BAD HAIR DAY
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Opening Prayer
Lord Jesus, thank you for offering me your grace and mercy without limit each day. Thank you for the potential that is mine because you continue to work in and through me.
Read EZEKIEL 5
For additional translations of the passage, use this link to Bible Gateway.
God’s Razor of Judgment
5 “Now, son of man, take a sharp sword and use it as a barber’s razor to shave your head and your beard. Then take a set of scales and divide up the hair. 2 When the days of your siege come to an end, burn a third of the hair inside the city. Take a third and strike it with the sword all around the city. And scatter a third to the wind. For I will pursue them with drawn sword. 3 But take a few hairs and tuck them away in the folds of your garment. 4 Again, take a few of these and throw them into the fire and burn them up. A fire will spread from there to all Israel.
5 “This is what the Sovereign Lord says: This is Jerusalem, which I have set in the center of the nations, with countries all around her. 6 Yet in her wickedness she has rebelled against my laws and decrees more than the nations and countries around her. She has rejected my laws and has not followed my decrees.
7 “Therefore this is what the Sovereign Lord says: You have been more unruly than the nations around you and have not followed my decrees or kept my laws. You have not even[a] conformed to the standards of the nations around you.
8 “Therefore this is what the Sovereign Lord says: I myself am against you, Jerusalem, and I will inflict punishment on you in the sight of the nations. 9 Because of all your detestable idols, I will do to you what I have never done before and will never do again. 10 Therefore in your midst parents will eat their children, and children will eat their parents. I will inflict punishment on you and will scatter all your survivors to the winds. 11 Therefore as surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, because you have defiled my sanctuary with all your vile images and detestable practices, I myself will shave you; I will not look on you with pity or spare you. 12 A third of your people will die of the plague or perish by famine inside you; a third will fall by the sword outside your walls; and a third I will scatter to the winds and pursue with drawn sword.
13 “Then my anger will cease and my wrath against them will subside, and I will be avenged. And when I have spent my wrath on them, they will know that I the Lord have spoken in my zeal.
14 “I will make you a ruin and a reproach among the nations around you, in the sight of all who pass by. 15 You will be a reproach and a taunt, a warning and an object of horror to the nations around you when I inflict punishment on you in anger and in wrath and with stinging rebuke. I the Lord have spoken. 16 When I shoot at you with my deadly and destructive arrows of famine, I will shoot to destroy you. I will bring more and more famine upon you and cut off your supply of food. 17 I will send famine and wild beasts against you, and they will leave you childless. Plague and bloodshed will sweep through you, and I will bring the sword against you. I the Lord have spoken.”
Footnotes
- Ezekiel 5:7 Most Hebrew manuscripts; some Hebrew manuscripts and Syriac You have
New International Version (NIV)Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV® Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
Reflect
How do you see your Christian community standing against the ‘morality’ of worldly culture around you?
After 13 months of eating starvation rations and lying down, Ezekiel moves seamlessly into another astonishing drama. Cutting off presumably a year’s growth of hair would have been a challenging task. Where would he have found a sword? Did he use one of his wife’s kitchen knives? Presumably, word would have spread that Ezekiel was up to something, and a crowd would have gathered to watch. Shaving his head, often seen as an act of mourning or disgrace and shame, would have been stressful enough, but more so for Ezekiel, as priests were expressly forbidden from shaving their heads.1 His drama is what Wright calls ‘a one-man double act2,’ in which he represents the Lord wielding the sword in judgment, but his hair, representing Israel, is the recipient of the judgment. When God says (v. 11), ‘I myself will shave you,’ this recalls Isaiah’s reference to God using the king of Assyria to shave the people.3
Ezekiel then explains the drama with words, stating that Jerusalem, which should have been the center of the nations and indeed a light to the nations, shockingly is morally worse than the pagan nations around it. In verse 12, Ezekiel delivers the word of the Sovereign Lord, explaining the dividing of his hair in terms of a prophecy of death, plague, famine, and exile when Jerusalem falls to the Babylonians. For Israelites expecting, as God’s chosen people, that God would protect them, the words in verse 8, ‘I myself am against you,’ would have been shocking words to hear.
In case we are reading this chapter smugly, as New Testament Christians, we need to remember that Paul castigated the Corinthians for sins ‘that even pagans do not tolerate.’4 Sin among God’s people is worse in God’s sight than among non-believers.
Apply
How effectively do you think the church today represents God to society around us? What could we do better?
Closing prayer
Holy Spirit, show me where my life needs to conform more with who I am called to be and how I am called to act because Jesus is my Savior.
1 Lev 21:5 2 C Wright, The Message of Ezekiel (IVP, 2001), 83. 3 Isa 7:20 4 1 Cor 5:1
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