Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks from Ezekiel 8–9 in this sermon from The Gospel Coalition Library
“In the sixth year, in the sixth month on the fifth day, while I was sitting in my house and the elders of Judah were sitting before me, the hand of the Sovereign Lord came upon me there. I looked, and I saw a figure like that of a man. From what appeared to be his waist down he was like fire, and from there up his appearance was as bright as glowing metal.
He stretched out what looked like a hand and took me by the hair of my head. The Spirit lifted me up between earth and heaven and in visions of God he took me to Jerusalem, to the entrance to the north gate of the inner court, where the idol that provokes to jealousy stood. And there before me was the glory of the God of Israel, as in the vision I had seen in the plain.
Then he said to me, ‘Son of man, look toward the north.’ So I looked, and in the entrance north of the gate of the altar I saw this idol of jealousy. And he said to me, ‘Son of man, do you see what they are doing—the utterly detestable things the house of Israel is doing here, things that will drive me far from my sanctuary? But you will see things that are even more detestable.’
Then he brought me to the entrance to the court. I looked, and I saw a hole in the wall. He said to me, ‘Son of man, now dig into the wall.’ So I dug into the wall and saw a doorway there. And he said to me, ‘Go in and see the wicked and detestable things they are doing here.’ So I went in and looked, and I saw portrayed all over the walls all kinds of crawling things and detestable animals and all the idols of the house of Israel.
In front of them stood seventy elders of the house of Israel, and Jaazaniah son of Shaphan was standing among them. Each had a censer in his hand, and a fragrant cloud of incense was rising. He said to me, ‘Son of man, have you seen what the elders of the house of Israel are doing in the darkness, each at the shrine of his own idol? They say, “The Lord does not see us; the Lord has forsaken the land.” ’
Again, he said, ‘You will see them doing things that are even more detestable.’ Then he brought me to the entrance to the north gate of the house of the Lord, and I saw women sitting there, mourning for Tammuz. He said to me, ‘Do you see this, son of man? You will see things that are even more detestable than this.’
He then brought me into the inner court of the house of the Lord, and there at the entrance to the temple, between the portico and the altar, were about twenty-five men. With their backs toward the temple of the Lord and their faces toward the east, they were bowing down to the sun in the east.
He said to me, ‘Have you seen this, son of man? Is it a trivial matter for the house of Judah to do the detestable things they are doing here? Must they also fill the land with violence and continually provoke me to anger? Look at them putting the branch to their nose! Therefore I will deal with them in anger; I will not look on them with pity or spare them. Although they shout in my ears, I will not listen to them.’
Then I heard him call out in a loud voice, ‘Bring the guards of the city here, each with a weapon in his hand.’ And I saw six men coming from the direction of the upper gate, which faces north, each with a deadly weapon in his hand. With them was a man clothed in linen who had a writing kit at his side. They came in and stood beside the bronze altar.
Now the glory of the God of Israel went up from above the cherubim, where it had been, and moved to the threshold of the temple. Then the Lord called to the man clothed in linen who had the writing kit at his side and said to him, ‘Go throughout the city of Jerusalem and put a mark on the foreheads of those who grieve and lament over all the detestable things that are done in it.’
As I listened, he said to the others, ‘Follow him through the city and kill, without showing pity or compassion. Slaughter old men, young men and maidens, women and children, but do not touch anyone who has the mark. Begin at my sanctuary.’ So they began with the elders who were in front of the temple.
Then he said to them, ‘Defile the temple and fill the courts with the slain. Go!’ So they went out and began killing throughout the city. While they were killing and I was left alone, I fell facedown, crying out, ‘Ah, Sovereign Lord! Are you going to destroy the entire remnant of Israel in this outpouring of your wrath on Jerusalem?’
He answered me, ‘The sin of the house of Israel and Judah is exceedingly great; the land is full of bloodshed and the city is full of injustice. They say, “The Lord has forsaken the land; the Lord does not see.” So I will not look on them with pity or spare them, but I will bring down on their own heads what they have done.’ Then the man in linen with the writing kit at his side brought back word, saying, ‘I have done as you commanded.’ ”
This is the Word of the Lord.
When I was a boy, it was not uncommon to refer to the choir of the church as the war department. It seemed to be the place where not a few massive egos congregated and competed for prominence. More than one pastor, I’m sure, felt wonderfully burdened just to smash the whole thing and be done with it.
Nowadays, we have extended this war department category to the entire church in the area of worship. Many are the churches in this nation that are struggling to sort out what worship should be. By struggling, I mean that there are very strong voices in the church with highly competing visions.
There’s one segment … steeped in tradition, maybe deeply indebted to the Book of Common Prayer … that wants litanies and responses. It wants public confessions. It wants things like the Apostles’ Creed recited every week. It loves the words that we read together on Sunday: “We have done those things that we ought not to have done; and we have not done those things that we ought to have done; and there is no health in us.” That’s the heritage.
