That thou mayest remember, and be confounded, and never open thy mouth any more because of thy shame, when I am pacified toward thee for all that thou hast done, saith the Lord GOD. That thou mayest ... never open thy mouth - in vindication, or even palliation, of thyself, or expostulation with God for His dealings (Romans 3:19), when thou seest thine own exceeding unworthiness, and my super-abounding grace, which has so wonderfully overcome with love thy sin (Romans 5:20, "Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound"). "If we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged" (1 Corinthians 11:31).
When I am pacified toward thee for all that thou hast done - enhancing the grace of God, which has pardoned so many and so great sins. Nothing so melts into love and humility as the sense of the riches of God's pardoning grace (cf. Luke 7:47. "Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for (i:e., the evidence that her sins are forgiven is furnished in the fact that) she loved much: but to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little").
Remarks:
(1) God illustrates in the form of a parable His gracious dealings with the Jews, and their abominable perversity-His judgments on them for apostasy-His final restoration of them to His favour because of His respect to His own everlasting covenant-and then their repentance flowing from His unlooked-for grace. Israel, in the beginning of her national existence, was as an infant taken up by the gratuitous grace of God; even as Moses, her first human leader, end the moulder of her national character, was taken up when an infant on the verge of destruction, and placed among princes through the overruling providence of God. (Ezekiel 16:1-7). So the call of the believer is due to sovereign grace alone. Born in sin, and by nature a child of wrath, by a miracle of grace he is adopted by God, who, seeing him "lie in the blood" of his guiltiness, speaks the word of omnipotent love and grace, "Live," and immediately the spirit of heavenly life from the Holy Spirit creates new life in him. He therefore needs often to look to the hole of the pit whence he was digged (Ezekiel 16:3, note), in order to learn humility by the contrast that there is between his own natural wretchedness and the riches of God's grace.
(2) The next phase in Israel's history was her union with Yahweh in spiritual marriage when she had attained her national maturity (Ezekiel 16:8-14). It was not she that made the first advance to God, but God to her. There was no moral beauty in her to attract the regard of the holy God, yet God, of His own free favour, took her into an everlasting covenant with Him, betrothing her unto Him forever. He openly ratified that covenant at Sinai, whereby she became a special treasure unto Him above all people. He then set up His tabernacle, which was as it were the nuptial tent of God and Israel So her renown went forth among the pagan, and distant monarchs heard of, and were constrained to admire, the comeliness which God had put 'upon her' (Ezekiel 16:8-14). So the Church of Christ is espoused to Him, as "a chaste virgin espoused to one husband" (2 Corinthians 11:2). It is not we who first loved Him, but He who first loved us, and gave Himself for us. He enters into an everlasting covenant with His people, washes their souls in His blood from all sin, and provides them with the "fine linen, clean and white," which is "the righteousness of the saints" (Revelation 19:8). This righteousness is not a righteousness of their own making, but Christ's righteousness imputed to them for their justification, and imparted by His Spirit for their sanctification. He also dwells among them and in them as His chosen earthly tabernacle (2 Corinthians 5:16). He feeds them in the green pastures of His Word, and with the spiritual manna from heaven. He puts His own comeliness upon them, so that even the men of the world are constrained to take knowledge of them that they have been with Jesus (Acts 4:13); because, like Moses after he had descended from the mountain, they reflect some of the heavenly grace and beauty which shone so brightly in their Divine Master when on earth.
(3) But Israel, alas! repaid the love of God with neglect, and the grace of God with foul ingratitude and apostasy (Ezekiel 16:15-34). Instead of ascribing the glory of her high gifts to God, the gracious giver, she boasted of them as if they were of her own making, and completely at her own disposal, and with strange and impudent perversity dedicated them to her idols. Finding the pure worship of God a continual check on her lusts, she sought abominable idols, whose worship was not only not inconsistent with, but gave a positive sanction to, her carnal gratifications. As though an adulteress were to clothe her paramour with the rich dresses which she had received from the generosity of her husband. so Israel gave God's gold and silver, garments and meat, nay, even the lives of her own sons and daughters, as offerings to Moloch and other filthy and false gods (Ezekiel 16:16-21). The source of all her sin, and its worst feature, was, she did not remember God's marvelous grace to her in her youth, when she was naked and helpless; but she was utterly shameless in her spiritual harlotries, bringing down upon herself the double "woe" of God (Ezekiel 16:22-26).
