Meditate is a monthly column in which insights gained from meditating on the Word are shared. We welcome your insights, too, in the form of comments or even your own article! Contact us if you'd like to write a submission for this column. -Editor
“And I will send My anger against you; I will judge you according to your ways…My eye will not spare you, nor will I have pity…Now upon you I will soon pour out My fury, and spend My anger upon you…My eye will not spare, Nor will I have pity; I will repay you according to your ways…The rod has blossomed, pride has budded. Violence has risen up into a rod of wickedness…They will throw their silver into the streets, and their gold will be like refuse; their silver and their gold will not be able to deliver them in the day of the wrath of the Lord; they will not satisfy their souls, nor fill their stomachs, because it became their stumbling block of iniquity…For the land is filled with crimes of blood, and the city is full of violence…I will cause the pomp of the strong to cease, and their holy places shall be defiled.
They have filled the land with violence; then they have returned to provoke Me to anger…Therefore I also will act in fury. My eye will not spare nor will I have pity”
Ezekiel 7: 3, 4, 8, 9, 10, 11, 19, 23, 24; 8: 17, 18.
I’ve been reading the Prophets while holding the question, “How is this a communication from a loving God?” in my mind. Let me tell you—that loving communication seems very well buried at first read in Ezekiel 7 and 8.
What irks me about these chapters most is how it seems like God has an anger problem. I’m put off by this because I have anger issues myself that I’ve been working on for years. Holding these passages in contemplation I realize I’m bitter because I am getting better at practicing self-control and here God looks like he’s got none whatsoever! What’s going on?
After meditating on it, I think this passage actually has absolutely nothing to do with what we think of as anger normally; instead, it’s simply spelling out the framework of the nature of reality, albeit in very triggering language.
I realize there’s a key difference between God and me when it comes to anger. God’s heart is utterly united with his mind and both are perfectly united and seamlessly expressed in his actions. And he is of one heart and mind. My heart and mind on the other hand are more often than not at odds with each other in one way or another, not to mention it’d be more accurate to say I have two of each, a higher and a lower, and they’re all discombobulated in how much stock they each have in my actions. God’s M.O. is working from a love for the salvation and eternal well being and happiness of the entire human race—all.the.time! I, on the other hand, can’t say I have such integrity. I think this unity of his intention in his whole being is pointed to by the repeated statement: “My eye will not spare, nor will I have pity” [insert some reference to fury]. God is using these terms to let us know what happens when we live against the ordained nature of reality—that of love for the salvation of the entire human race.
This statement is said five times in Ezekiel, almost identically worded each time and all of them include some reference within a verse or two to God’s anger or fury. Rather than making the claim that God has some ruthless anger problem, I think it’s trying to get the message across that mutual love is the inviolable nature of reality. If you work against that, if you attempt to violate that, you inevitably get burned from your own actions. All the fury that’s being poured out is in response and according to “their ways.” Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, right? God’s “anger” is less like an emotional problem and more like a law of physics. Okay, that might not be the most comforting thing you hear all day. But hear me out, if you can stand it.
The word for fury (as BlueLetterBible.org tells me) is “chemah” and also could be translated as bottles, like bottles of wine that make you drunk. It can also mean heat or burning, specifically the burning from a poison. It makes me think this statement is pointing out a one-to-one correlation: when we live against the Lord’s commandments, it boils/triggers something like anger "in the Lord" or reality itself. God is heavenly love itself, so if something is going against love, “infuriating” it, it might make more sense to say this love gets heated, or burns/boils in reaction.
The word for “eye” (`ayin) can be used also to mean a spring, fountain, or spiritual faculties. Just as wisdom is the form of love, we could say God’s eye is the form, the coming out, the fountain or expression of love. If love is being transgressed, it can’t act against its nature and so God’s eye is a direct expression of what is happening to the love. To be clear, I don’t think this is God being angry with us in our sense of it; rather it’s using our language of anger to portray the order of love and wisdom. If you stick your hand in boiling water, it’s going to hurt. If you live a life that is against love for others, it’s going to hurt.
Why does God allow the words to come across so harshly? I think it is for our protection. He’s sounding the alarm and even spelling it out for us. There are bits in the chapters that show what the children of Israel are doing that is causing this “burning.” Two things I notice are first how it mentions that “their” silver and gold won’t be able to deliver them but instead is their “stumbling block of iniquity.” This strikes me as a critical initial misstep. The stumbling block is when we start believing in our own self-sufficiency apart from God; when we start believing the appearance that we live from ourselves and are not connected to everyone else and that the “silver and gold” we have—the true ideas and goodness—come from ourselves or are to our own credit. We have goodness and truth on loan from God but this can throw us off, it can trip us up; we have the tendency to use it for our own self-aggrandizement instead of for its true purpose, that of service and love for others. Once we’ve turned love inside out, so to speak, we start to live this way at the expense of others, we start to act against the neighbor, lacking charity or loving kindness—these are the crimes of blood and the violence mentioned. We use what we know only for the sake of our own honor, reputation, and gain; our “rod” “buds with pride” rather than using our strengths in service to and with love for others. When we lose connection with the bigger picture we start working against the very nature of reality and it’s not pretty. And rather than it being an enormous transmutation into some monstrous beast, I think we walk this homeostatic line every day and the "temperature changes" can be sensed in our feelings; one hallmark feeling for this poisonous/intoxicating burning I notice is a kind of grasping anxiousness; another is acute offendedness. The nature of reality is love, cooperation, connectedness and mutual support so when we live against this nature, we inevitably, in a sense, get burned.
Although it’s still easy for me to get caught up in my default reaction to the language, I’m clear now that any reference to the “angry God of the Old Testament” isn’t reason to worry or fear that we suddenly could get on God’s bad side, or that God even has a bad side. It’s not even about living in accordance with external ritual—that’s not what God cares so much about; what matters is living in accordance with the nature of divine reality—love and care for others and the world we share. When we shift into alignment with this loving nature, God’s eye actually becomes our support. Just like the psalmist in Psalm 32 when he acknowledges his sin to the Lord, the Lord forgives his iniquity and says, “I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go, I will guide you with My eye” (8), so likewise can we open ourselves to this guidance when we live from the loving-kindness that is our source.
Chelsea lives with her husband and three children in Willow Grove, PA. She enjoys making music, doing yoga, talking and writing about spiritual topics, and living life overall.