That group is often viewed by the more enthusiastic sort as “the upright and the uptight.” If they would just let themselves go and worship God a bit, maybe they would escape the narrow confines of their tradition and get on with the sheer glory and joy of the Lord. For their part, they cannot easily imagine worship that does not involve some footwork and some hands in the air.
And you have to clap. If you don’t clap, then clearly there is something inferior about your worship. To “the upright and the uptight,” those people seem simply undisciplined. They don’t really have the heart of the issue. They’re just letting their emotions hang out. They could do that at a football game. Football or Jesus: it’s all the same thing for them! They have no idea of the solemnity of the occasion. Now I’ve stepped on everybody’s toes!
For example, one of my favorite preachers this century was a genuinely godly man called Martyn Lloyd-Jones. He was a great man of God and a very gifted preacher. His own habit while singing hymns, for example, was to keep the hymnbook right in front of his eyes. Even when he knew the hymn cold (which was about 98 percent of the time), he would never take his eyes off of the text.
He’d never look around, never look up, never lift his hands up, and never clap. His rationale was very simple. He said, “I so much want to focus on the text. I don’t want to be distracted by what’s going on around me, and I don’t want to entertain second thoughts about whether anybody is looking at me as the chap at the front, so I just focus on the text.”
Now there’s a second and third generation of post-Lloyd-Jones-ites who feel that is the law of the Medes and the Persians that cannot be altered such that if you’re preaching in their circles and take your eye off the text for a moment and look down, they already know you’re at least one notch down from the spirituality of Lloyd-Jones, because this, for them in their tradition, has become a new test of what genuine worship is.
In the broader culture, granted how secular our Western world has become, there is an astonishing amount of interest around in worship. In part, it’s tied to a larger quest for “spirituality,” whatever that is. Spirituality has become a kind of “good word,” like motherhood and apple pie in the 1950s. Those words have both gone out for various reasons, but now spirituality is a good word like that. You can’t say anything against spirituality, but it can mean almost anything.
It can mean feeling part of the transcendent because you gaze at crystals. It can mean holding silence at TaizÈ. It can mean journaling. It can mean being deeply entrenched in Zen Buddhism. Spirituality is a catchall that somehow means being connected with the transcendent or the “other” and escaping the sheer sterility of this technological age, which focuses so narrowly on things and science and the like that we want to escape these narrow domains.
Remember the Heaven’s Gate episode? It was discussed everywhere in the media. With only two exceptions (in my hearing), we couldn’t find commentators or journalists who would say that this was wicked. It was, in the strongest term, bizarre, but you’re not allowed to say that anybody else’s worship is wicked or that what they’re doing in religion is wrong, stupid, perverse, and people-destroying. You can’t say that because it’s part of spirituality, and spirituality is good. So the strongest category is bizarre.
Of course, that judgment is simply based on the view that faith is personal and non-testable. There is fact and science over here, for those who still believe in such things, and then over here, there is faith. That’s mere opinion. If the Heaven’s Gate people have their faith, then that’s their faith. You can’t criticize it. It’s personal.
The only heresy left is the view that there’s such a thing as heresy. That means you can never, ever speak of corrupt worship. Bizarre worship, maybe, but not corrupt worship. Nevertheless, Ezekiel doesn’t have any difficulty talking about corrupt worship. Ezekiel has quite a few things to say about worship. In this pair of chapters, he denounces corrupt worship. Later on in the book, he has a glorious picture, cast in Old Testament terms, of future worship.
I will allude to a little bit of that later this evening, but let’s understand, first of all, what worship and what corrupt worship are before we try to make application to ourselves. Here, in these two chapters, we discover two clear principles, I think. First … What does corrupt worship look like? And second … What does God do about it? We need to establish the setting (verses 1 to 4) before we answer those two questions.
The passage in verses 1 to 4 is set out exactly 14 months after Ezekiel’s inaugural vision. So he is now in the period when he has stopped lying on his left side, denouncing Israel, which has long gone into captivity. He’s now lying on his right side and is denouncing Judah. At this point, Ezekiel has established enough prophetic credentials as a bona fide prophet of God that the elders of the exilic community sometimes consult with him, as in verse 1.
“In the sixth year, in the sixth month on the fifth day …” That is, 14 months after the inaugural vision. “… while I was sitting in my house and the elders of Judah were sitting before me, the hand of the Sovereign Lord came upon me there.” Now they may even have been consulting him over the future of Jerusalem. Would they ever get back home? We do not know.
As a true prophet, Ezekiel would not simply give an immediate answer. He would wait for God to speak and wait for some visionary experience. Sometimes, this would be a long wait. At such a time as this, Ezekiel had a visionary experience akin to his first. “Thus, the hand of the Sovereign Lord came upon me there.” The figure of verse 2, clearly, is entirely reminiscent of the figure of God in the inaugural throne vision.
Note again the avoidance of too much anthropomorphism; that is, talking about God in merely human categories. “I looked, and I saw a figure like that of a man. From what appeared to be his waist down he was like fire, and from there up his appearance was as bright as glowing metal. He stretched out what looked like a hand …” There are many of the same elements in this glorious transcendent picture from chapter 1.
