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CHAPTER FIVE

THE COMPOUNDED MESSAGE OF EZEKIEL 16

AND JEREMIAH 16

TO JEW AND TO GENTILE

1) EZEKIEL 15-16 AND THE NEW COVENANT

MOVING from

VINE USELESS AS WOOD

to A SERVING NATION USELESS AS IDOLATERS

and A RESTORED NATION IN NEED OF A NEW COVENANT

2) JEREMIAH 15-16 FROM THE IRREMEDIABLE

THROUGH RESTORATION OF REMNANT

TO GENTILE RAPTURE IN REALITY

MOVING FROM AN IRREMEDIABLE POSITION FOR THE NATION,
PAST PRAYER, THROUGH A REMNANT TO RETURN (15:11),
AMID A PERSONAL CHALLENGE TO THE PROPHET (15:19ff.),
PRELUDE TO DEPICTION OF COMING DESOLATION,
THIS WORD TO JEREMIAH IN 16:19-20
REACHES THAT COMING TIME,
APPOINTED TO THE GENTILES
AS SITE FOR A NEW ONRUSH TO COME.
SICK OF IDOLS, WITH RELISH THEY ARE INVADED BY TRUTH.

Such in outline is the substantial degree of parallel in these two prophets, in both cases centring for dénouement on the sixteenth Chapter.

I EZEKIEL

The vine, said the Lord, is useless as wood, but valuable as producer. Israel fails to produce its due fruit and remains merely barren as wood. That is the substance of the message at the outset of Ezekiel 15. In the parallel of Jeremiah 15:1, we find no intercessor can prevail now, not even Moses and Samuel; whereas in Ezekiel 14:14, not even Noah, Daniel and Job could contrive to deliver the sinful people. Many set up idols in their hearts (Ezekiel 14:4), and even those three men of vision would deliver neither son nor daughter, but themselves alone from such a squalid nation, wallowing in unspirituality and idolatry.

How barren a nation when sons and daughters are so driven with spiritual fraud and riven with misinstruction and malign example, that their highway is that to hell, with no visible impediment! (Ezekiel 14:19). Moving to Ezekiel 16, one finds a devastating cultural assimilation Israel has made, an accommodation with the multicultural mass of nations about it, surrendering what is sacred in order to be like the rest, forsaking its mission and squandering its inheritance of holiness, justice and truth; and in this it so resembles modern Australia, that unless this our own nation repents, the prognosis is certainly not at all kindly! It is time to consider what kind you are, and if to doom, then to CHOOSE it, not simply moving as

	mesmerised by a smallish percentage of the people,
	into a vast cavern of corruption,
	dissipating from what made the nation as one among the great, when it was humble,
	when contrition still meant something,
	and conversion was not replaced with cultural conformity.

Repentance remains as crucial now as when Christ spoke as in Luke 13:1ff.. Its need is as then, so now.

In Ezekiel 16 we have such a litany of lawlessness, lust after false ideas, modes, models, idols, concerns, that it is compared to an extensive harlotry, unnatural in its lasciviousness, and even at that, distinguished by its abandon. This however is a spiritual harlotry. For that, the Lord will "gather all your lovers with whom you took pleasure, all those you loved, and all those you hated," declaring,

"I will gather them from all around against you and will uncover your nakedness,
and I will judge you as women who break wedlock or shed blood are judged..."

(Ezekiel 16:37).

Indeed, in 16:43, we find in the Massoretic text, an account, "Because you did not remember the days of your youth, but were agitated with Me," in terms of all the things appealing however appalling, and leading to ruin: it is in these terms that there is recompense from the Lord! Notice it is not the sins of youth which are the ground, but the FORGETTING that earlier onset of the wonder of the Lord, the days of the goodness of the Lord, and instead, now unrelenting, rich and deep in sin, bypassing the good that was hitherto known.

It is not God who is agitated, but it was Israel who agitating itself against God, spreading itself a little here, a lot there, till a multicultural religiosity became a confounding of the whole mission of the people, and a misadventure in mission. The confusion of the wholesome and commanded kindness to immigrants became a riotous rush into mangling their own religion, with a chameleon character and an arrogant refusal to consult what God has done in the past for them. It is such things as these which makes them an almost perfect image not only of Australia, currently being spiritually seduced at a vast and augmentative rate, but of Britain and the USA, and much of Europe, merely to take examples from a wayward world.

But let us revert to our grievous example of ancient Israel, and the Lord's dealings with it, and the cited reasons for this at that time!

YOU were lofty as well as wicked, and judged fallen nations about you WHILE IMITATING them, the Lord charges, noting that it became more abased even than Samaria, that dispossessed and ruined nation to the North (called 'Israel' as distinct from the Southern 'Judah' to whom Ezekiel cries). WHEN I bring back Samaria and Sodom, then I will bring you back, the Lord announces with withering challenge.

