“What do you mean that you use this proverb about the land of Israel, saying, ‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge'? As I live,” says Yahweh, “you will not have occasion to use this proverb in Israel any more.”
The coming lesson on individual responsibility is opened by taking a popular proverb and rebutting it. Like all proverbs it contained truth when taken rightly, but was misleading when take wrongly. It is always true that our children to a certain extent suffer for our failures, as well as benefiting from our successes, that we are all to a certain extent what we are because of our backgrounds. But when this becomes fatalism, suggesting that we cannot escape the round of fate, it becomes dangerously misleading. In the end we are what we choose to be.
The idea of corporate sin is an example of this. There is a sense in which we are responsible for the activities of our families and communities, if we go along with them without protest, and seek to do nothing about them. If we share in their attitude, we share in any judgment made on them. But in the end, God tells us, we are each responsible for our own behaviour and actions. We are accountable as individuals. And that is how we will finally be judged.
This applied very much to the exiles. They looked back and to a large extent blamed their present situation on their ‘fathers' (Lamentations 5:7). ‘Our fathers have sinned and are no more, and we have borne their iniquities'. And they had some justification for this. (Compare Exodus 20:5; Exodus 34:7; Numbers 14:18; Deuteronomy 5:9). But they now had to be faced up with the fact that in the end their fate depended on themselves, and that it was their own sin which was the cause of present judgment. See Ezekiel 3:16-21; Ezekiel 14:12-20; Ezekiel 33:1-20; Deuteronomy 24:16; 2 Kings 14:6.
There is a significant contrast here with the use of the similar proverb by Jeremiah 31:29. There Jeremiah was looking ahead to the coming age when the new covenant would be established. Then, he said, individual responsibility will be clearly established. But through Ezekiel God says that that time is now. We must not just wait for the future, He says, we must recognise that there is a need for full response to God even now.
That lesson is important. While Ezekiel too looked forward to the coming age, he also very much emphasised that what was true then could be true now. Would men then receive the Spirit? They could receive the Spirit now (Ezekiel 18:31 compared with Ezekiel 36:26). Would they be changed then? They could be changed now. While each age has its different emphases, God's way of deliverance through faith in His mercy and forgiveness, and God's gracious activity on behalf of His own through His Spirit, have not changed. Salvation has always been, and will always be, by faith through grace (Ephesians 2:8), as a result of the activity of His Spirit, and as a result of God's own provision of a means of propitiation and reconciliation. It was just as true then as now.