The vision that Ezekiel sees controls chapters 8 through 11. It’s all one long vision. We’ll look at chapters 8 and 9 tonight. In his vision, he is spirited away to Jerusalem. I don’t really like the means myself (being yanked there by his hair), but I suppose if it’s in a vision, it doesn’t hurt too much. Everything that takes place now in chapters 8 and 9 you must understand to be visionary. You don’t have to hold that he was literally transported. He was in a vision, and in his vision, he was transported.
In this vision, he is set down (verse 3) at the entrance to the north gate of the inner court. This is significant; we’ll see the significance in a few moments. There were three gates that gave entrance to the inner court from the outer. One was to the north, one was to the east, and one was to the south. The north gate was the one that the king habitually used, as his palace was on the north side of the temple. That point is important; we’ll come back to it.
In his vision, then, Ezekiel sees two astonishing things not far from this gate. First was the “idol that provokes to jealousy” (verse 3). The second was “the glory of the God of Israel,” just as he had seen that glory on the plain in Babylon (verse 4), which calls us back to chapter 1 again. So what Ezekiel sees, then, is the glory of the God of Israel and this idol that provokes to jealousy. It is this combination that kicks off the four vignettes that follow.
Let me simply list them first of all, and then I will go through them one by one. They are the idol of jealousy, verses 5 and 6; the worship of animals, verses 7 to 13; the fertility cult, verses 14 and 15; and sun worship, verses 16 to 18. But here, right at the beginning of this sequence of pictures of horrendous idolatry, we’re reminded that God is still present.
This is still his temple. His glory is still there. Others cannot see this glory in the temple, but Ezekiel, in his vision, can. That, of course, under these circumstances, is both a blessing and a threat. When there is massive sin and massive idolatry, the presence of God is always both a blessing and a threat. That controls the rest of these two chapters. Now we come to the first of our two questions
1. What does corrupt worship look like?
A. Corrupt worship replaces or relativizes God.
Consider this idol of jealousy (verse 5 and 6) or, as it’s more prosaically called, this “idol that provokes to jealousy.” (Verse 3) What does that mean? What is it? We can’t be certain which idol it was. According to 2 Kings 21, Manasseh had put a wooden image of Asherah, a Canaanite goddess, in the house of the Lord at one of those periods of declension in Israelite history.
According to 2 Chronicles 33, he later removed it. He reigned for more than 50 years; the first half century was awful. Then he was converted, but he only had two or three years left to live. During those final years, he did remove it, but it must have been kept in storage because later, Josiah had it taken out and burned (2 Kings 23).
One of King Josiah’s successors had probably made another similar idol and set it up in the northern gate, where he would see it every time he went to the temple. This is a terrible but typical example of syncretism. Syncretism is mixing together different religions, belief systems, or structures of thought … a little bit of this god and a little bit of that god, a little bit of this worldview and a little bit of that worldview … into a nice stew.
Instead, therefore, of remaining faithful to the God of the covenant, increasingly, the people of Israel were involved in syncretism. At one level, they kept practicing the great feasts. They still took the name of Jehovah, Yahweh, on their lips. They still read the scroll and had the temple choirs. They still observed Yom Kippur, when the high priest, on the Day of Atonement, went in and offered the blood.
Meanwhile, however, they had Asherah goddesses. They had the Baals scattered around here and there. They mixed them all up. I mean, the more gods you have on your side, the better off you are, aren’t you? God’s point of view was different. This was the idol of jealousy. It was the idol that provoked God to jealousy. That is what is meant. It doesn’t matter what the idol is. It’s not that this was the idol called jealousy, but it was the idol that made God jealous.
Already in the Ten Commandments, way back at Sinai, God had said (according to Exodus 20), “For the Lord your God is a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, to the third and the fourth generations of those who hate me and despitefully use me …” You may well ask, “In us, jealousy is usually viewed as a vice, so why should it be viewed as a virtue in God?” Isn’t it a bit petty for God to be jealous? Here we come to one of the fundamental distinctions between human beings and God.
My wife, Joy, is over there. If I became, for any reason whatsoever, extremely possessive and controlling, if didn’t want her to leave the house without knowing everywhere she went, if I looked askance at every man who ever looked at her or shook her hand or smiled or had a kind word to say to her, if I didn’t want her outside or taking any courses or pursuing tennis or anything else … because, after all, I couldn’t be very sure of her, and besides, she’s my wife and I’m jealous … would that be a godly virtue?
This would be awful because here you have two finite human beings, one trying to control the other. It’s terrible. However, there is a place in marriage for proper jealousy, isn’t there? Flip it. Supposing now, my wife discovers that I’m having an affair on the side. Does she have the right to be jealous? You bet! We swore before God and witnesses that we would “cherish each other and cleave only to each other, as long as we both lived, in sickness as in health, so help us, God, until death separated us.” She has every right to be jealous if I’m playing around.