The very pagan became disgusted with her abandoned passion for idolatry and lust. They were faithful to their nation's false gods, Israel was not faithful to her Yahweh, who is the only true God, but changed Him for profitless idols. God therefore used the Philistines, who hated her (Ezekiel 16:27), as His instruments for punishing her. But not even chastisements availed to produce repentance in her. Instead of returning to Yahweh, she only the more keenly sought alliances with distant idolatrous nations, Assyria and Chaldea, and hired them as her spiritual paramours, importing their superstitions and vices, yielding all that was sacred in her high calling of God to them, and gaining nothing in return. So the professing Church of Christ has sadly fallen from her high calling of God. Designed to be the salt, seasoning the corrupt mass around, too often she herself has been tainted with the surrounding corruption. Not remembering the grace of God in Christ, which has called her out of darkness into His marvelous light, she has trusted in her mere privileges, and even in her worldly possessions, and instead of dedicating these to God the giver, has used them as instruments to minister to pride and vanity. When the Church thus lowers her testimony for her Lord, to adapt herself to the low standard of the world, she has all to lose by the compromise, and nothing really to gain. For if she reduces the world thereby to recognize herself, and to pay an outward deference to Christianity, it is mere formalism that results, not vital religion; and formalism, so far from being a gain, is a positive loss to the truth, because it is mistaken for the really. It is therefore righteously ordered that the world, with which she spiritually intrigues, shall be the instrument of her chastisement.
(4) God in just retribution gathered all Israel's lovers against her, as well as those who had always hated her (Ezekiel 16:37), and whom she had hated. The Chaldeans, or whose alliance she had forsaken her God, as well as her enemies of old, Edom, Moab, Ammon, and the Philistines, all poured down upon her; and as she had shamefully exposed herself before them in a spiritual point of view, so in a political aspect she was exposed to shame by them, being stripped of all that she had gloried in, her temple, her palaces, her houses, the rich produce of her pleasant land, and her sons and daughters. As when she had the power she never ceased to play the harlot spiritually, God put this out of her power by His judgments (Ezekiel 16:43). The Jews had so fretted His Spirit by their doings, and their utter forgetfulness of His grace (Ezekiel 16:43), that nothing short of the severest judgments on them could make His fury to rest (Ezekiel 16:42).
They had not only shown themselves no better than the previous exceeded them in guilt (Ezekiel 16:47). Sodom and Samaria, whom Judah was so ready to condemn as having received only the punishment which they deserved, seemed innocent in comparison with Judah, because of her superior privileges which she so shamefully abused (Ezekiel 16:50-51). So God will deal with professing Christians more severely than with the world, which makes no profession of religion, whensoever they despise and abuse their high privileges. When, ashamed of Christ, they abandon Him for the world, He will justly put them to shame before the world. The nearer was their relation to Him, the more heavily will He punish them. So far from being regarded by Him as superior to the ungodly world, which they superciliously look down upon, they are estimated as an abomination in His sight. As in the case of Sodom, so in that of many-the first sources of their fall have been "pride, fullness of bread, and abundance of idleness" (Ezekiel 16:49). Hence, arises their selfish want of sympathy with their needy brethren. The world only condemns Sodom's grosser sins; but God singles out for special reprobation those evil principles which the world hardly censures at all, or even commends, but which are at the root of the worst abominations which provoke God utterly to remove the sinner out of His sight (Ezekiel 16:49-50). How awful that those once lifted up to heaven in privileges should be brought down to the level of Sodom, so that the latter in hell shall feel a kind of melancholy comfort in seeing them as miserable and as guilty as herself! (Ezekiel 16:54.)
(5) Yet after all there follows to Israel a promise of grace and restoration in the end (Ezekiel 16:60-63). O the riches of the goodness of God! How wonderful His favour to His elect, flowing from His everlasting covenant! Though His people often do not remember Him (Ezekiel 16:22; Ezekiel 16:43), He never ceases to "remember" them. Though Israel has despised the oath by breaking the covenant (Ezekiel 16:59), God, for the sake of the elect remnant, remembers His covenant with her in the days of her youth, and establishes unto her an everlasting covenant. His covenant is one of grace and promise in Christ, the Fulfiller of the law for us; not a covenant of works, wh erein Jew and Gentile alike have failed (Ezekiel 16:61). This unlooked-for grace on the part of God is the first thing that shall awaken her to remember, as well her own guilt as also His marvelous and gratuitous love. Shame because of her past abominations toward so loving a God will then cause her tears of unfeigned repentance to flow: she will not open her mouth anymore in self-vindication; but, accepting the past punishment of her iniquity, will justify God in His dealings, and marvel, in humble and adoring gratitude, that where her sin so abounded, grace did so much more abound. Then shall all the nations of the earth attach themselves to her as believers in Messiah her manifested King; and the original purpose of God's grace in the call of Israel as the kingdom of priests and mediators of blessing to the whole earth (Exodus 19:6) shall be realized. So also the spiritual Israel, the elect Church, shall throughout eternity remember with adoring love the divine grace which pitied her in her original low and lost estate, and which has with such long-suffering borne and restored her from her backslidings, and shall serve the Lord in His presence continually, and be the mediate ministers under Him of blessing to His creatures, reigning with their Saviour forever as kings and priests to God and the Father.