Every 90 seconds…just over a minute and one half, someone else is raped in the United States. Most of those take place in a location where the victim thought they would be safe; the home, at school or at work.
I looked up the statistic because of the comment that Ezekiel made about men sleeping with their neighbor’s wife. To that end, there is a website for married people who are looking to be intimate outside the boundaries of their marriage, and they were recently hacked. So we know that 37 million people visited their site. Statistics show that no less than 20% of the married public has engaged in extramarital affairs…with the numbers being very close for both men and women.
I’m sure that if I cared to do the research I would find that every single thing that the people of Israel were guilty of we are guilty of…except for maybe offering our children in fire to idols.
In my sermon today I quoted Colossians 3:5 “don’t be greedy, for a greedy person is an idolator”. That verse really struck me, because of how angry God was with Israel over adultery…and here is a modern day example of how we could be guilty of the same thing. Now, if we add greed to the list of our sins, can you imagine how corrupt we appear in heaven? Even those who haven’t cheated or lusted could be guilty of being greedy in one way or another…..it just makes our situation seem so bleak…. In 22:30 God says he scoured the land looking for ANYONE who could stand in the gap…and found no one. Certainly there wasn’t anyone “perfect” as Jesus is who could stand in the gap…but I wonder, is that what God was looking for? Noah was considered righteous and he wasn’t perfect. Lot was considered righteous and he was flawed as well. I suspect that things had gotten so bad in Jerusalem that you couldn’t even find an honest person, let alone a perfect one.
The good news for me today comes with the discussion of the two adulterous sisters in Chapter 23. Sure, everything here is slanted toward condemnation because the sisters have shared their intimacy with other nations. But look at it from the opposite view: When we praise God, give Him glory and honor, and take our requests to Him…we are being intimate with Him. God wants to be intimate with us, to have that deep personal and yes, intimate relationship where we are completely exposed before Him. In those moments He reveals Himself to us as well, and our relationship grows even closer because of it.
I confess I am a little uncomfortable talking about intimacy and associating it with the images of sex that pop up in this chapter. I haven’t spent much time thinking that my relationship with God is as personal as this. I haven’t spent much time thinking of God receiving pleasure in my actions in this way. We experience sex and sexual pleasure through the lens of our fallen nature, so there is a distinct possibility that what we think and feel are inappropriate, at least in part. It would be unfair to assume what we think about sexual relations is the same as what God thinks.
Having said that, there can be no doubt that praising, worshipping and interacting with God in any way brings great pleasure to Him. After reading this, I think God would rather that we came to him with questions…even angry…rather than choosing not to talk with Him at all, or worse yet…..to dismiss Him and seek after some other false deity to interact with.
Today’s reading has given me much to think about. And some of the images are uncomfortable…
Faithfully,
PR