Does God have the right to be jealous? If God is simply one more deity amidst all of the other deities, on competing terms, as it were, then he doesn’t have the right to be jealous. He’s just one more god. Let him play his turf. But if there is but one God, finally, our Maker and if, in addition to this, he has entered into an agreement with this covenant community …
An agreement in which, in full knowledge of their actions and with understanding of the entailments, these people have entered into a sworn covenantal relationship of which God says, “Listen, don’t enter into this unless you really are awake and see what’s going to happen here if you turn away from me” then for God, at this point, to say, “Well, quite frankly, I don’t give a rip what you do,” it would be to deny his own deity.
It would scarcely be a mark of my wife’s loyalty and fidelity and love if she found out I were sleeping around and said, “I don’t really give a rip what he does.” God is the God of creation. We owe him. He is the God of the covenant. If we are in the covenant community, we owe him and are pledged to him. If you add on other gods to that, which is the very definition of syncretism, then it’s small wonder that God is a jealous God.
What will be the effect? Verse 6: “Son of man, do you see what they are doing—the utterly detestable things the house of Israel is doing here, things that will drive me far from my sanctuary?” It’s not as if God is so weak that he’s going to be driven off by these stronger gods. That’s not the idea. Rather, he is the God who will not share his glory with another, as my wife won’t share me with another and I won’t share her with another. He will not share his glory with another. He will, therefore, abandon his people to their devices. He’ll be driven from the temple.
But there are still more detestable things. We come now to the vision of verses 7 and following. The exact location is now uncertain, but in this vision, Ezekiel is told how to gain access to this chamber of abominations in verses 7 to 10. These are probably carvings and relief work of serpent deities and the like, known from Egyptian, Canaanite, and Babylonian sources.
Here is not only forbidden syncretism all over again but even worshiping things which, according to the old covenant, are unclean. This is not merely adding something on to the God of the Old Testament. It is using a whole symbol-laden apparatus that is fundamentally opposed to what is at the heart of the old covenant: where God, and God alone, declares what’s clean and what’s unclean, what’s holy and what’s not holy. Now these people make it up as they go along.
But there will be yet more detestable things. Verses 13 and following. Here, there are nature worship and fertility cults. Verse 14: “Then he brought me to the entrance to the north gate of the house of the Lord, and I saw women sitting there, mourning for Tammuz.” Tammuz needs to be explained.
Tammuz was a Samarian god of vegetation who died and became a god of the underworld. The cult connected with Tammuz incorporated a kind of mourning ritual. It conducted the mourning ritual every autumn, connected with the end of the harvest season when everything is dying. It also conducted a fertility ritual in the spring connected with everything coming back to life. It was a fertility cult.
Fertility cults were very popular in the ancient Near East and the eastern Mediterranean, generally. Eventually, Tammuz wore Greek dress and became associated with the Greek gods Adonis and Aphrodite. Already a century and a half earlier, Isaiah had condemned the people of his day for planting Tammuz gardens. We don’t know much about them, but they don’t sound right to me.
Fertility cults often, though not always, were associated with sexual promiscuity as well. In many fertility cults, a farmer and his wife, for example, would go to the fertility temple. He (the farmer) would sleep with one of the priestesses, and she (his wife) might sleep with one of the priests. The idea was that by the copulation you encouraged the gods to copulate. If the gods copulate then you get fertility in the land.
You can imagine the social effects of this kind of thing going on. Fertility cults were immensely popular right into the first and second century AD. The point here is not so much the sex. The point here is that these people trust the fertility gods for their harvest, not the living God. Read Deuteronomy. Remind yourself how God promises to provide all that they need.
In fact, in Deuteronomy 8, he warns them that once they come into the land and their riches are multiplying, they turn over good crops, their annual income is going up, and the GDP looks very positive … he says, “Don’t forget who brought you out of the land of slavery. Don’t forget who gives you the power to work. Don’t forget who gives you seedtime and harvest.” These people have forgotten all of that. They now ascribe their plenty to Tammuz, the fertility gods. “Do you see this, son of man?” (Verse 15)
Then there are still more detestable things. Here’s the crowning display of all that’s detestable. It takes place at the very entrance to the temple itself, in the inner court between the altar and the temple portico (verse 16). The temple lay on an east-west axis. This was enough to trigger, of all things, sun worship. This was not the first time.
Perhaps they had been influenced by their sojourn down in Egypt. The Egyptians had a god called Ra, a sun god. Maybe some of them had brought this heritage with them and it had never been stamped out. Perhaps some had been influenced along these lines. Not many years before the vision of Ezekiel 8 and 9, King Josiah removed horses that the kings of Judah had dedicated to the sun and burned chariots dedicated to the sun (you can read about it in 2 Kings 23).
