Today, I am reading and commenting on  Ezekiel 16.

I never quite know what to do with this passage for a couple of reasons.  First, it addresses people as a group, in particular, the people of Israel, rather than as individuals.  Second, it makes a simile between adultery and idolatry which does not work in either our current views of idolatry or adultery (or even marriage).  Today we do not normally associate idol worship with sexual activity, nor do we normally consider sexual immorality as an expression of idol worship.  However, the separation we imagine between idolatry and sexual immorality results from our failure to truly understand both human sexuality and the role which worship plays in our lives.  This realization came to me as I saw the way Ezekiel connected child sacrifice with both sexual immorality and idol worship in today’s passage.  I had long ago come to see the connection between the child sacrifice condemned by Old Testament prophets and abortion.  Today, I connected the casual view of sexual immorality which underlies the support for abortion today and the idolatry which the Old Testament prophets condemn.  From there I saw how Ezekiel ties together idolatry, sexual immorality, and the oppression of the weak among us in today’s passage.

It always interests me to see where God’s Spirit leads me when I do not know what to write about a passage.  I do not mean to say that my blog today, or any day, is especially inspired by God.  Anyway, we often overlook how sexual immorality results from treating others as objects which we can use for our own pleasure.  This same attitude also leads to oppression of those weaker than ourselves in other ways.  And all of this results from us worshiping ourselves in place of God.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.