Today, I am reading and commenting on Ezekiel 5-8.

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I find this passage interesting.  Ezekiel is not anywhere near Jerusalem when God sends this prophecy to him to deliver.  That leads me to believe that even though the wording is directed towards those in Jerusalem the prophecy is not actually directed at them.  Repeatedly throughout this prophecy God declares to the people of Jerusalem (and the others to whom this prophecy was directed) that these things would happen so that they “shall know that I am the Lord.”  God condemns them for rebelling against His laws and refusing to walk in His statutes.  In fact, He tells them that they have been even more immoral than the nations around them which do not know God at all.  Then at the end of today’s passage, Ezekiel has a vision of people in Jerusalem worshiping idols in God’s temple.  God has Ezekiel burrow through the walls of the temple and shows him the leaders of Israel offering incense to various disgusting images in secret rooms.  Then God showed Ezekiel some women mourning for Tammuz (which is an idolatrous worship practice of the Phoenicians).  Finally, Ezekiel saw people in the temple courtyard turning their backs on God’s temple and worshiping the sun.

I want to look at the ways in which Ezekiel’s visions of people committing idolatry in the temple offer us warnings against doing similar things today.  The temple was the place for worshiping God, so these people presented themselves as worshiping God.  Yet the first thing we see is that many of the leaders of that worship were secretly dedicating themselves to disgusting, immoral, and degrading actions of worship which run counter to what God commanded.  But God tells Ezekiel that it gets worse.  The practice of mourning for Tammuz takes worship practices which God established and twists them to focus them away from God.  Finally, Ezekiel was shown people worshiping creation instead of worshiping the Creator.  Let us examine ourselves and the way we worship to make sure that we are not turning away from God when we think we are turning to Him.

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