Ezekiel - Lesson 18

Lesson 18B, The Passion of God's Love, Recalling the Boundless Grace of Yahweh in Ezekiel 16, 1 to 14. Some time ago I was looking around for stories comparable to Ezekiel 16, 1 to 14, that might help us understand this classic rags to riches theme. The closest I could get was the Cinderella story.As in our text in that fairy tale, a poor girl was rejected by her family, was missing out on life, was rescued by a prince, who dressed her in the finest clothing and was elevated to the status of queen. But the difference in the stories are also obvious. Cinderella was a good girl, morally much superior to her sisters. She worked hard, she was conscientious, she even forgave her sisters. And in the end we leave the theatrical performance saying, she got what she deserved, but she lived happily ever after. Well, having read Ezekiel 16 to the end, we know the girl in our story was not at all like Cinderella. She despised the prince who rescued her, she proved herself morally worse than her sisters, she despised the prince who had married her, she ran off with any other man she could find, and eventually she got what she deserved, the judgment of God. But our story does have a happy ending, not because she had it coming, but despite her contempt for her savior, and because of the grace and mercy of the one who had rescued her. This story begins with the most touching and remarkable love story in the Bible. Here the story was embedded in a legal case, a wreath, that the king had launched against his bride. The scriptures use many figures of speech to describe the relationship between Yahweh and his people, but no metaphors are as powerful as the language of love within a marriage relationship. In both First and New Testaments, prophets often portray God as a husband, passionately committed to his wife, Hosea 1.3. In the New Testament, Jesus Christ is related to the church as a husband relates to his bride, Ephesians 5.22-33. In my mind, Ezekiel 16 offers the most powerful story in all of scripture, that is, the most powerful love story in all of scripture, especially if we treat love, Hebrew ahayv or Greek agapau, in its biblical sense. In the scriptures, love means covenant commitment, demonstrated in action in the interest of and for the benefit of the other person, often without reference to the well-being of the person who is the grammatical subject of the verb. This is obviously the case with divine love, as expressed in John 3.16, for God demonstrated his covenant commitment love for the world in this way. He gave his one and only Son so that everyone who believes in him will not be damned but have eternal life. In the Bible, love is an action word. Words for love are absent from our text, but the root ahayv will appear four times in the section that follows. You have the root in verses 33, 36, and 37 twice. However, in all these texts, as well as the parallel text in chapter 23, verses 5, 9, and 22, it functions only in the crassly cheapened sense of engaging in sexual activity with a sex partner, irrespective of a covenant at all, while the persons the woman engaged in sexual intercourse with are called your lover's me'achal vayik, your lover's objective genitive, that is, the men she chose as her sex partners, Yahweh's declaration in verse 37 confirms this interpretation. Therefore, look out, I will gather all your lover's me'achal vayik, whom you charmed, all those whom you loved, as well as those whom you hated, that is, rejected. Despite the absence of the word love for God in this passage, no text captures the sense of the word more clearly than Ezekiel 16, 1 to 14. On the surface, verses 1 to 14 look like a tender, touching love story, but deep down, this is but the beginning of an intensely serious legal case presented by a husband whose love had been spurned by his wife, who preferred all sorts of alien lovers, that is, the sex partners. In verses 3 to 34, the prophet presented the evidence for the case against the woman. In verses 35 to 43, he announced the verdict and described the sentence. And in verses 44 to 52, he offered a further analysis of the problem. The following message of Yahweh came to me. Human, inform Jerusalem of her abominations. Say, thus has the Lord, Yahweh, declared to Jerusalem. This is how the story begins. Ezekiel gets an inspired rewriting of Israel's history in terms of a love story. Our chapter opens with an announcement of another prophetic moment captured by the word-event formula, the following message came to me. And addressed to Ezekiel as Benadam, human, son of man, Yahweh opened his word for the prophet with a charge to engage his audience by declaring to them the words that