And they shall recompense your lewdness upon you, and ye shall bear the sins of your idols: and ye shall know that I am the Lord GOD.
Ye shall bear the sins of your idols - i:e., the punishment of your idolatry.
Ye shall know that I am the Lord God - i:e., you shall know it to your cost, by bitter suffering.
Remarks:
(1) The prophet represents Israel and Judah under the image of two women, called respectively Abolah and Aholibah (Ezekiel 23:4). The former set up a tabernacle of her own devising, as her name implies; the latter had the privilege of God's true tabernacle being in her. But though they differed in this important respect, yet in regard to spiritual adultery both alike were guilty from the days of their youth in Egypt (Ezekiel 23:3). Aholah, or Israel, though she belonged not to herself or to the world, but to God, who was spiritually her husband and Lord, gave her heart to Assyria, and formed alliances with the Assyrian kings. Therefore in just retribution God made the objects of their sinful trust, the Assyrians, the instruments of their punishment (Ezekiel 23:9-10). When the professors of religion depart in heart from God to the world they are sure to be punished by the world.
(2) Notwithstanding the awful warning given in the punishment of Israel, Judah, instead of shunning her sister's sin, only corrupted her way the more (Ezekiel 23:11); and being dazzled by the attractive appearance and dress of the Babylonians (Ezekiel 23:12; Ezekiel 23:14-15), she did not wait for them to pay their court to her, but "sent messengers unto them into Chaldea" (Ezekiel 23:16); and as one step downward precipitates men into another and deeper plunge, from political confederacy she passed on to the adoption of their showy idolatrous worship. Political expediency is frequently the excuse alleged for sacrifice of religious principle; and alliances with the ungodly in secular interest mostly lead the professing worshippers of God to a sinful conformity to the world's corrupt and God-dishonouring usages. How much, too, of sin enters the heart through the avenue of the eyes! "As soon as Judah saw with her eyes" the gorgeously attired Babylonians of Chaldea "she doted upon them" (Ezekiel 23:16). The gaud and glitter of the world's tinsel fas cinates the unwary. In a moment the spark of passion passing through the sight into the imagination kindles the flame of lust in the inmost soul; and "when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death." Our resolution, therefore, should be that of Job, "I made a covenant with mine eyes" (Job 31:1); and our prayer that of David (Psalms 119:37). "Turn away mine eyes from beholding vanity!"
(3) Unlawful love, sooner or later, ends in hatred and estrangement. They who are unfaithful to their God are little likely to be faithful to their friends, allies, and lovers. With characteristic fickleness, Judah forsook her pledged alliance with Babylon to ally herself with Egypt, the rival of Babylon in those days. After she had "polluted" herself with them, "her mind was alienated from them" (Ezekiel 23:17); and "calling to remembrance the days of her youth, wherein she had (spiritually) played the harlot in Egypt" (Ezekiel 23:19), she transferred her vile love to the filthy idolaters and idolatries of that land. After we have once entered the service of God, we should beware of letting the memory dwell on the unlawful pleasures which we indulged in formerly, lest the treacherous heart should be tempted to regret the loss of them, and to desire a return to them.
(4) As Judah's mind was "alienated from" the Babylonian king to whom she had sworn allegiance (Ezekiel 23:17), so God's mind, in righteous retribution, was "alienated from her" (Ezekiel 23:18); and as the Babylonians had been the objects of her unlawful love, so now they were made the instruments of her richly-merited punishment. They had been the means of alienating her from God; they now were appointed by God to be the means of alienating her from the possession of all that had previously been her ornament and glory (Ezekiel 23:29). Their very vigour, dignity, and wealth, which had so attracted her in the first instance, only enabled them the more effectually inflict God's judgments on her (Ezekiel 23:22; Ezekiel 23:24). The guilty adulteress is to be deprived by the holy and jealous God, who is her Husband, of her bejewelled nose and cars (Ezekiel 23:25), the very features of her personal beauty whereby she tried to attract the notice of admiring paramours. Instead of having sought the hearing ear, and the spiritually seeing eye, and "the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price" (1 Peter 3:4), she had imitated the meretricious adorning of the world, priding herself on her gold, jewels, and vain pomps. Let us beware of her sin, remembering that "the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. is not of the Father, but is of the world; and the world passeth away, and the lust thereof; but he that doeth the will of God abideth forever!"
(5) Sore and lengthened judgments have had the effect on the Jews which God designed-namely, so far as to "make her (idolatrous) lewdness to cease from her." For much more than two thousand years past, ever since the return from Babylon, the Jews have sternly abhorred idolatry (Ezekiel 23:27). Having dealt hatefully herself, Judah has been, dealt hatefully with by the executioners of God's wrath (Ezekiel 23:29). She has had to drink to the dregs the "deep and large cup" which her sister Israel before her has had to drink" (Ezekiel 23:32). She has been filled with the stupefaction of sorrow and desolation, like one drunken (Ezekiel 23:33); and all this because she forgot God, and cast Him behind her back (Ezekiel 23:35). When once we suffer ourselves to forget and lose sight of God, we cannot say to what lengths in sin we may be tempted.
(6) What especially provoked God in both Israel and Judah (Ezekiel 23:36) was, that immediately after their idolatry, adultery, and bloodshedding, on the very same day, in flagrant bloodshedding, of the sanctuary of God and profanation of the Sabbath (Ezekiel 23:38), they hypocritically presented themselves before God in His house, as if they were His true worshippers (Ezekiel 23:39). Hypocrisy is of all sins the most loathsome to God and ruinous to the soul of the sinner himself; because it is an effort to deceive alike the heart-searching God, our fellow-men, and our own selves.
(7) Like an "old" and worn-out adulteress, Israel and Judah passed from the more refined idolatries of Assyria and Babylon to the grosser corruptions of more degraded and coarser peoples "of the common sort" (Ezekiel 23:42-43). Sin debases the understanding, and from the more refined and intellectual objects of taste, wherewith it originally has stolen away the heart from God, it soon leads the sinner downward and downward still, until it has brought him to grovel and wallow, like the swine, in the mire of sensuality and bestiality.
(8) God therefore raised a company of executioners to fulfill His righteous vengeance on the apostate people (Ezekiel 23:45; Ezekiel 23:47), in order that all men might take warning by her fate to shun her sins (Ezekiel 23:48); and that she herself might be made to know, to her cost, that Yahweh alone is God (Ezekiel 23:49). This is the lesson that we especially have to learn from this history; because it applies more to the professing worshippers of God than to those who know not God, and who are denied the religious privileges which we now enjoy, as the Jews did formerly. The, humbling picture of our common nature in Israel's apostasy should fill us with holy fear of offending the God and Saviour whose name we bear, and with jealous distrust of ourselves, and renunciation of all self-righteousness, and, above all, with prayerful dependence on the grace of God in Christ alone, while we look for the working of His Holy Spirit as our only security against sin and judgment.