The People of God: God's Wife--III

Ezekiel 16 tells a gripping story. An Amorite man and his Hittite wife give birth to a little girl. They do not want her, so they leave her in the open field to die. As the helpless child is kicking about in her blood, a man just happens to come by the field and hears the child crying. He takes pity on the newborn, takes her home, washes her, clothes her, feeds her, and raises her to womanhood (verses 1-7).

When this little child became a mature woman, the man who had saved her fell in love with her and married her. He lavished extravagant gifts of clothing and jewelry and ointments and food upon her, so that she was the most beautiful of all women (verses 8-13).

The man in this story is Yahweh, and the woman is Jerusalem in the time of Ezekiel, which actually represents all of the people of God. This story emphasizes three important truths about God's relationship to his people.

First, the people of God are people whom others abandon; they are ugly; they would perish if God did not have pity on them and deliver them from certain doom.

Second, the "beauty" which the people of God possess does not come from within them, but is an undeserved gift of God to them. Yahweh's words to his people in verses 13b-14 emphasize this point vividly:

"You [God's people] became VERY BEAUTIFUL and rose to be a queen. And your fame spread among the nations ON ACCOUNT OF YOUR BEAUTY, BECAUSE THE SPLENDOR I HAD GIVEN YOU MADE YOUR BEAUTY PERFECT, declares the Sovereign Lord."

Paul makes precisely the same point about the church in Ephesians 5:25-27:

"Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her TO MAKE HER HOLY, CLEANSING HER by the washing of water through the word, and to present her to himself AS A RADIANT CHURCH, WITHOUT STAIN OR WRINKLE OR ANY OTHER BLEMISH, BUT HOLY AND BLAMELESS."

The people of God have nothing of which to boast (Ephesians 2:9). God through Christ has made them beautiful in spite of the ugliness of their hearts. God's people are repulsive, requiring the moment-by-moment spiritual cleansing by Christ's blood to survive (1 John 1:7).

Third, very often, when God's makes his people beautiful in spite of their innate ugliness, his people try to convince the world that they are responsible for their own beauty. Thus the very next words which God speaks to his people--in Ezekiel 16:15--are: "BUT YOU TRUSTED IN YOUR BEAUTY and used your fame to become a prostitute. You lavished your favors on anyone who passed by and your beauty became his."

How warped and disheartening it is for people to receive God's gifts and blessings, then to claim those gifts and blessings are their own doing, and to use them for ungodly activities!

John Willis