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Observations from today’s readings and today’s S-WOD, Tuesday, 8 September 2026:
Ezekiel 5:1-4 — “And you, O son of man, take a sharp sword. Use it as a barber’s razor and pass it over your head and your beard. Then take balances for weighing and divide the hair. A third part you shall burn in the fire in the midst of the city, when the days of the siege are completed. And a third part you shall take and strike with the sword all around the city. And a third part you shall scatter to the wind, and I will unsheathe the sword after them. And you shall take from these a small number and bind them in the skirts of your robe. And of these again you shall take some and cast them into the midst of the fire and burn them in the fire. From there a fire will come out into all the house of Israel.”
Ezekiel’s disturbing sign-acts continue. He is commanded to shave his head and beard with a sword and carefully divide the hair into thirds. For Ezekiel, a priest, shaving his head carried particular significance because priests were forbidden to shave their heads in this manner (Leviticus 21:5). What ordinarily represented his consecration and dignity before God now becomes a visible picture of the disgrace and devastation coming upon Jerusalem. The sword used as a razor makes the meaning even clearer: Babylon may wield the weapon, but God is bringing the judgment.
The balances are equally important. Ezekiel does not casually divide the hair; he weighs it. The coming destruction will be terrible, but it will not be arbitrary. The God whose glory Ezekiel saw in chapter 1 is perfectly holy and perfectly just. He does not lash out unpredictably or punish beyond what righteousness requires. Abraham asked, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” (Genesis 18:25). Ezekiel’s scales answer yes. Even when we cannot understand everything God permits or does, His judgments are never careless, unjust, or uncontrolled.
The three portions of hair portray what will happen when Jerusalem falls. Some will perish within the city through famine and pestilence, others by the sword, and others will be scattered among the nations. The meaning is explained explicitly in verse 12. The people who believed Jerusalem could not fall are being shown that there will be no escape simply because they belong to Israel. Yet Ezekiel takes a few hairs and binds them into his robe. Even in judgment, God preserves a remnant. Judgment does not mean that God has forgotten His covenant purposes. Throughout Scripture, when human rebellion appears to have destroyed everything, God preserves a people through whom His promises continue (Isaiah 10:20-22).
That small remnant ultimately directs our eyes toward Christ. Israel’s survival did not rest upon Israel’s faithfulness but upon God’s faithfulness to His promises. Through the preserved line would eventually come Jesus Christ, the true and faithful Israelite, through whom God would bring salvation not only to Israel but to the nations. Judgment cannot overturn God’s redemptive purpose. Even when human sin seems to have reduced everything to ashes, God continues moving history toward the Savior.
Ezekiel 5:5-8 — Thus says the Lord GOD: “This is Jerusalem. I have set her in the center of the nations, with countries all around her. And she has rebelled against my rules by doing wickedness more than the nations, and against my statutes more than the countries all around her; for they have rejected my rules and have not walked in my statutes. Therefore thus says the Lord GOD: Because you are more turbulent than the nations that are all around you, and have not walked in my statutes or obeyed my rules, and have not even acted according to the rules of the nations that are all around you, therefore thus says the Lord GOD: Behold, I, even I, am against you. And I will execute judgments in your midst in the sight of the nations.”
Jerusalem’s tragedy is magnified by her privilege. God had placed her “in the center of the nations.” Israel had been chosen not merely to receive God’s blessing but to display God’s character. From the beginning God promised Abraham that through his offspring “all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:3). God later gave Israel His law so that the surrounding nations would see the wisdom and righteousness of the God she worshiped (Deuteronomy 4:5-8). Jerusalem was meant to shine outward with the knowledge of God.
Instead, the people who possessed God’s Word rejected it. Their greater revelation produced greater responsibility, and therefore their rebellion carried greater guilt. They knew the God they were rejecting. They possessed His statutes, experienced His covenant faithfulness, worshiped in His temple, and heard His prophets. Yet they deliberately chose another way. Remarkably, God says they had become worse than the surrounding nations.
Jesus taught the same principle when He warned the cities that had witnessed His works yet refused to repent. It would be “more bearable” for Tyre, Sidon, and Sodom in the judgment than for those who had received greater revelation and rejected it (Matthew 11:20-24). Spiritual privilege never makes sin less serious; it makes persistent rebellion more serious. Knowing Scripture, attending worship, hearing faithful teaching, and understanding the Gospel are extraordinary gifts, but they are not substitutes for faith and obedience.
That warning should penetrate the heart of anyone who has spent years around the things of God. Familiarity with truth can quietly deceive us into believing that knowing truth is the same as submitting to it, being transformed by it, becoming one with it. We can explain doctrines we do not obey and embody, defend biblical standards we privately violate, and speak about Christ without truly knowing Him, genuinely loving Him, and deeply abiding in Him. Jesus said, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15). John presses the point even further: “For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome” (1 John 5:3). The mark of genuine love is not merely obedience, but a heart increasingly aligned with God so that obedience is desired, not merely required. His commands cease to be external restraints imposed upon reluctant desires and increasingly become the path the renewed heart actually wants to walk. Genuine knowledge of God increasingly produces a life surrendered to Him, not grudgingly, but gladly, because the heart is learning to love what He loves and desire what He desires.