Poole in his often splendid commentary on the Bible, still fresh after centuries, notes an irony here, and does so well. Of course, Samaria had been removed from being a nation, the land depopulated and repopulated with other peoples of other religions and only Judah remained. As to Sodom, its burial in doom physically was notorious. The meaning is thus: JUST AS those famous examples of absolute crushing in ruin might come back (if the moon fell into the sea with it), so might you! You are ALL in one boat of wickedness, with one ruin before you all in your deserts, if mere law prevailed. Be ashamed and realise both your depravity and your ruinous state; and NEVER boast of yourself again! (Ezekiel 16:53-57, cf. 36:22).

However mercy is also mandated to this people, so that as in Ezekiel 16:60ff., the emphatic word NEVERTHELESS appears! First He WILL remember what He promised, despite the room for abandon of their status, so that as in Ezekiel 36 they will come back to their King (Ezekiel 37:24-25), brought back to their land even from the far off places of the earth, to their divinely accorded homeland, yet it will be spiritually as in the Everlasting Covenant, death swallowed up in victory, symbol in finality, in their King. .

"Nevertheless I will remember My covenant with you in the days of your youth, and I will establish an everlasting covenant with you. Then you will be ashamed as you find the abominations of the earth," (imaged in the above terms) restored, and "never open your mouth any more..." That is just as for the Gentile believers in that same everlasting covenant, then to come as in Jeremiah 31:31 and in this our own day, now long operative for the heart of Jew or Gentile, for salvation of the soul. As it was to be, as always, so it comes to be. God is like that: faithful, reliable, responsible, never changing His promise or His premises, nor aborting His undertakings; and as such, His is a magnificent composure and grandeur of character, that gives to all goodness its source, meaning and basis. THAT is why there is so much GOOD in the world, amid the corrosive and corrupt renditions of disaster which are rapidly bringing the whole orb to the stage of the earlier ruin Israel for so long suffered. That was for long, however; while this is for ever (Matthew 24:35). It is necessary to open the eyes.

II JEREMIAH

In our parallel though not identical coverage as found in Jeremiah 16, we look first in Ch. 15 at Moses and Samuel. EVEN IF, translated in time from their own day, to the time of the prophet Jeremiah, in order to intercede for this people, in vain would they cry for Israel. Divisions of disaster await a recalcitrant people, to whom repeatedly mercies were presented as the Lord, through the prophet, pled for them to awaken rather than be slain in the forces of pollution, amid the dynamics of an evil world, indeed, amid deserved judgments no longer merely to wait, as if they could be adjourned for ever!

"For who," asks the Lord, "will have pity on you,
Or who will bemoan you ?

"Or who will turn aside to ask how you are doing ?
You have forsaken Me,"

the Lord declares (Jeremiah 15:5-6)..

This world ? source of pity ? solicitude and reliability ? Find it then!

Jeremiah laments that he appears as a contentious man, though he merely presents the Lord's word (Jeremiah 15:12ff)., but the answer is sure:

"If you return,
Then I will bring you back:

"You shall stand before Me;
If you take out the precious from the vile,
You shall be as My mouth.

"Let them return to you,
But you must not return to them..."

So we enter Jeremiah 16, our fascinating parallel to Ezekiel 16: similar but not the same; of the same substance, but with its own contributions from the mouth of the Lord.

After review of the disaster to come (though a new plea occurs in Jeremiah 17, simple and searching, but the Lord knew of the reply as of all things - Isaiah 46:10), the Lord covers a point in contemplation. WHEN the ruin made clear as if already executed, then people will ask this: WHY is this to be done ?

The answer is already to hand, and the Lord declares it, enunciates its items. Why ? It is

"Because your fathers have forsaken Me ...
they have walked after other gods and have served them and worshipped them,
and have forsaken Me and not kept My law."

Indeed, He adds, "You have done worse than your fathers..." - Jeremiah16:12.

Incisively, in Jeremiah 16:11-12, we find that so bad is the stultification, that it amounts to an auditory closure, a complete and summary, a deafened waywardness. The Lord declares this to the above, that

"for behold, each one follows the dictates of his own evil heart,
so that no one listens to Me."

Thus they are to be cast out, but not altogether away, for they are a people of the covenant (Genesis 12, 15, 17, 22).

Hence they will for a time (70 years as in Jeremiah 25), leave their land; but yet mercy is not to forsake them, for the remnant will return, those fished or hunted, as if these were to find them in exile, and bring about their return (Jeremiah 16:16). Then, in effect, it would be said, the Lord indeed is living, who from the dead brought back the living from the North (as in the Exodus from the South)! and from all the nations, as in Jeremiah 16:15.

First however, the Lord would repay their long-time iniquity; for He will not have endless evasion and contagion with cultural relativism and ruin of spirit and contempt of heart, without its due notification and notice, when the time comes! (Jeremiah 16:18). Indeed, there is to be mortification!

Nevertheless, they WILL return, and ultimately it is to a NEW COVENANT (the everlasting covenant of Ezekiel 16:60), as in Jeremiah 31:31ff., and this is the covenant which will be written in the hearts and minds!

This new covenant is no longer that for the nation, but rather for the whole array of nations.

"O LORD, my strength and my fortress,"
My refuge in the day of affliction,"

the prophet cries,

"The Gentiles shall come to You
From the ends of the earth and say,
'Surely our fathers have inherited lies,
Worthlessness and unprofitable things.'

