Ezekiel 20:25,26 - Joseph Benson’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

Wherefore I gave them statutes that were not good, &c. This some understand of the ceremonial law, as if it were given purely to be a check and restraint to that perverse people, consisting of numerous rites and observances, many of which had no intrinsic good in them. “But I conceive,” says Lowth, “the statutes here spoken of to be of a different nature from those mentioned Ezekiel 20:11, because they have a quite contrary character given of them; and therefore I take the words to import, that God, in a just judgment for their disobedience to his own laws, gave them up to a reprobate mind, and suffered them to walk after the idolatrous and impious customs of the heathen around them. And whereas, by obeying the laws and ordinances which he had given them, they might have lived happily, (Ezekiel 20:11,) they became slaves to the vile and cruel practices of the heathen idolatries, so as to offer up their very children in sacrifice to idols, to the utter destruction of themselves and their posterity, Ezekiel 20:26. This will appear to be the sense of the text, if we compare it with Ezekiel 20:39, and with Deuteronomy 4:28; Deuteronomy 28:36; Jeremiah 16:13; in which texts God threatens them, as a punishment for their neglect of his worship, to disperse them into the heathen countries, and thereby deprive them of an opportunity of serving him in public, and expose them to the peril of being seduced to idols. Just as David complains to Saul of the hardship of his exile, that it laid him open to the temptation of serving the heathen gods, 1 Samuel 26:19.” In the same light Bishop Newcome views the passage, interpreting the sense to be, “I permitted them to observe statutes, or idolatrous rites, of an evil and execrable nature.” And I polluted them in their own gifts I suffered them to pollute themselves in offering abominable sacrifices. In that they caused to pass through the fire, &c. In offering their firstborn sons in sacrifice to Moloch. That I might make them desolate Which occasioned the destruction of great numbers of them, and made a desolation in the land. That they might know that I am the Lord This I permitted, that they might be made sensible that I am the living and true God, and a being infinitely more excellent than any or all of the idols, to the worship of which they had foolishly addicted themselves: or, that they might be compelled to acknowledge, that I am a mighty king in punishing those that would not have me for a gracious king in governing them.