follow. However, to ensure they recognize the source of the message and in so doing acknowledge him as an authorized mouthpiece for Yahweh in this moment, he prefaced the prophecy with a citation formula. Thus has the Lord, Yahweh, declared. The speech that follows did not consist of a report of the prophet's private imaginative reading of Israel's history but of Yahweh's own assessment. Verses 1 to 3 sets the stage for a formal proceeding, a reve in which Yahweh plays the role of both accuser and judge. Yahweh identified the accused party at the outset as Jerusalem which as the capital city of Judah represented the entire nation. In fact, since Judah was all that was left of the original 12 tribe nation Jerusalem represented all that the nation of Israel as a whole by synecdoche represented the whole business. Yahweh announced the prophet's role in the legal proceedings that follow with the verb, Hoda, make known to Jerusalem her abominations. Based on the introductions to the three reave oracles that follow in chapter 22, verses 2 to 4, 22, 2 to 3, and 23, 2, and verse 36, there it's delayed we know that this did not involve merely a dispassionate telling of the story. On the contrary, the association of this verb with Shaphat, to judge in these cases, meaning to arraign, call to court In the cases that follow, the proclamation of Jerusalem's abominations functions as a bill of indictment, the formal presentation of the charges. We've encountered the word abominations told of oath 19 times to this point in the book. That's more than once every chapter. As noted, this word represents the strongest Hebrew expression for actions utterly abhorrent to God. This word occurs 11 times in this chapter alone. Suggesting that along with the root Zana, to commit adultery, it functions as a key word and summarizes Yahweh's assessment of Jerusalem's history. Its association with Zana, to commit harlotry, prostitution, and the noun taznuth, harlotry, from the same root, in this chapter gives it a more specific nuance. It means committing prostitution with other gods and with other men that are representatives of foreign nations. When they should have been faithful to Yahweh, their own husband, they were running after other lovers. The opening statement sets the stage for all that follows. So let's see how this story of grace begins. Jerusalem's lowly origins, her desperate need for grace, this is described in verses 3b to 5. Your origin and birth were in the land of the Canaanites. Your father was Amorite and your mother is Hittite. Speaking of your birth, on the day you were born, your navel cord was not cut, you were not washed smooth with water, you were not rubbed down with salt, nor were you wrapped in swaddling clothes. No one should pity towards you by doing any of these things for you to care for you. Instead, you were flung out in the open field, rejected, on the day you were born. Well, following the order to articulate the indictment against Jerusalem and to preface the accusation with a reminder of the divine source of the speech, Ezekiel launched into his attack. But rather than stating the charges directly, Yahweh cast his case in the form of a story that illustrated the history of God's relationship with his people as he saw it. The story of Jerusalem's desperate origins in verses 3b to 5 sets the stage. In the beginning, all the strikes were against this city. First, Jerusalem's roots were in the wrong place, the land of the Canaanites. Now, in a literal sense, Ezekiel was correct. Jerusalem was a Canaanite city whose origins in Egyptian records confirm that it dates back at least to the 18th or 19th centuries B.C., long before the Israelites were there. David had defeated the Jebusites who occupied the city and made Jerusalem his capital, 2 Samuel 5, 6 to 10. But Yahweh hereby challenged popular perceptions of Israel's sacred traditions, which trace the nation's roots to the call of their ancestor Abraham from Chaldean Ur, and of course his wife Sarah, and their exodus, the exodus of the nation from Egypt. At one level, the name Canaanite reflects her origin in Canaan, but at another level, it stands for all that is antithetical to Israel and to Yahwism. Your father was an Amorite and your mother was a Canaanite, a Hittite. You are a Canaanite. Second, Jerusalem had the wrong parents. Your father was an Amorite, your mother was a Hittite. Well, strictly speaking, the city's roots were neither Amorite nor Hittite, but Jebusite, Joshua 18, 28, and Judges 19, 10. But Ezekiel was not giving a lecture on ethnography. His intention was rhetorical and sharply polemical. In a sense, Ezekiel was literally correct. Jacob's sons had married Canaanite