Bible Commentaries
Ezekiel 16

Verse 6

Ezekiel 16:6

I. Preachers are servants of God. We are God's servants on behalf of souls. The souls of our world are desolate and dead as winter; it is the will of God that a spring-time should be brought out in their history, that they should become verdant and flourishing as the garden of the Lord. We are commissioned to traverse the whole world with a life-giving ministry, and to exercise it on behalf of every soul.

II. There are souls dead. (1) Men are ignorant of the nature of their souls. Men suppose that there is a congruity between their souls and the pleasures and gains of the present world, whereas there is an utter incongruity. If souls know not their own nature, it is not too strong a figure to speak of them as dead. (2) The souls of men are not fulfilling the end of their being. (3) The souls of men are strangers to the peculiar joys of their being. The love of God is the highest of all possible pleasures. The love of God, tasted and enjoyed in everything, is that fine pleasure concealed in everything, concealed expressly for souls, and which only souls can extract. Human souls are dead to this bliss.

III. Therefore, as the servants of the Gospel, the cry of our ministry is, Live. We are charged by God to call upon you to repent, to sue for mercy, and solemnly declare to you that not to repent is to perish. We are to tell you that He who knew no sin died for your sins, and that, therefore, life, eternal life, is offered to you through His death.

J. Pulsford, Preacher's Lantern, vol. ii., p. 567.

References: Ezekiel 16:6 . Spurgeon, Evening by Evening, p. 190; J. Irons, Thursday Penny Pulpit, vol. iv., p. 253.Ezekiel 16:9-14 . Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xiv., No. 813.Ezekiel 16:10 . Ibid., Evening by Evening, p 358.

Verse 27

Ezekiel 16:27

I. The last clause of the text may be considered as supposing that a man becomes the slave of another, and that this other is one who entertains towards him a feeling of hatred. Through the apostasy of Adam, Satan obtained a dominion over the globe which he never could have held had our first parents remained firm in their allegiance. It may have been that it was hatred to man which first moved Satan to attempt his destruction. That haughty spirit, chafed by his defeat, and furious at his own exile from happiness, could not endure to look on the purities and felicities of Paradise. Man was innocent, and that made him hateful; man was happy, and he was, therefore, instinctively detested. And if we may speak of man as an object of hatred to Satan when he held fast his allegiance, what may we suppose him now now that, seduced into apostasy, he has been secured by the interference of God manifest in the flesh? Who will attempt to tell what must have been the rage and disappointment of the devil when he found that the creature whose overthrow he had compassed, and whom he therefore regarded as his undisputed prey, was the object of a most wondrous arrangement an arrangement which in the largest measure was to bring good out of evil, and cause that the very fall of our race should issue in man's exaltation to a far higher than his original glory?

II. Satan must hate man, so that whosoever is the servant of this chief of fallen angels, is accurately in the condition described by our text. There are but two moral states. Mankind admit morally of only one division the servants of Satan or the disciples of Christ. Therefore is no alternative but this; for the whole world would have been Satan's empire had not Christ interposed. And whilst the effect of that interposition has been to diminish that empire already, and to secure its final demolition, it is only those who acquire "repentance towards God and faith towards our Lord Jesus Christ," who are translated into the new kingdom before which every other shall ultimately give way. Every unconverted man is virtually in such a state that he may be described as "delivered unto the will of him that hateth him."

H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit, No. 1654.

References: Ezekiel 16:54 . Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. v., No. 264; Preacher's Monthly, vol. iii., p. 354.Ezekiel 16:62 , Ezekiel 16:63 . Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxii., No. 1289. Ezekiel 17:4 . Clergyman's Magazine, vol. xvii., p. 95.