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ODERN men like a tidy religion.
An hour a week (or less), a check in the offering plate; births, baptisms,
weddings and funerals... a Christian name and a good social circle – this makes
for a nice religious suit. A religion like that must exist without the Bible
though. The Bible is a bloody book. From
the murder of Abel, to the crucifixion of Christ, to the battle of Armageddon –
an unaltered film of these and many other Bible scenes would be bloodier and
gorier than anything Hollywood has yet produced. And, every drop of blood that
has been shed has been the product of sin. The blood of Ezekiel 22 is no
different. Jerusalem was not dubbed "the
bloody city'' because she was so clean and innocent (Ezekiel 22:2). She was
neither clean nor was she innocent. She
was guilty of shedding innocent blood, and great quantities of it too.
We should be a bit shocked as we
read in Ezekiel 22:6 that the princes of Israel shed blood "to their power” – that is, to their maximum potential. There
was no prejudice in their murderous abandon.
Their victims were family members as well as their weak and helpless
neighbors (Ezekiel 22:7). And, as the blood of their innocent victims soaked
into the ground, they marched on. They marched into groves and worshipped every
god except Jehovah. They marched into their neighbor's houses and committed every
variety of sexual deviance (Ezekiel 22:10-11). They marched off to the bank
with dishonest gain. The moral condition of Jerusalem was so bad that God
compared the population to dross; refuse; trash. He said that because of the
utter lack of truth in their city, everything the Jews had built was doomed to
fall (Ezekiel 22:28). God did look for someone in the city who would be willing
to push in the right direction, but He searched in vain (Ezekiel 22:30).
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