Self-Destructive Bride

Read Ezekiel 15-18
 
Ezekiel 16:14-16 Your fame soon spread throughout the world because of your beauty. I dressed you in my splendor and perfected your beauty, says the Sovereign Lord. 15 But you thought your fame and beauty were your own. So you gave yourself as a prostitute to every man who came along. Your beauty was theirs for the asking. 16 You used the lovely things I gave you to make shrines for idols, where you played the prostitute. Unbelievable! How could such a thing ever happen?
 
EZEKIEL 16 is a remarkable chapter, and I hope you’ve read it with a sense of God’s grief fo rhis people. He is as a husband who has lost his bride.
   Judah’s self-destruction reminds me of a movie produced many years ago. The story well illustrates Judah’s death sentence. The plot was about a respected doctor who had a wife and three children. His life was good and properous. His family and patients loved him.
   But he became entangled in an adulterous affair. It came to the point that he had to either divorce his wife or end the affair. A self-centered man, directed by his own desires, the doctor could do neither. Then through the circumstances of a patient’s death in his office, he convincingly faked his own death. He went off to live with his mistress. Certainly they could be happy! No more encumbering wife and family!
   But the tragedy grew deeper when the adulterous doctor even deceived his mistress. He hid his false death plot from her, still pretending he was divorcing his wife.
   You know what happened, don’t you? Their lives became a life caught in the ever-growing dark shadows of lies, cover-up, fear and deceit. At no time was the doctor willing to confess his sins to either woman and repent of his evil. He insisted on the shadows even when his mistress offered him a way out.
   The darkness grew deeper. The doctor’s face was burned in a car accident resulting from a jealous rage against his mistress. His face was surgically repaired. Investigating the doctor’s “death”, the police uncovered supposed evidence that the doctor with the surgically repaired face was responsible for the doctor’s death. In short, the devious doctor was convicted of murdering himself! He was executed for “killing” himself.
   Sin, indeed, is death, isn’t it? We enter into sinful habits, a little trifle, and then a little more. It grows to kill our relationship with God. Then we are faced with a death sentence against our soul. In varying degrees, sin always separates us from people we love.
   Ezekiel 16 tells us how God had given life to a nation when Israel was merely a group of slaves in Egypt’s fields. He raised them up out of the mire to clothe them in his commands, so they would be his blessed bride. He richly adorned them with his many covenants and physical blessings. But they chose to sin, to hide and then to die in their guilt.
   The image of the church - you - as Jesus’ bride in Ephesians and Revelation is an illustration of God’s gracious call to join our lives with him. He has chosen us to be his own. We get to be pure in his forgiveness, faithfully connected with him. Remember, dear Christian, he has clothed you in himself. Savor the union and live in joy with Jesus.