wives, and many Canaanites like Rahab had been incorporated into the ethnic group now making up the remnant of Israel. But in the Bible, Canaanites and Hittites and Amorites represent human depravity at its worst. Read Deuteronomy 9, 4-6. The prophet hereby announced that contrary to cherished tradition, Jerusalem's roots derived not from the pious Abraham and Sarah, but from the pagan peoples whom the Israelites had been charged to drive out. Third, Jerusalem's personal story began all wrong. Verse 4 is interesting because it outlines in greater detail ancient practices in the maternity ward than we find anywhere else in ancient texts. There's nothing like this anywhere else. Here, Yahweh described Jerusalem's desperate state in terms of what her mother and father and attendants had not done for her in the maternity ward. They had not cut her umbilical cord or bathed her or rubbed her with salt or wrapped her in clothes. While the practice of rubbing with salt continues among some Arabic groups today, we're not sure what the actions originally signified. Some suggest the salt was intended to prevent swaddling clothes from turning sour. In primitive conditions, laundering a baby's clothes can be quite a chore. Whereas these were the ancient, normal, natural expressions of maternal love, Jerusalem got off to a miserable start. But this was not all. Verses 5 to 7 describe how completely deprived Jerusalem was of the normal love of a mother for her child, and how depraved her parents were. Instead of tenderly caring for their newborn daughter, her Amorite father and Hittite mother had thrown her out and abandoned her in the open field to die. This case was obviously not like that of Ishmael, Genesis 21, 14 to 16, or Moses in Exodus 2, 3 to 4. Ezekiel did not explain the motive behind these Amorite and Hittite parents' decision to discard their baby to vultures and jackals in the open field. He simply treated it as a cruel and inhumane act by Jerusalem's parents. No eye looked on you with pity, and no one cared for you. We heard these expressions earlier in 5.11, 7.4, 7.9, 8.18, 9.5, 9.10. They become familiar. But our story now has a different purpose. Because Israel represented all humanity in microcosm, the pathetic baby, Jerusalem, was a figure not only of Israel in its infancy, but of all humanity. Although each person is created with equal dignity as an image of God, the dominant gene in the human family tree is sin. Even the person with the most noble and privileged cultural heritage inherits this gene. In our sin we are filthy, naked, miserable, void of all beauty, and in danger of death by exposure. Left to our own resources, we perish. Our case is hopeless. We are helpless. The sentence of death hangs over us from the day we are born. Well, this is the sad beginning to the story. But then, in the nick of time, somebody shows up. In the following verses, 6-14, we hear of God's amazing grace in Jerusalem's rescue and elevation. Ezekiel 16, 6-14. Jerusalem's biography should have ended there, with the vultures eating her. But it didn't. Just in time, perhaps even while the vultures were circling overhead, Yahweh showed up. Here, Yahweh portrayed himself as a traveler, perhaps a merchant, who happened to pass by the spot where the foundling had been abandoned to face a certain death. Indeed, from verses 6-14, the focus shifts from the foundling to Yahweh, who quickly took charge of the situation. Indeed, he is the subject of all the significant verbs. Other passers-by, like the priest or the Levite in Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan, Luke 10, 30-33, would probably have walked around on the other side. And in our day, when we are so brilliant, we would probably be asking from what sort of mental illness her parents were suffering. We would contemplate this as a case for psychological analysis and ask, what factors in a person's life would make people do something like this to their baby? And then we'd continue walking. Not so, God. His response divides into two parts, actually describing two trips he took to this region, separated by 13 or 14 years. Phase 1, Yahweh's first rescue of the infant from certain death, verses 6 and 7. I happened to pass by you and noticed you flailing about in your blood. I declared to you, in your blood, live! I declared to you, in your blood, live! And I made you flourish like a plant of the field. You grew up and matured and you entered completely nude. Your breasts were well-formed and your pubic hair had sprouted, but you were stark naked. Now the motion of the newborn baby flailing about in her blood captured the traveler's attention. Since the infant's umbilical cord had not been