I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Ezekiel 24-26.

Elsewhere, some of the false prophets were quoted as saying that people would be safe in Jerusalem because it was like an iron cooking pot.  Here Ezekiel illustrates why that was a faulty metaphor for safety.  He makes the point with this illustration that the wealthy and the powerful, those who think of themselves as the “choice cuts”, will be no different from the poor and needy.  When you cook meat in a pot like this, it all becomes pretty much interchangeable.  Further, as I read the passage, he cooks the meat until it becomes burned to the sides and bottom of the pot, charred and inedible.  As a result the pot cannot be cleaned and becomes unusable.  Ezekiel takes the metaphor which false prophets had used to reassure people and makes it a metaphor for the results of the people’s unwillingness to turn from their sins.  This is a perfect metaphor because earlier Ezekiel had used the metaphor of using fire to purify silver.  God brings trouble into our lives to purify us.  We can either let it melt us down to remove the impurities, or we can resist and be discarded as useless.

I am going to skip over the very sad portion where Ezekiel was forbidden by God to mourn for the death of his wife.  I find a very real lesson for practical politics in Ezekiel’s prophecies against the nations which surrounded Judah.  Those nations fell into two classes: those which encouraged the kings of Judah to ally against Babylon, and those which sought to gain by encouraging Babylon to destroy the Jewish people.  There may have been significant overlap between these two groups., as some may have sent envoys to convince the kings of Judah to rebel against Babylon while sending envoys to Babylon to swear fealty to Babylon.  In either case, the destruction which came upon Judah brought devastation on those nations as well.  War does not stay within borders.