Now these same forms of idolatry have returned with a vengeance. We read, in verse 16: “With their backs toward the temple of the Lord and their faces toward the east, they were bowing down to the sun in the east. He said to me, ‘Have you seen this, son of man? Is it a trivial matter for the house of Judah to do the detestable things they are doing here?’ ”
This is not merely syncretism, though it is that. It is also, first, worship of the creation rather than of the Creator. Second, it is an explicit contravention of the covenant. Deuteronomy 4:19 had said, “Whatever else you do, don’t worship the sun.” Third, even symbolically, it was turning one’s back on God. You turn, with your back to the altar and the temple, and you open yourself up to this created order.
Corrupt worship, then, replaces and relativizes God. Now the same is true, of course, today. Corrupt worship is not so much a question of the wrong method or the wrong style … whether it is guitars or pipe organ, litanies or choruses … as the wrong object, or even a compromised object. That is the heart of the issue.
Our culture is not tempted by exactly the same idols and godlets that attracted the ancient Israelites. Not many in this room, I suspect, have been caught bowing down to the sun in the morning. But some of the parallels might make us more uncomfortable than we might initially think.
In our culture, we have not set up an Asherah idol, an idol of jealousy, but is there anything that we cherish that makes God jealous? Is there anything that we value that runs competition with him for our allegiance? We confess that Jesus is Lord. To the extent that that’s a lie, we provoke God to jealousy.
We don’t worship snakes that are carved in bowel relief on walls, but do we cherish and revere dirty things, things that God declares unclean? I have worked with enough students who are hooked on porn on the Internet. I doubt that anybody has been out in a Tammuz garden recently. We don’t have fertility cults today, but we come jolly close to worshiping sex itself.
No, we don’t worship the sun, but we are sold out to worshiping the creation rather than the Creator, are we not? Not least in the rising pantheism of our culture that is distorting large swaths of our outlook, God is identified with things. In corrupt worship, everyone worships as he or she sees fit … choose your own gods … while maintaining nominal allegiance, if you like, to some sort of traditional deity. It’s almost a definition of postmodern worship at its worst.
B. Corrupt worship commands extensive and diverse assent.
Of course, betraying God is wrong and evil, even when done by an individual. In some circumstances, even that can bring on tragic consequences. You may recall the story of Achan, for example, in the book of Joshua, whose lust for some gold and some garments led to tragedy way beyond his family. However, when corrupt worship is found throughout the society and throughout the professing church, the times are exceedingly dangerous.
Look at this passage again in verses 5 to 6. The north gate was used by royalty, so this idol of jealousy has been posted at the place where the king can offer his worship on the way to the temple, if you please. No one else uses the north gate regularly. So the king, who was supposed to be the defender of the faith, was the one who was, in effect, leading the nation in perversity.
Of course, in this country, we don’t have a king, but in Britain, for example, Prince Charles has gone on record as saying that when he comes to the throne, he does not want to be called defender of the faith but defender of faith. What is that but syncretism?
In the covenant community in our generation, there are many, many people whose whole desire is to bring confessional Christianity into line with Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam because, supposedly, they are all the same paths going to the same thing, aren’t they? It’s our version of syncretism. You must understand it.
Then in verses 7 to 13. Again, these details are not just put in for no purpose. Who is involved in this pagan ritual? These 70 elders are not an official assembly like the Sanhedrin, which was invented much later. This means, simply, a substantial number of Israel’s leaders. The specific naming of Jaazaniah, son of Shaphan, is a way of showing just how far the corruption went.
Shaphan was Josiah’s secretary of state. You may recall that Josiah was the last reforming king. Shaphan was his secretary of state. One of his sons, Joachim, supported Jeremiah, but Jaazaniah, another offshoot from the same family, shows that even the greatest and best families were participating in the national pension for syncretism. It would be like discovering that Billy Graham’s wife was secretly a Hindu.
In verses 14 to 15, the women in the society were heavily involved in the Tammuz worship. In the culture, the women were understood to be preserving, protecting, and shaping the home, and now they’re involved in fertility cults.
In verses 16 to 17, these 25 men must be priests, as they are in the inner court and only priests were allowed in there. These were not only prominent people, but they were priests who were prominent priests, since, in 9:16, they are also described as elders. They are prominent priests who are involved, also, in rule, and they are involved in sun worship.
In other words, corrupt worship commands widespread and diverse assent. The problem is that once corrupt worship has become very extensive, it is hard to avoid its influence. Let me take an analogy entirely away from this. If you’re brought up in a nicely protected environment you might not hear a lot of profanity.
Some friends of mine took their young family off to Japan. There they lived in Toyama-ken, learned Japanese, and the kids went to Japanese schools. These kids hardly knew any English speakers, except their parents, so they had never heard any profanity or swearing, at least not in English. The parents said sometimes those kids came off the streets in Japan, bringing home some words the parents hadn’t heard, but so far as English went, they didn’t know any bad words.
After five or six years there the youngest daughter (who was 1 when they went out) was brought back to Vancouver, Canada. That night, the father went into her room and heard this daughter, in her sleep, saying, “Damn! Damn! Damn!” She’d been back 24 hours, and she had already learned how to say damn. She hadn’t learned it from the parents.