cut and she had not been washed, here the plural, bloods, probably refers to the amniotic fluid and blood that her mother had discharged at the time of her birth. No human infant is viable in this condition. Abandoned in the open field under the hot near-eastern sun, the foundling would have died within minutes. Yahweh's compassionate reaction to the baby contrasts with the hardness of her parents. First, emphatically, he pronounced the sentence of life upon the child, otherwise sentenced to certain death. In your blood, live! In your blood, live! In calling Jerusalem to live in her blood, Yahweh assumed the role of the lifesaver. This phase alludes to Yahweh's rescue of Israel from Egypt, where the Pharaoh had sentenced her to death. The present call to life reminds us of Psalm 133.3, like the dew of Hermon, which falls on the mountains of Zion, for there Yahweh has commanded the blessing, life forevermore. Here, to live, is a theological idea, meaning to enjoy life in all its fullness, good fortune, and the joy of God's presence. Given the child's flourishing in verse 7, the declaration also represented Yahweh's legal adoption of this foundling as his own child. She may now cast all her anxieties upon him, for he cares for her, comes from 1 Peter 5.7. Verse 7 reinforces this interpretation. Yahweh did not simply call Jerusalem to live and then send her off on her own. That would still have meant certain death. Ezekiel explicitly attributed the girl's maturation to Yahweh. To make this point, the prophet put a unique twist to the expression Nathan Rivava, whereas elsewhere the expression always means I made you myriads, I made you a multitude, Genesis 24, 60, Leviticus 26, 8, and Deuteronomy 32, 30. Here it carried the sense of I made you great, I promoted you. When used in adoption context, the corresponding cognate expression in Akkadian, rubum, carries a technical legal meaning referring to a rearing of an adopted child by the adopter. Ezekiel highlighted Yahweh's effectiveness in child rearing by comparing her to a plant in the field that sprouts and flourishes. This analogy also prepares for the reference to the growth of her pubic hair later in the verse. Ezekiel described the maturing of the young maiden in two parallel lines. You grew, your breasts were well formed, and matured, and your pubic hair had sprouted, and you entered completely nude, and you were stark naked. Two parallel lines. The Hebrew of the last line of the column is obscure admittedly, but I interpret it as a perfect parallel to the last line in the second column of the first line of verse 7. The point is clear. In the last clause in each column, no, the last clause in each column highlighted the young woman's problem. Yes, she had grown, and she had matured, and now she was at a point of sexual maturity, but as a sexually mature young woman, her nakedness posed a completely different problem from her earlier nakedness as an infant lacking the swaddling clothes. Whereas the earlier nakedness had made the foundling vulnerable to the elements and marauding animals, now she stood exposed to dangers of creatures of a different sort, two-legged creatures. Her age of innocence had passed, but she was naked, which leads to phase two, Yahweh's marriage to this young woman, verses 8 to 14. When I passed by you, I noticed your time, the time for love-making had arrived. I spread my garment over you and covered your nakedness. I pledged myself to you and entered into a covenant with you, the declaration of the Lord Yahweh, and you became mine. I bathed you with water and I rinsed your blood off you. I anointed you with oil. I clothed you with finely embroidered cloth. I provided you with sandals of luxury leather. I wrapped you in fine linen and I covered you with exquisite fabric. I adorned you with jewelry and I placed bracelets on your wrists and a chain on your neck. I put a ring in your nose and earrings in your ears and a beautiful tiara on your head. Thus you were adorned with gold and silver and your garments were made of fine linen, exquisite fabric, and finely embroidered cloth. You dined on fine flour, honey, and oil. You were extremely beautiful and reached the status of queen. Your fame spread abroad to the nations because of your beauty. Indeed, it was perfect on account of my splendor with which I had endowed you, the declaration of the Lord Yahweh. Just in time, the same traveler passed by a second time and recognized the young woman's physical maturity, which meant vulnerability of a different sort. Her time for love-making had come. Since we do not have time to work through the entire chapter, we should take this opportunity to note that this legal case