loyalties, and they are attracted by the blessings that the idols seem to promise, the greener grass they offer, the more powerful magic they seem to contain.
The result is that all of the exiles have, in their hearts, deserted the Lord for their idols (14:5). Such people—whether native-born Israelite or proselyte (14:7)4—should not expect to receive a word of divine guidance through the prophet. God is not deceived by the orthodoxy of their outward behavior, for he looks on the heart (1 Sam. 16:7). Instead, the Lord will answer them himself (Ezek. 14:7), by direct action rather than through a prophet. Do they want a word from the Lord? The Lord will demonstrate his attitude toward them by making them “an example and a byword” (14:8). Just as Lot’s wife has become a proverbial example of the dangers of looking back, so they too will become a “byword,” a proverbial warning of the dangers of divided loyalties.
The judgment with which they are threatened is being “cut . . . off from [the LORD’s] people” (14:8). This punishment has often been interpreted as a form of excommunication;5 however, in view of the divine destruction threatened on a prophet in the following verse, the death penalty is more likely indicated here.6 In any case, it is doubtful that the people would have seen a big distinction between the two fates as we do. In either case, the sinner would be excised from the covenant community, from the realm of life, and sent out into the realm of death, like the scapegoat on the Day of Atonement.7
A similar judgment would apply to any prophet who attempted to provide an oracle for them. There were clearly other prophets present in exile apart from Ezekiel, and the temptation to go shopping around for a more favorable word was significant. Yet any such word would be no true word from the Lord, but rather a deceiving word sent as a judgment on the compromising prophet and people alike (14:9). Those who sought false gods rather than the true God would find what they sought—lies in place of the truth. Those who attempted to counteract God’s will by speaking when he had not spoken would find that they were doing nothing other than God’s will, confirming the guilty ones in their guilt.
A similar judgment fell on Ahab in 1 Kings 22: As a judgment for his refusal to listen to prophetic truth, the Lord promised to send him a deceitful oracle through another prophet. Yet the prophet remains responsible for his own actions. Prophet and idolater alike will each “bear their guilt” (Ezek. 14:10), that is, they will bear the punishment their iniquity deserves. The guilt of each is equal (14:10), and so they are destined for a similar fate, that of being “cut off” or “destroyed” from the covenant people.
Yet the goal of God’s judgment on the exiles is not their total extermination, but rather their salvation.8 There is still room for God’s people to repent and return to God (14:6).9 The result of God’s purifying judgment will be a faithful and undefiled people, cleansed from their transgressions (14:11). The goal of the covenant—God’s dwelling in the midst of his people—will certainly not be thwarted, not even by Israel’s sin (14:11).10
Bridging Contexts
DIVINE SOVEREIGNTY and human responsibility. The question of the relationship between divine sovereignty and human responsibility is by no means a new issue. Yet perhaps few eras have been less conducive to the acceptance of divine sovereignty than ours. We live in an age that celebrates human freedom above all things. As my wife once heard it put in a women’s Bible study: “The debate between divine sovereignty and human free will is too complex to discuss. But of this one thing we can be sure: Human beings have free will.” Previous generations (and indeed many contemporary non-Western cultures) would certainly not have framed their conclusions in similar terms. If there was one thing that was clear to them, it was that the gods did what they wished and human beings were powerless against them. In consequence, what modern Westerners may perceive as the key interpretive issue in this passage (How can God deceive a prophet and still hold him responsible for his actions?) would probably not have been a difficulty for Ezekiel’s audience.
The Old Testament frequently traces actions that we attribute to secondary causes back to their primary cause in the will of God. Thus, whereas we perceive the abundance or lack of rain to be due to a certain combination of meteorological conditions, some of which we now recognize as due to our own mismanagement of the planet, the ancient Israelite saw the rains as a direct expression of the Lord’s pleasure or displeasure with his people (Deut. 11:13–14).
In part, this is due to our different position in the redemptive-historical scheme of things. God no longer deals with our nations directly, in the way he did with ancient Israel, for our nations are not in covenant relationship with him as Israel was. So for us, rain is not directly an expression of the blessings and curses of the covenant. But in part, this attitude is also an expression of a modern form of idolatry, whereby nature is crowned with godlike powers and humanity is perceived as the only significant player in the universe.
In contrast, in the Bible it is God who is the only significant player in the universe. All things can ultimately be traced back to his agency and his will. Even the prophecy of a false prophet, which led people astray, could not be given without the Lord’s permission and direction. Does that thereby make God responsible for sin? By no means. For God’s action in giving the prophet a deceitful oracle is nothing other than giving him and his hearers what they have sought. It is a judgment of God that in no way violates the free will of prophet or people, for they do nothing other than what their nature inclines towards. The vaunted “free will” of sinful humanity turns out to be nothing more than the “free will” of a hungry lion presented with the choice between a juicy piece of meat and a fresh green salad. It is the lion’s nature always (freely!) to choose the meat. Should the zookeeper sovereignly choose to present the lion only with fresh meat and to hold back the salad, the lion’s “free will” is not thereby violated. He continues to choose what his nature dictates he will choose.
