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

Today, I am reading and commenting on Ezekiel 16.

There are a few prophetic visions in the Bible which I struggle with applying to my life, or to society around me.  This is one of them because it is so specifically to the people of Jerusalem and Judah just before the Exile.  Yet, there are aspects of it we can generalize to ourselves and the society around us.  The line which made it come home to me was the beginning of verse 15: “But you thought your fame and beauty were your own.”  This made me see how we as individuals and as a society often fail to credit God for what He has given us.  As individuals, we see our wealth, our possessions, our health, or even our bodies as things which we obtained on our own and as things with which we can do whatever we want.  We fail to recognize that they are gifts from God and that we should seek to discover what He wants us to do with them.

As a society we often view our blessings as things which came to be purely through the hard work of our predecessors who passed these good things on to us to use, or throw away, as we desire.  Again, we fail to recognize that these things were gifts from God, given for His purposes.  Some of the things we choose to throw away are values which led our predecessors to do the things which brought about the world in which we live.  Rather than look to see which of those values were gifts from God which brought about good and which were products of our predecessors sins, we choose those which appeal to us and throw away those which do not. 

It is not enough that our society takes the wealth and possessions which God gave us and uses them selfishly.  No, our society has chosen to take the children which God gives us and sacrifice them on the altar of convenience.  When I read passages such as today’s, my first thought is on the atrocity which is abortion in this country, but really our society’s sacrifice of children goes far beyond that.  We see it in the parents who use their children to satisfy their own ambitions, whether that is in sports, or show business, or the many other ways in which parents push their children that are not healthy for the children.