Ezekiel 16:1

Terrible judgments threatened, ver. 35-43. An aggravation of their sin and of their punishment, ver. 44-59. A promise of mercy to a remnant, ver. 60-63 Commentary on Chapter XVI

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Again the word of the Lord came unto me, saying. The word of prophecy from the Lord, as the Targum; the following representation was made to him under a spirit of prophecy.

Idolatry is frequently represented by the prophets under the figure of a wife’s unfaithfulness to her husband. This image is here so portrayed, as to exhibit the aggravation of Israel’s guilt by reason of her origin and early history. The original abode of the progenitors of the race was the land of Canaan, defiled with idolatry and moral corruption. Israel itself was like a child born in a polluted land, abandoned from its birth, left by its parents in the most utter neglect to the chance regard of any passer-by.

AND HOW THINK YOU did the prophet proceed in order to accomplish the solemn commission which had been thus intrusted to him? Did he begin by reminding the people of the law which was delivered to Moses on the top of Sinai? Did he picture to them the exceeding fearfulness and quaking of the leader of Israel’s host when he received that stony law in the midst of thunders and lightnings?

AND HOW THINK YOU did the prophet proceed in order to accomplish the solemn commission which had been thus intrusted to him? Did he begin by reminding the people of the law which was delivered to Moses on the top of Sinai? Did he picture to them the exceeding fearfulness and quaking of the leader of Israel’s host when he received that stony law in the midst of thunders and lightnings? Or did he, do you think, proceed to point out to them the doom which must inevitably befall them, because they had broken the divine law, and violated God’s holy statutes? No, my brethren; if he had been about to show to the then unprivileged gentiles their iniquity, he might have proceeded on legal grounds; he was now however about to deal with Jerusalem, the highly-favoured city, and here he does not bring to their mind the law; he does not begin dealing out law-thunders to them at all; he fetches obligations as his arguments to convince them of sin from the grace of God, rather than from the law of God. And, my brethren, as I am about this evening to address you who profess to be followers of the Son of God, and who by faith have “fled for refuge to the hope set before you in the gospel,”—as my business is to convince you of sin, I shall not begin by taking you to Sinai,—I shall not attempt to show you what the law is, and what that penalty is which devolves upon every man that breaks it; but, feeling that you are not under the law, but under grace, I shall draw arguments from the grace of God, from his gospel, from the favour which he has shown to you—arguments more powerful than any which can be fetched from the law, to show you the greatness of your sin, and the abomination of any iniquity which you have committed against the Lord your God.