Our natural human inclination and God’s grace. Left to themselves, human beings have a similar “taste” for evil. By nature, they will inevitably choose lies in place of the truth and worship the created in place of the Creator (Rom. 1:18–25). Therefore, God is in no way violating their free will when he gives them over to the sinful desires of their hearts and a depraved mind (1:24, 26, 28), or when he sends a powerful delusion on those who have refused to love the truth (2 Thess. 2:11–12). Those New Testament references demonstrate that this is not merely an “Old Testament” doctrine, but one that persists throughout the pages of Scripture.
Indeed, the truly difficult question to answer is not why God sovereignly allows sinners to persist in the delusion they seek, but why God sovereignly chooses to save some of those selfsame sinners! It is not because those saved are more intelligent or richer or more beautiful or more righteous than those who perish. Far from it, all is of grace, not of works, so that no one has any grounds for boasting (Eph. 2:8–10). The sovereignty that changes the lion’s nature, enabling him to lie down in peace and eat salad with the lamb, is genuinely astonishing and without cause except for God’s electing love! How indeed can it be that sinful men and women can acquire a taste for righteousness? There is the true cause for wonder. As Charles Wesley put it in his great hymn:
And can it be that I should gain
An interest in the Savior’s blood?
Died He for me, who caused His pain?
For me, who Him to death pursued?
Amazing love! how can it be
That Thou, my God, shouldst die for me?
Contemporary Significance
THE STANDARD OF “just good enough.” When I used to work in the oil industry, we had a problem that we called the problem of “just good enough.” Things would always be manufactured just good enough to meet the standard you set—and no better. If you simply specified a car, what you got was the most basic vehicle on four wheels, not a Mercedes. If you wanted a Mercedes, you had to ask for a Mercedes. Similarly, most people, most of the time, are content to coast through life, doing just enough. We don’t in general have a massive urge to push back the frontiers of knowledge and goodness. Most of us are content to live lives that are “just good enough.”
But what is “just good enough” when it comes to your commitment to God? Is it enough to be 25 percent committed—you come to church one Sunday out of four and obey two and a half of the Ten Commandments? Is it enough to be 51 percent committed—better than the average pew sitter? Or must you be 100 percent, totally, life-dominatingly committed to God? If this was a multiple-choice test, I’m sure we’d all get the right answer. Everyone within the church knows that you ought to be 100 percent committed to God. So why is it that surveys time and time again show that the majority of Christians behave little differently from their secular counterparts? Why is it that the statistics on premarital sex and divorce are not radically different for Christians and non-Christians?
The answer is that all of us who claim the name of Christ have divided hearts. Outwardly, our appearance may “fit”: We go to church regularly and appear to be decent, religious people. Yet when it comes to the tough decisions in life, there are other standards operating than God’s Word, which demonstrates the existence in our hearts of other gods than the true God. We have deep-seated idolatries in our hearts that drive our various behavior patterns. Like the Laodiceans, our deeds prove us to be neither cold nor hot, but lukewarm, fit only to be spit out (Rev. 3:16).
The fundamental issue of idolatry. Yet when trouble comes, we want the Lord to come to our aid. We seek his help, but at the same time we don’t want to give up on our other options. We don’t want to give up our cherished sins. Ezekiel tells us that such an approach to God is not an option. You cannot serve the true God and keep one foot in the camp of idolatry at the same time. God sees what we are really like on the inside; we cannot hide the truth from him, and the double-minded person stands to receive nothing from God (James 1:7).
Much of the counseling within the church of our day fails to recognize the key significance of the idolatries that remain within our hearts. On the one hand, there is a moralizing approach that focuses purely on the level of behavior. This approach says, “Your problem is that your anger (or lust, or worry, or whatever) is sin. Repent and change your behavior! If you would just do what is right, then good feelings will follow.” The problem with this approach is that in focusing on behavior it doesn’t go deep enough. It doesn’t recognize the reason for the behavior: the idols and false beliefs that are driving it. The reason why this particular person sins in this particular way is because there are idols and false beliefs in his or her life that say, “By doing this, you will gain what is really important and meaningful in life.”
On the other hand, there is a psychologizing approach to counseling that says, “Your basic problem is that you don’t see that God loves you and accepts you just as you are. If you could just feel good about yourself, right actions will follow.” This approach focuses on the feelings rather than the behavior, but still doesn’t go deep enough. It doesn’t recognize that behind the bad feelings lies an idolatry, a belief that “even if God loves me, yet while I don’t have this, I’m not a worthwhile person.” Both approaches fail to see the sin behind the sin, the fundamental issue of idolatry.11
The principle crime of the human race, the highest guilt charged upon the world, the whole procuring cause of judgment, is idolatry. For, although each single fault retains its own proper feature, although it is destined to judgment under its own proper name also, yet it is marked off under the general account of idolatry. . . . Thus it comes to pass, that in idolatry all crimes are detected and in all crimes idolatry.12
What does Tertullian mean by that? He goes on to explain that all murder is idolatry since the motive for killing is ultimately that something is loved more than God—yet in turn all idolatry is murder for it incurs one’s own death. Similarly all idolatry is also adultery because it is unfaithfulness to the truth and to God, while adultery is idolatry because it flows from the inordinate desire for a person or for a sensation, a desire stronger than our love for God and our desire to obey his law.
