In this week’s reading I was struck by the assertions on pages 241 and 242 that people will be rewarded or punished for their own righteousness or their own sin. God establishes his right to determine this, he says “all people are mine to judge.” And he goes on to say that “the person who sins is the one who will die.”
My first reaction to this was gladness, almost approval (as if I have the right to bestow approval on God’s administration of justice). In Exodus 20 and Numbers 14 it says that God punishes children for the sins of the father for three and four generations. That’s never seemed particularly “fair” to me, so I appreciate how clearly it states here that “The child will not be punished for the parent’s sins, and the parent will not be punished for the child’s sins.”
Without diverging to much from my main point, I do want to say that I think that the kind of repercussions in Genesis and Numbers may refer more to the damage and consequences that are wrought upon our families when we sin, and the kinds of generational sin patterns that are so often perpetuated through families: abuse, addiction, deceit. Too often these sin patterns (and others) not only inflict damage on subsequent generations, but the behavior itself is picked up and perpetuated.
Here though, in Ezekiel, I think it’s pretty clear what God is saying: “Righteous people will be rewarded for their own righteous behavior, and wicked people will be punished for their own wickedness.”
Furthermore, we’re told that “if wicked people turn away from all their sins and begin to obey my decrees and do what is just and right, they will surely live and not die.” Yea! There is the promise of forgiveness with repentance. Yet, yikes, there’s a flip side: “if righteous people turn from their righteous behavior and start doing sinful things and act like other sinners…all their righteous acts will be forgotten, and they will die for their sins.” Oh dear. (Remember, as Pastor Lee has taught us, usually when the Bible talks about death, it is referring to spiritual death.)
This passage stirs up my balance-sheet thinking: that running tally I’m all too tempted to keep in my head, wherein if I do enough “good” things, it balances out the bad things and I’m okay. I read my Bible yesterday, prayed, turned away from the temptation to lose my temper: check, check, check. Yea me! But today I overslept and didn’t do my devotions, I said a bad word, and I spread some gossip. All those demerits wipe out any progress I made.
The glorious truth of the gospel is that we are freed from living this way: There is no condemnation for those in Christ (Romans 8:1). We are forgiven because of what Jesus did, not because of our own efforts. There is no balance sheet.
What, then, do we do with this chapter of Ezekiel? Is this the pre-cross, sacrifice-based system of keeping the law to be right with God? Do we get to throw out this Old Testament teaching?
Elsewhere in the Old Testament we’re told that our sins are removed as far as the east is from the west (Ps 103), and that though are sins were once scarlet as blood, we are now white as snow (Is 1). We cling to those truths when we talk about forgiveness, so I don’t think we get to toss this.
I think God speaking through Ezekiel here is not talking about tit-for-tat recordkeeping, but heart change. For the sinner who repents, there is forgiveness. Conversely, then, can one who walks in righteousness and then rejects (“turns from”) that path be lost? I don’t like that thought. But neither do I think that salvation is a one-and-done, get your rubber stamp and then live as you please. Paul says to “continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil 2:12). Taken in context with all the assurances in the New Testament that salvation is by grace, through faith, we can be certain that we don’t work to earn our salvation. But we are in relationship with God, through Jesus, and that should inform the way we live. Just like the Israelites were the chosen people of God, his special nation, but they didn’t live that way, and there were consequences.
And one thing is certain, God was incredibly clear with the Israelites, for generations, for centuries, about what a covenant relationship with him required, and what disobedience would cost. I think he’s just as clear with me about what the life walking with him looks like, and the spiritual death that would ensue from turning away. I think that kind of clarity is pretty fair.