You and I both know that if you are brought up in sort of a Christian home, school, and church where this sort of conduct is frowned upon, then suddenly you go off to a secular university, you start hearing and seeing some things that you hadn’t kept at the very front of your imagination before. Eventually, however, you become inured. It’s the way the world is.
You go home and tell your parents about it (if you do tell your parents about it), and they seem shocked. You’re the sophisticated one. You’re not shocked anymore. “That’s just the way it is. Come on, don’t be stuffy, Mom and Dad.” Isn’t that the way, finally, sin itself is no longer shocking? What do you have to do to shock people?
It’s why porn becomes so addictive, too, isn’t it? You always have to keep ratcheting it up because the last dose no longer is worth much. It’s the same with corrupt worship. Once corrupt worship had become very extensive, it’s hard to avoid its influence. We analyze it and philosophize over it, but we’re no longer shocked by it. The evil inherent in it is no longer shocking until we’re all, in a certain way, compromised.
C. Corrupt worship dulls moral vision.
Look at verse 17b: “Must they also fill the land with violence and continually provoke me to anger?” Isn’t that an interesting question? Most of us, when we think about Christianity, think of the social implications first. We talk about the social implications first, and then we say, “And also, by the way, God is getting shafted.”
That’s not the way Ezekiel looks at it. Ezekiel looks at the religious dimension first, the God dimension first. God is getting shafted by the people of the covenant. “And also,” he says, “furthermore, this has the effect of dulling the moral vision.” Basically, that’s the way it works in the Bible. That’s the way it works. Do you remember Hosea 9? “But when they came to Baal Peor, they consecrated themselves to that shameful idol and became as vile as the thing they loved.”
Someone has said that you cannot rise higher than the god you worship. If, at the end of the day, your god is materialism, you become a materialist. But supposing your vision of God is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ? How will that shape your life? If, instead, you drift into corroded, compromised, and syncretistic worship, defined here in these ways … the object of worship redefined, domesticated, and trained so that he is no more than the other gods … then what will this finally do to your moral vision?
It was the moral impetus behind the Great Awakening in Britain that people observed. One must understand that the moral impetus that transformed life in Britain under the Great Awakening, and in the New England states in this country, was not the first front of the movement. It was the entailment of the movement. First was men and women getting right with God, seeing who God was, worshiping in Spirit and in truth. In consequence, they shook the very foundations of society.
In Britain, approximately one-third of all babies born in 1740 were thrown out. They were thrown in the garbage tip. They didn’t have abortion, so they just threw them in the garbage tip. Infanticide, it was called, by exposure. About one-third of all babies were killed that way. By the time the Great Awakening was over, it was a relatively rare thing and it was a crime.
One could work through, then, prison reform, child labor laws, and the abolition of slavery. Area after area of reform, without exception, was driven home, sometimes at great political cost, by men and women who had a vision of God. Without godly vision, without godly worship, the moral impetus dissipates.
If all of our worship is configured in our minds as mere entertainment, then God is the great entertainer. If on the other hand, all of our worship is configured around a God who is exceedingly stern, then all of our life is likely to become stern and without anything of the joy of the Lord.
If God is configured in our mind as a sort of great sentimentalist, sort of a goopy grandfather figure, then our moral reflection will be shaped by that so that we can’t exercise discipline in the home or in the church or anywhere else because it wouldn’t be loving, like God. Do you see? Our vision of God will finally shape our morals. What you cherish, what you worship, shapes who you are. That’s what this text says.
“Have you seen this, son of man? Is it a trivial matter for the house of Judah to do the detestable things they are doing here? Must they also fill the land with violence and continually provoke me to anger? Look at them putting the branch to their nose!” The Hebrew can be read a different way. I think it really means, “Look at them putting forth a stench before my nose!”
In other words, these people are really disgusting. They stink, which is the Old Testament equivalent of what the Lord Jesus says about the church in Laodicea. “They’re so nauseating that I want to puke. I want to vomit them out of my mouth.” This, of the people of God. So that’s what corrupt worship is. It’s bound up, in the first instance, with a compromised object. We may handle the second question much more quickly.
2. What, then, does God do about corrupt worship?
Verse 18 displays implacable judgment now threatened. In particular, in this vision (and it’s still a vision), God does two things.
A. God slaughters those who participate in corrupt worship.
In the vision of Ezekiel, God does this by the hands of six executioners, or guards, of the city … angelic beings of some sort … each with a deadly weapon in his hand (chapter 8, verses 1 and 2). They are told to go and kill all the people in the city who participate in this false worship except those who have a certain mark on their foreheads.
Eventually, they go to their task. They begin with the temple. They begin with the elders (verse 6). “Go!” God says, in verse 7. “They went out and began killing throughout the city.” Ezekiel is filled with despair (verse 8). He is no casual observer. Although this is still only a vision, these are his people. This is his covenant community. So he cries, “Ah, Sovereign Lord! Are you going to destroy the entire remnant of Israel in this outpouring of your wrath?” This is all that’s left! The rest are scattered abroad.