Idolatry, then, is simply the desire for something other than God at the center of our lives as our guiding star, the source of meaning in our life. As such, idolatry is the sin behind every sin, the life-lie that drives all of our choices and values. The object of that idolatry varies from person to person. There are probably as many different idols as there are human beings. However, the fact that we have idols is an inescapable truth. Our hearts are, in Calvin’s vivid image, factories that mass-produce idols.13
Repentance and freedom from idolatry. The only way to deal with our idols is to come to God in the simple act of repentance. Repentance turns its back on any other source of hope or self-justification and finds its refuge in the Lord alone. It is the attitude expressed by the hymnwriter Augustus Toplady: “Nothing in my hand I bring; simply to thy cross I cling.” This attitude is the ultimate idol-smasher, for every idolatry is at root an effort towards self-justification. Every idol promises us salvation, that is, self-worth, if we will just give in to what it demands. The idol “beauty” says: “I can make you a worthwhile person. Just make the sacrifices I require, and you will never lack friends”; the idol “power” says: “Put in the long hours in pursuit of your career, even though it costs you your family, and I will give you a significant life.” Idols make promises to those who can meet their demands.
Christianity offers salvation, meaning, and worth only to those who recognize that they can never give what the law demands; their only hope lies in the fact that Christ has fulfilled it for them. “Religion” or “doing good” is a popular idolatry that says: “Be a good person, punish yourself for your sins, turn your back on them, and you will be saved.” The difference between Christians and religiously minded idolaters is that Christians repent not only of their sins but also of their very best deeds, their best righteousness, in order to receive in its place the righteousness of Christ, to which they cling single-heartedly.14
Even that ability to cling single-heartedly to the Lord is itself the gift of God. The promise of Ezekiel 11:19 is that the Lord will give his people “an undivided heart,” a single-minded devotion to the Lord. By nature, all of us desert God and go after idols. But our idols will not ultimately have dominion over us. In order to rescue us from ourselves and from the grasp of our idols, God sent Jesus Christ into the world for us. There is nothing halfhearted about Jesus’ commitment to his people. He came down from heaven to live among us—that alone is an astonishing commitment. But his commitment is laid out even more plainly for us to see on the cross. His body was torn apart there because of my sins. His blood was poured out as a fountain to cleanse me from my unrighteousness. There on the cross, Jesus won a complete victory for us. Through his complete obedience, the demands of the law were comprehensively met. That’s why his final words on the cross were: “It is finished” (John 19:30). It is complete! His work is done.
Christ’s finished work on the cross is what gives us freedom from our idols. Their power to threaten us was broken once and for all, there and then. When our idols say to us, “You are not a worthwhile person if you do not have success or beauty or wealth or children or _____” (fill in the appropriate blank with the demand of your idol), now we can simply point them to the cross. There, God demonstrated his love by declaring me worth the death of his sinless only Son; there, God declared me a valued member of his family; there, God accomplished for me the free gift of salvation. That fact, unlike the moralizing or psychologizing approaches, frees me to recognize the full depth of my sin, because I now recognize the full depth of God’s love for me in Christ. I am indeed a far worse sinner than I ever thought, but in Christ I am at the same time far more loved than I ever dared hope.
The result of Jesus’ wholehearted sacrifice is the salvation of his people and their restoration to the full covenant relationship with God. What Ezekiel looked forward to, the presence of God in the midst of his sinless people on the far side of judgment (Ezek. 14:11), is still that to which the church looks forward. Though even now we experience the presence of Jesus in our midst whenever two or three are gathered together (Matt. 18:20), yet we are still strangers and aliens in this world, all too familiar with sin. Remaining sin in the lives of believers serves God’s glory by showing that he has not done anything without cause. It continues to remind us of our own weakness and depravity and thus to point us to the Savior. It continues to remind us of the world’s depravity, and thus of our neighbors’ utter need of Christ if they are ever to be saved.
But sin will not remain our constant companion forever (Ezek. 14:11). Because of the sin-bearer’s death in our place, we look forward to the day when we will join perfectly in the worship on the heavenly mountain. There we will join with the whole community of saints of all times and places, along with the heavenly hosts of angels and archangels. On that day, the dwelling of God will be with his people and he will live with them (Rev. 21:3). On that day, our idols will finally be smashed, and we will be able to worship and serve our beloved God with undivided hearts.