NOTES for Eze 20:1-44
Today's reading is perhaps one of the sternest rebukes of the people of God for their sins among those spoken by the prophets. Here the whole history of the people stands before us, and this history proves to be a history of sin and apostasy. Yet even so, God still does not abandon His people. And not because the people absorbed the lessons God had taught and changed for the better, but because God had a certain plan that could be carried out only with the participation of the people He had chosen.
If God had left the Jewish people to its own fate, this would apparently have become a kind of counter-witness that He could not allow (vv. 14, 22). But, as we can see, the situation changed, and changed radically. Previously, for the people of God to bear witness it was enough simply to exist, to exist in spite of everything and everyone, even when any other people should long since have disappeared, scattered, and been assimilated. Now it was important to show the world the qualities of the people of God, the people-community that preserves unconditional and uncompromising faithfulness to its God. And these qualities had to be shown precisely in the dispersion, surrounded by those very Gentiles whom the Jews had once so eagerly tried to imitate and whom they often considered it an honor to resemble. Now they had every opportunity to see the once so tempting Gentile world close up, as it really is. And to remember God, whom they had previously tended to forget in their pursuit of the supposed goods of paganism. That is why God speaks through His prophet about the judgment with which He will judge His people in the "wilderness of the Gentiles" or "wilderness of the peoples"; in the Hebrew Bible, "peoples" sometimes means precisely the Gentiles (vv. 34-36). Only after passing through the furnace of real paganism, coming into contact with the pagan world and knowing it as it is, without embellishment, will the people of God become a community of the faithful and learn to be God's witness.
And this will no longer be boastful pride in a majestic Temple or high walls, but true faithfulness to God, which is what makes a community a community. Those who cannot do this will remain in the "pagan wilderness," as those who once could not decide and did not wish to go into the promised land remained in the wilderness (vv. 37-38). Those who want to go and resolve to go will become the remnant that will once again see the land of the fathers (vv. 39-44). They will see it in order to settle on the land given by God and to meet the Messiah promised by Him.