The most frightening words in this section are therefore not the descriptions of Babylon but God’s declaration: “Behold, I, even I, am against you.” Israel’s greatest danger was never ultimately Babylon. It was standing in rebellion against the God who had once fought for her. No earthly security can protect us if we persistently set ourselves against God. Yet the Gospel announces the astonishing reversal available in Christ: “If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31). The God whose holiness condemns our rebellion has Himself provided the reconciliation we could never achieve.
Ezekiel 5:9-12 — “And because of all your abominations I will do with you what I have never yet done, and the like of which I will never do again. Therefore fathers shall eat their sons in your midst, and sons shall eat their fathers. And I will execute judgments on you, and any of you who survive I will scatter to all the winds. Therefore, as I live, declares the Lord GOD, surely, because you have defiled my sanctuary with all your detestable things and with all your abominations, therefore I will withdraw. My eye will not spare, and I will have no pity. A third part of you shall die of pestilence and be consumed with famine in your midst; a third part shall fall by the sword all around you; and a third part I will scatter to all the winds and will unsheathe the sword after them.”
The language becomes almost unbearable because the consequences of Israel’s rebellion have become almost unbearable. The horrors described here were not arbitrary threats. God had warned Israel centuries earlier that persistent covenant rebellion would eventually bring siege, famine, exile, and even the terrible desperation described here (Leviticus 26:27-33; Deuteronomy 28:52-57). What Ezekiel announces is the fulfillment of warnings God had patiently given again and again.
The horror Ezekiel describes was not merely rhetorical. During the Babylonian siege, Jerusalem’s famine became so severe that this covenant curse was actually realized. Lamentations records the almost unimaginable result: “The hands of compassionate women have boiled their own children; they became their food during the destruction of the daughter of my people” (Lamentations 4:10; see also 2 Kings 25:3). Sin had carried the people to a place where even the most basic bonds of human love were being consumed by desperation. This gives us an extreme and horrifying picture of a much broader spiritual reality: when people separate themselves from God, they eventually begin to consume one another. Not ordinarily with their teeth, but through selfishness, exploitation, envy, hatred, lust, violence, manipulation, and the relentless pursuit of our own desires at another person’s expense.
Scripture repeatedly uses this imagery. Paul warns the Galatians, “But if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another” (Galatians 5:15). James traces conflict to desires warring within us: “You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel” (James 4:2). By contrast, life in Christ moves in exactly the opposite direction. Instead of consuming others to satisfy ourselves, we are commanded, “through love serve one another” (Galatians 5:13). Jesus Himself establishes the pattern: “For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). Sin asks what others can provide for me; Christlike love asks what I can give for them.
That contrast remains painfully visible in a prosperous world where most of us will never experience Jerusalem’s physical starvation. We can possess abundant food, comfortable homes, money, entertainment, and nearly limitless conveniences while remaining spiritually famished. When we cease receiving life from God with gratitude, abundance does not cure our hunger; our appetites simply expand, and eventually other people become something to consume. We exploit employees for profit, use people sexually for pleasure, manipulate relationships for affirmation or control, sacrifice marriages and families for ambition, resent those who possess what we desire, and discard people when they no longer serve our purposes. Nations exploit the weak, businesses can treat people as commodities, communities fracture into competing tribes, and even families can become battlegrounds where each person fights to have his own desires satisfied. This is James’s diagnosis of human conflict: “You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel” (James 4:2). Jerusalem’s starving inhabitants literally consuming one another presents in horrifying physical form what sin always does spiritually: when God is no longer our source of life and satisfaction, we begin taking from one another what we were meant to receive from Him, and people become objects to use rather than neighbors to love.
But Jesus offers another kind of life: “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). The person abiding in Christ does not have to consume others because he is learning that his deepest needs are already met in Him. Gratitude replaces entitlement; generosity replaces grasping; service replaces exploitation; and people cease being instruments for satisfying our desires and become neighbors whose good we genuinely seek. This is why the gospel reverses the direction of fallen humanity. Sin says, give yourself to me so that I may live; Jesus says, “the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). Separation from God makes consumers of people; union with Christ forms people who increasingly give themselves away in love.
At the center of the indictment is this charge: “you have defiled my sanctuary.” The people wanted God’s temple while rejecting the God who inhabited it. They presumed that the outward symbols of His presence would protect them while their hearts pursued idols. But religious activity cannot compensate for rebellion. God does not desire outward worship disconnected from inward allegiance.
This exposes a temptation that remains within the human heart. We can cherish Christian identity while tolerating things Christ hates. We can attend worship, read Scripture, pray, serve, and still protect idols of pride, lust, money, control, approval, resentment, or comfort. Jesus confronted precisely this separation between outward religion and inward reality when He described people who honored God with their lips while their hearts remained far from Him (Matthew 15:8). God does not merely claim a religious portion of our lives. He claims us.
