Ezekiel 20:1 - Meaning and Application

Here is the occasion of the message in this chapter. The sermon in chapter 18 was stirred up by their proud complaints about God. This one was stirred up by their false and self-serving requests for guidance. Each kind of sin gets its own answer. This prophecy is carefully dated in the seventh year of the captivity, about two years after Ezekiel began to prophesy.

God wanted them to keep track of how long their exile lasted, so they could see the years slowly moving toward their rescue. Some of the elders of Israel, the older leaders among the people, came to ask for a word from the Lord. They did not seem to come on a regular schedule, as in Ezekiel 8:1, but on a special occasion and for a particular need. It is not certain whether they were men already in exile or elders who had come from Jerusalem to Babylon on business. But Ezekiel 20:32 suggests that their question was whether, now that they were captives in Babylon, far from their land and with no temple or synagogue for worship, it was lawful to join the worship of their Babylonian masters so they could make peace with them and live like the local people who served idols.

They may have softened the matter as much as they could, much like Naaman asking Elisha for permission to bow in the house of Rimmon, as a courtesy to the king. But there is good reason to think this was really what they wanted. Those hearts are truly hardened that ask God for leave to keep on sinning, especially when they are already suffering because of that sin. They came and sat very respectfully, with an outward show of devotion, before the prophet, as in Ezekiel 33:31.

The message they must hear is this. First, they must know that God is angry with them. He treats it as an insult that they come to ask him questions while they are determined to keep living in sin. “As I live,” says the Lord God, “I will not be consulted by you” (Ezekiel 20:3). Their outward piety will bring them no favor with God and no benefit to themselves. He will not listen to their questions or give them a comforting answer. Hypocritical worship is not pleasing to God, it only provokes him.

Second, they must know that God is rightly angry with them (Ezekiel 20:4). “Will you judge them, son of man? Will you judge them?” That means Ezekiel is not to defend them before God as a helper or intercessor, but to speak God’s sentence against them. He has been set over them, so he must declare the Lord’s judgments to them. He is also to make them know the sins of their fathers. Before, he had to show them their own sins (Ezekiel 16:2). Their own guilt was enough to justify God’s sharp dealings with them, but it would also help them to hear about their fathers’ sins. Then they could see how right it was for God, at last, to cut off a people that had been provoking him from the very beginning.