Day 242 — Ezekiel 16 – 17

God compared His people unfavorably to the very standard of wickedness, Sodom. Sodom was so infamously corrupt that we have words in our vocabulary today, words that describe despised practices, that derive from its name. God’s people, good as they were (!), wouldn’t even mention Sodom. As wicked as those people were, God said His people were more wicked. Jesus preached about something similar in the Sermon on the Mount, admonishing His listeners to get the beams out of their own eyes before attending to the splinter in someone else’s eye. Apparently that kind of pride is a common human condition. As such, we need to examine ourselves regularly to keep ourselves clean in that area. He called Sodom Judah’s sister, indicating that they are related – Judah had no reason for her pride because she was like Sodom. Are you proud of the fact that you are better than someone you disdain? But for the grace of God, you could be in a similar situation to that person. Rather than indulge in pride, we need to be humbled by remembering what we would be apart from God’s grace, compassionately pray for those people whom we are not like, and praise and thank God for His wonderful grace that makes a difference.

God used virtually every pronouncement of judgment to speak of the restoration He longed for. He describes it in this reading as breaking off “a tender sprig from the topmost shoots” of one of those valuable cedars and planting it on a high place in the Promised Land. Are you a tender sprig, tender of heart, readily humbling yourself before God? Or are you a hardened branch, set in your ways, convinced of your rightness, too brittle to bow before God in humility? Are you willing to be set apart in a high place, or are you too entangled in the forest below to remain on the heights? The few He will choose for a remnant (remember those few hairs Ezekiel was instructed to tuck away in a safe place?) will be tender and planted on the heights. Will that be you?