Yet we must read these terrifying words within the whole story of Scripture. Ezekiel shows us what rebellion against a holy God deserves; the cross shows us what God did to save rebels. Jesus bore the curse of sin in the place of His people. The judgment that should fall upon sinners fell upon the sinless Son, so that “there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). God did not save us by ignoring His holiness but by satisfying His justice through Christ’s atoning death and raising Him victorious over sin and death.
That grace must never make sin seem smaller. It should make sin more hateful and Christ more precious. The Christian looks at Ezekiel’s vision of judgment and then at the cross and realizes both how serious rebellion is and how astonishing grace is. We were not rescued so that we could return comfortably to the sins from which Christ died to deliver us. United with Him, we have died to sin and been raised to “walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4).
Ezekiel 5:13-17 — “Thus shall my anger spend itself, and I will vent my fury upon them and satisfy myself. And they shall know that I am the LORD—that I have spoken in my jealousy—when I spend my fury upon them. Moreover, I will make you a desolation and an object of reproach among the nations all around you and in the sight of all who pass by. You shall be a reproach and a taunt, a warning and a horror, to the nations all around you, when I execute judgments on you in anger and fury, and with furious rebukes—I am the LORD; I have spoken—when I send against you the deadly arrows of famine, arrows for destruction, which I will send to destroy you, and when I bring more and more famine upon you and break your supply of bread. I will send famine and wild beasts against you, and they will rob you of your children. Pestilence and blood shall pass through you, and I will bring the sword upon you. I am the LORD; I have spoken.”
The chapter ends by returning to one of Ezekiel’s central themes: “they shall know that I am the LORD.” Israel had been placed among the nations to reveal God through faithful obedience. Because she refused, she would now reveal something about Him through judgment. God will make His holiness known. His people cannot continually misrepresent His character while assuming that His name and their religious privileges will shield them from accountability.
God describes His judgment as arising from His “jealousy.” Biblical jealousy is not petty insecurity or sinful envy. It is God’s holy insistence upon the exclusive love that rightly belongs to Him. He had entered covenant with Israel, loved her, redeemed her, and claimed her as His own. Her idolatry was therefore spiritual adultery. God’s jealousy reveals the intensity of His covenant love. He will not casually share the hearts of His people with idols.
That truth becomes even more personal in the Gospel. Christ did not merely rescue us from punishment; He purchased us for Himself. “You are not your own, for you were bought with a price” (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). Salvation is not simply escaping judgment and receiving heaven. It is being reconciled to God and brought into union with Christ. Jesus prayed that His people would be one with Him and the Father (John 17:21-23). The Gospel restores the relationship our rebellion destroyed.
The repeated declaration “I am the LORD; I have spoken” also confronts our tendency to treat God’s warnings as negotiable. Jerusalem had heard warnings for generations and continued living as though judgment would never come. God’s patience was mistaken for indifference. Scripture warns us against the same presumption. God’s kindness is intended to lead us to repentance, not convince us that sin does not matter (Romans 2:4). Grace gives us every reason to run toward God, not permission to continue running from Him.
But for those who are in Christ, the final word is not that God is against us. At the cross, Christ bore judgment so that His enemies could become His children. Through faith we are forgiven, reconciled, indwelt by the Spirit, and increasingly transformed into Christ’s likeness. The same God who says in Ezekiel, “I, even I, am against you,” now declares over those united to His Son that nothing “will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:39). That security does not produce complacency; rightly understood, it produces worship, gratitude, holiness, and a growing desire to belong wholly to the One who gave Himself wholly for us.
Ezekiel 5 therefore forces us to ask uncomfortable but necessary questions. Have years of exposure to God’s Word produced increasing obedience, or merely greater familiarity? Are there areas where I know exactly what God says but continue choosing what I want instead? Am I relying upon Christian identity, church involvement, biblical knowledge, or past faithfulness while tolerating present rebellion? What rival affection has gained territory in my heart that belongs to Christ alone? And when I see the seriousness with which God treats sin, does it drive me toward fear and hiding, or toward deeper gratitude for Christ, deeper repentance, and deeper dependence upon the One who bore judgment to bring me back to God?
“Cross” Fit S-WOD (Spiritual Workout of the Day) – 8 September 2026: Identify one area where you already know what God’s Word requires but have delayed or resisted obedience. Write down the specific command or biblical truth, confess your resistance to God, and take one measurable step of obedience in that area today.
Pray: “Father, You are holy, righteous, and faithful in all Your ways. Forgive me for treating lightly the truth You have graciously given me and for allowing anything to compete with Christ for my heart. Thank You that Jesus bore the judgment my rebellion deserved and reconciled me to You through His death and resurrection. By Your Spirit, expose the idols I excuse, deepen my union with Christ, and make my knowledge of Your Word visible in joyful obedience. Make me increasingly like Jesus, wholly Yours in heart and life. Amen.”
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