NOTES for Eze 16:35-63
Today’s reading continues the theme of apostasy and its punishment. Evidently, now that the “point of no return” in the relationship between God and His people has been passed, punishment becomes inevitable. Yet this punishment proves not quite what we are accustomed to imagine. Strictly speaking, God does not punish His people directly. He simply leaves them alone with the consequences of their own sins (vv. 36–43).
In a certain sense, one could say that the warnings God sent to the people (v. 27) were of the same nature. At that time, however, God had not yet abandoned them completely; He merely allowed them to feel the weight of the possible consequences of the sin they had committed. Now those consequences fall upon the people in full. It might seem that such permission can properly be called punishment. Yet in this case we should probably speak not so much of punishment as of a kind of shock therapy, one that is, in a certain sense, unavoidable.
Indeed, before the situation became what today’s passage describes, the people had already, in essence, broken off every relationship that once bound them to God. Without such a relationship, God’s possibilities for intervening in the situation are extremely limited, because He takes the free will of the people He created—as well as of entire nations—completely seriously. If a people says a decisive “no” to God, He takes that “no” with complete seriousness too. He does not play at freedom of choice; He truly gives this freedom to everyone, while also laying upon each person the full responsibility for the choice made.
Of course, He could end the game and stop the experiment at any moment by intervening in the situation without regard for anyone’s choice. But the point is precisely that, for God, freedom is not a game or an experiment but an absolute reality. Fallen humanity, meanwhile, might sometimes prefer it to be a kind of game, so that everything could be started over if something went wrong. But God gives a person—and sometimes a whole people—such a chance only in one case: repentance and conversion. It is precisely such repentance and conversion that He awaits from His people in order to give them the opportunity to begin again (vv. 60–63). Yet this will not be a repetition of the former history, but a new stage of it. What has happened cannot be undone, and the memory of sins committed does not vanish without a trace (v. 63). Only when the Kingdom enters the world and reveals itself in all its fullness, transforming everything, will sin disappear forever and even its memory be erased.