But God is implacable. Verses 9 and 10: “The sin of the house of Israel and Judah is exceedingly great; the land is full of bloodshed and the city is full of injustice. They say, ‘The Lord has forsaken the land; the Lord does not see …’ ” There’s a pun here. “… so I will not see them with pity.” Literally, “I will not look on them with pity. They said I don’t see; I’m not even looking. If that’s the way they want it, then they can have it.”
Of course, the categories of the vision are apocalyptic (there were no executioners of the city wandering around with swords and things), but the historical reality was scarcely better. Nebuchadnezzar and his marauding troops are now only five and half years away.
B. God exempts those who grieve over corrupt worship.
There were not just these six executioners of the city at the beginning of chapter 9. There was a seventh person. In Ezekiel’s vision, this seventh person has a writing kit by his side. He takes the writing kit and is told, then, to do something with it. We’re told in verse 3, “The glory of the God of Israel went up from above the cherubim, where it had been …”
In the temple, there was the first part and then, beyond that, the Most Holy Place, built like a cube. In it was the ark of the covenant. Above the ark of the covenant were two angel-shaped structures with their wings over the ark of the covenant: the cherubim. God’s glory, from time to time in the Old Testament, manifests itself in this Most Holy Place, right above the temple (earlier, it was right about the tabernacle) and right above the cherubim.
When Ezekiel first approaches this temple, in his vision, he sees this idol of jealousy and sees the glory of God, like the pillar of fire in the Old Testament, still above the cherubim. Now the presence of God, mediated by this glory, begins to move away from the Most Holy Place. It begins to move away, and it moves, now, to the threshold of the temple.
Where the glory moves to in the rest of the vision, we’ll see tomorrow night, but it begins to move. As it begins to move, it is thus a sign that God is abandoning the temple. He’s abandoning Jerusalem. He’s abandoning his covenant people.
“The glory of the God of Israel went up from above the cherubim, where it had been and moved to the threshold of the temple. Then the Lord called to the man clothed in linen who had the writing kit at his side and said to him, ‘Go throughout the city of Jerusalem and put a mark on the foreheads of those who grieve and lament over all the detestable things that are done in it.’ ” When the executioners go forth, they are told, “Do not touch anyone with a mark.” Of course, this is apocalyptic vision again, but you must understand two things from this.
Those who are protected by the mark are not simply people who haven’t participated in the syncretism but those who grieve over it. Have you noticed that? We can understand why. The issue at stake is not simply participation in active corrupt worship. The real issue is whether corrupt worship, worship that replaces or relativizes God, is so offensive that we grieve and lament over the detestable things that are done in the city.
If there is no sense in which we grieve and lament over the detestable things that are done in the city that relativize God, how are we better? My brothers and sisters in Christ, never, under the cloak of pseudo-sophistication, become inured to sin and idolatry. It isn’t sophisticated. It’s merely the first step toward compromise. Grieve and lament over the sins done in the city.
In the historical arena of Ezekiel’s day, these people, too, suffered when Nebuchadnezzar surrounded the city. It’s not that they didn’t suffer in that sense. The point is that in God’s long-term plan, they are finally vindicated. This exact imagery is picked up in the book of Revelation. It’s picked up in chapter 7 and then again in chapters 13 and 14. I wish I had time to expound those chapters.
In Revelation 13 and 14, what happens is this: All those who follow Satan and the two beasts, a kind of unholy triumvirate that apes the Trinity and demands worship (in chapters 12 and 13), get his mark on their forehead. Then all those who follow the Lamb get the Lamb’s mark on their forehead. In the drama of the book of Revelation, then, those who have the mark of the Beast are spared the wrath of the Beast, but they face the wrath of the Lamb. All those who have the mark of the Lamb are spared the wrath of the Lamb, but they face the wrath of the Beast.
So the question, once you take away the imagery, is … Whose mark is on your forehead? Because you’re going to face the wrath of the other one. At the end of the day, do you want the Devil’s wrath on you or the wrath of the Lamb on the last day? It’s just as blunt as that in the book of Revelation.
Let me conclude with a couple of reflections about how this applies to us today. Have you ever tried to share your faith with someone who asks, “Why does God insist that he be praised? Why does he insist that he’s number one? In this, surely Christian morality makes no sense. If one of us claimed to be number one or claimed that we should be adored, praised, or worshiped, it would be intolerable hubris and intolerable arrogance. Isn’t God getting a bit chippy when he insists that we all gather around, worship him, and tell him that he’s the best?”
But in the beginning, you see, there was God. There was just God. Then he made all kinds of things, but he made a man and a woman who bore his image. When they woke up in the morning, they thought about God. They loved him. They walked with him in the cool of the garden, whatever that meant. It meant some kind of communal arrangement with him where they enjoyed his presence, basked in this glory, and delighted in his ways. God was God, and their marriage was, at this point, perfect, for each was rightly related to the Maker.