"Will a Man make gods for himself,
Which are not gods ?

"Therefore I will cause them to know
My hand and My might;
And they shall know that My name is the LORD".

Now one Gospel from one God will come to all the nations, and their time will come for direct call to the Lord, for the Messiah will Himself become the international ground of grace for any race, as in Jeremiah 23:5-8. Then it is a case of this (as in Psalm 71): "THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS"! This is the theme, not our performance or purity as criterion, but His, as a ground for our praise! As in Isaiah 66, when that time comes, that finale, when past the immediate return from Babylon, there is a finale, then what ?

Then "Therefore, behold, the days are coming ... they shall no longer say," God brought us out of Egypt, but now He has returned us from the North! and from all the lands where He had driven them (Jeremiah 16:15), and in their own land will they dwell. In fact, the time comes, is coming, as the end of a day comes, when all the events lie packed together in the past hours of it, and one reviews them, when the sun sets and makes its magnificent atmospheric floras and recesses, imparting a glow throughout.

But it is not yet.

Yet come it will.

Such days are coming when "the Gentiles will come to You from the end of the earth," declaring that their fathers have had lies Jeremiah 16:19); but now they find this self-same Lord, with His new, indeed His everlasting covenant, to which any who come, come as from alienation of life, to its reconciliation. They come as with others, drawn by the resources of pity and mercy of the Lord, to be redeemed without price (to them - Isaiah 55), but with the cost of the Lamb (Isaiah 50-53), from the point of view of the Maker and Redeemer. It may be ignored; but not the result of doing so.

III THE TESTIMONY OF BOTH

Thus Jeremiah shows Israel brought back to its land (16:14-15), this indeed with such zeal as to show hunters and fishers dexterously employed in doing this, and after noting His prior disciple (16:18), the Lord proceeds to exhibit the new glory in a vast movement to the living God from amid deadened Gentiles (cf. Luke 15, Psalm 115, Ephesians 4:17-18, Deuteronomy 4, 12). Here they are prophetically seen in the sudden exposure of Ezekiel 16 as it ends, vivified to see the appalling and the supinely superficial character of their former false beliefs (16:18-20). How they exult in their new finding of God Himself, direct, with no conditions of access from Israel! (cf. Isaiah 24:16).

It is in Jeremiah 31:31ff. that it is explicit that this is in terms of a New Covenant that is not only arrestingly direct to Gentiles (as in Isaiah 42, 49, 66), but has an inwardly inherent stress as a covenant, as well as an outwardly directed one. This in itself is not novel (Ezekiel 18:31, Isaiah 1), but its terms are emphatic in this field.

Thus that heart transformation that Jeremiah explains in 31:31ff. so explicitly, Ezekiel 18:31 shows also be a critically important feature; and where Jeremiah shows vast undertaking as deep as the order of the stars, for this coming new covenant and for Israel and its continued existence in this divine mercy, so Ezekiel 16, having made clear that a chastened Israel will return to its land, brings in the vast explosion of grace amid the Gentiles who though no Jews, gain the crux of what Israel had spiritually, and that with a reverential exuberance and directness, entirely parallel to the prescription for a new heart found in Ezekiel 18:31.

In Ezekiel 16 and Jeremiah 16, thus there is protestation, review, ravagement, restoration, humiliation, a new covenant either implied or explicit (Ezekiel 16:60-66, Jeremiah 16:19ff.), and in each BOOK, explicit, reaching to many as to all, as one and the only spiritual basis for life as God made it.

The Gospel it is which will not be humbled, its bud blessed to Israel (cf. Romans 9), in the prophets and in the power of God as and when they followed Him, its bloom transfusing a spiritual life in the New Testament. It is for one as for all, for Jew as for Gentiles; while God keeps His word as a maiden may keep her virtue, or a young man his loyalty to the Lord: moving nowhere and in nothing, the Lord that immovable Rock, the onward wonder, immovable in character, unveiled in detail, proceeds. The events move in history to the consummation of all, that any may come, none favoured as pets, but all found and coming by grace, treated as children, till tests and testimony alike concluded, earth's time is done; and even then they remain (cf. Isaiah 51:6, Matthew 24:35, John 10:9-10). It is forever. That, it is security; and there is none other.

The millenium of demonstration succeeding the times of remonstration, and God vindicated in victory made manifest (Psalm 72, Isaiah 59, Micah 4), then the day is done, the universe removed like choir stands; for God is a God of scale as well as heart. He, being God, is not stalled or stumbling amid the thrust of His creation. Rather has He adorned it with a salvation which comes to stay, just as His words come to be fulfilled, the testimony of truth of one God who in many ways, explicitly in writing in the Bible, and written into flesh in Jesus Christ (cf. Hebrews 1), manifestly and savingly has declared Himself. Thus, it is one for all, but not all in one! In Him, there is life for love, and love for life, and this, where in Him alone, it is to be found.

There is no other and no other testimony even to compare in heart or head or mind or reason or effectuality or fulfilment or testability or versatility, or security from change, or applicability to one and to all, in all things.