The Expositor's Bible: The Book of EzekielSkinner, John
Religion
The Expositor's Bible: The Book of Ezekiel
Skinner, John
Bible. Ezekiel -- Commentaries
In order that this tendency to sin may be destroyed, Ezekiel sees that the
consciousness of guilt must take its place. In the same way the apostle
Paul teaches that “every mouth must be stopped, and all the world become
guilty before God.” Whether the subject be a nation or an individual, the
dominion of sin is not broken till the sinner has taken home to himself
the full responsibility for his acts and felt himself to be “without
excuse.” But the most striking thing in Ezekiel’s representation of the
process of conversion is the thought that this saving sense of sin is
produced less by judgment than by free and undeserved forgiveness.
Punishment he conceives to be necessary, being demanded alike by the
righteousness of God and the good of the sinful people. But the heart of
Jerusalem is not changed till she finds herself restored to her former
relation to God, with all the sin of her past blotted out and a new life
before her. It is through the grace of forgiveness that she is overwhelmed
with shame and sorrow for sin, and learns the humility which is the germ
of a new hope towards God. Here the prophet strikes one of the deepest
notes of evangelical doctrine. All experience confirms the lesson that
true repentance is not produced by the terrors of the law, but by the view
of God’s love in Christ going forth to meet the sinner and bring him back
to the Father’s heart and home.
Another question of great interest and difficulty is the attitude towards
the heathen world assumed by Ezekiel. The prophecy of the restoration of
Sodom is certainly one of the most remarkable things in the book. It is
true that Ezekiel as a rule concerns himself very little with the
religious state of the outlying world under the Messianic dispensation.
Where he speaks of foreign nations it is only to announce the
manifestation of Jehovah’s glory in the judgments He executes upon them.
The effect of these judgments is that “they shall know that I am Jehovah”;
but how much is included in the expression as applied to the heathen it is
impossible to say. This, however, may be due to the peculiar limitation of
view which leads him to concentrate his attention on the Holy Land in his
visions of the perfect kingdom of God. We can hardly suppose that he
conceived all the rest of the world as a blank or filled with a seething
mass of humanity outside the government of the true God. It is rather to
be supposed that Canaan itself appeared to his mind as an epitome of the
world such as it must be when the latter‐day glory was ushered in. And in
Canaan he finds room for Sodom, but Sodom turned to the knowledge of the
true God and sharing in the blessings bestowed on Jerusalem. It is surely
allowable to see in this the symptom of a more hopeful view of the future
of the world at large than we should gather from the rest of the prophecy.
If Ezekiel could think of Sodom as raised from the dead and sharing the
glories of the people of God, the idea of the conversion of heathen
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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