Then came the fall. The fall was not simply a matter of bending some rules. Do you know what the hardest thing is that I have to do in university missions today? It’s not explaining the Trinity. That’s easy compared with the hardest thing. Do you know what the hardest thing is? Explaining sin. Because there are an awful lot of the modern generation who don’t believe in sin. Sin itself is a snicker word. How do you get across the sheer odium, the sheer opprobrium, the sheer shame, and the sheer ugliness of sin? It’s very difficult.
The fall wasn’t just bending some rules. The fall was a fundamental turning that shaped their whole constitution so that from then on, each human being thinks of himself as number one, the center of the universe. Oh, I don’t mean literally, but if I were suddenly to hold up your high school class photo and said, “Look, this is your high school class photo,” where will your eyes go first?
Suppose you have an argument, a really good knock-down, drag-out humdinger of an argument (with your parents, a friend in the cabin here, a family leader, a teacher, or whoever) and you go away steaming. You think of all the things you could have said, all the things you should have said, all the things you would have said if you’d thought of them fast enough. When you replay this whole argument, who wins? I’ve lost lots and lots of arguments, but I’ve never lost a rerun!
It’s because I want to be number one, and so do you. The problem is that all these individual people now want to be number one, and so the others all have to be number two or number three or number four. Even God gets relegated, so that if this God isn’t serving my purposes, if he doesn’t make me happy, if he doesn’t give me a sense of fulfillment, then I’ll make another god. I’ll trim him. I’ll redefine him. I’ll invent some more gods. That is the origin of idolatry.
Then there are all of the power plays in the family, which start already with Adam. “Well, it wasn’t my fault, God. It was this woman that you gave me.” So you start passing the buck. Eventually, all of the social breakdowns come. In the second generation, you already have fratricide. Then you multiply the number of humans until you have war, pillage, famine, hate, and lust. At the end of it all, it’s simply because God is no longer God.
What is worship? Oh, I know that in the Old Testament, it is heavily bound up with certain cultic observance. I know that. Rightly defined worship under the old covenant brought you to the temple and so on, but how does it look under the new covenant? “I beseech you, brothers, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.”
In fact, when you work through the pages of the New Testament, you discover that worship is not confined to a Sunday at 11 o’clock or to a cultic act. It embraces such things, but it’s broader than that. It involves all that we say and all that we do. In Romans 15, evangelizing is worship. In Hebrews, offering ourselves up to God and joining with the heavenly new assembly is part of worship.
All we say and all we do is offered up to God continuously. We don’t offer the sacrifices of lambs and goats; we offer the fruit of praise to God with our lips. In short, the heart of genuine worship is the working out in every aspect of our lives of the confession, “Jesus is Lord.” That’s all it is.
It troubles me a bit that in our services we used to have a service that we called worship at 11 o’clock. Evening service was evangelism or Bible teaching, but the morning was worship. So in the morning you’re not supposed to be evangelizing and in the evening you’re not supposed to worship, because the morning is “worship” and the evening is “evangelism.”
Nowadays, we’ve broken it down some more. We have a “worship time” in the church, and then the sermon. Now with a “worship time” you have a “worship leader.” Then with the sermon, you don’t worship, you just listen to a sermon.
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He brings these rebel image-bearers back into line so that they again confess, “God is God. Jesus is Lord.” God help us, we still need forgiveness, but we’re moving to a new heaven and the new earth, where no one will ever, ever contest again the godhood of God. We are the outpost of the ultimate community, worshiping in all that we say and do and think.
Why do we choose what can last but an hour
Before we must leave it behind?
Why do possessions exert brutal power
To render us harsh and unkind?
Why do mere things have the lure of a flower
Whose scent makes us selfish and blind?
The cisterns run dry, and sour is our breath;
We dwell in the valley of death.
Why is betrayal attractive to us
Who often are hurt and betrayed?
Why barter faithful devotion for lust,
Integrity cast far away?
Why do our dreams, then our deeds, beggar trust,
Our guilt far too heavy to pay?
The cisterns run dry, and sour is our breath;
We dwell in the valley of death.
Why do we stubbornly act out a role,
Convincing the world that we’ve won?
Why for mere winning will we sell our soul,
In order to be number one?
Why sear our conscience so we’re in control—
Despairing of what we’ve become?
The cisterns run dry, and sour is our breath;
We dwell in the valley of death.
Why worship godlets that we have defined
As if God can be shaped and trimmed?
Why worship self that is mortal, confined,
While baptizing self-love as Zen?
Why is rebellion to God so resigned
To living with lies as a friend?
The cisterns run dry, and sour is our breath;
We dwell in the valley of death.
O Jesus—
Why do you promise to quench all our thirst,
When we have despised all your ways?
Why do you rescue the damned and the cursed,
By dying our death in our place?
Why do you transform our hearts till they burst
With vibrant expressions of praise?
The well flows with life—and we’re satisfied—
The fountain that flows from your side.