offers an interesting study on nudity and nakedness. And we could offer some brief comments on what happens later, especially in verses 36 to 67. We actually encounter the matter of nakedness in four different dimensions with remarkably different significances. First, there is the innocent nakedness of infancy, verses 3 to 4. Second, there is the vulnerable nakedness of a girl that has reached her puberty. She is sexually mature. That nakedness has a different issue. Then third, there is the immoral, brazen, voluntary nakedness of an adult woman who has bared herself to her husband many times undoubtedly, but she bares herself before her lovers. And then four, there is the shaming, involuntary nakedness of victims and captives of war at the hands of their captors. This is verse 37. It is the last that is particularly troubling to cynics and critics of the portrayal of Yahweh in this passage. Will Yahweh really put Jerusalem on display before her lovers and his enemies? That's what the verse 37 says. You want to be naked? All right, let me strip you. But we should not miss the point of this, that this is what happens in war. The captors disrobe their captives and have them prayed before the troops and out into the broader public. If you have seen the movie Schindler's List, you know what this means. But we should not miss the irony in Yahweh's threat. First, to this point, the woman has not been the victim of Yahweh's violence up until 37, and second, by no means will she be an innocent victim if this is what happens. On the one hand, in effect, Yahweh said by that stage of the story, fine, if you want to bare yourself to all your neighbors, let me grease the slide. But on the other hand, the intent here is more than mere shaming. If covering a woman with his garment, which we read, serves as a nonverbal gesture of marital commitment, remember what Ruth says to Boaz when he wakes up in the middle of the night and discovers she's at his feet. She says, cover me with your garment. And she is thereby saying, marry me. Well, if that is a nonverbal gesture of marital commitment, then the public stripping of his wife symbolized a divorce. We hear a hint of this dimension in Hosea 2, 4-5. That's a formula. It's the opposite of the marriage formula. At the wedding, the man would say, I will be your husband and you will be my wife. And the wife would say, I will be your wife and you will be my husband. Here you've got the inversion of that. He says, she's not my wife and I'm not her husband. Plead with your mother, please. She's not my wife, I'm not her husband. That she may put away her whoring from her face and her adultery from between her breasts. Or I will strip her naked and expose her as in the day she was born and make her like a wilderness and turn her into a parched land and kill her with thirst. In the light of these and other analogous texts, Yahweh's actions were intended not only to shame Jerusalem but also to expose her destitute condition when divorced from him. Her fate, fortunes have come full circle. But this problem surfaces only later after she has brazenly abused and desecrated all her sacred and royal privileges. Yahweh's unrestrained magnanimity to this naked girl at the front end, actually the young woman by now ready for marriage, it takes up all of verses 8 to 14. Let's summarize what he did, the details of his lavish generosity. First, Yahweh spread his garment over Jerusalem. On the surface, this seems like a very simple act of charity, relieving her of the shame of nakedness. However, the gesture of a man covering a woman with his garments was a symbolic act whose meaning is illustrated in Ruth's invitation to Boaz to spread his wing, kanaf, over her. In the ancient Near East, the gesture signified establishing a new relationship. Like the exchange of rings in our culture, this was a symbolic promise of the husband to provide for the sustenance and well-being of his wife. Second, Yahweh formalized the marriage. Two expressions describe this event. Yahweh gave his solemn oath to Jerusalem. Literally, I swore myself to you. And he entered into a covenant with her. In Ezekiel 20, verse 5, Ezekiel clarified his understanding of this idiom by saying, I raised my hand to the descendants of the house of Jacob. I made myself known to them in the land of Egypt. I raised my hand to them like this. I am Yahweh, your God. Raising the hand reflected the physical gesture of oath-taking that accompanied verbal declarations of covenant. Here, I am Yahweh, your God, is an adaptation of the marriage formula. This formula was rooted in ancient rituals involving the man who would declare, I will be your husband and you will be my wife, and the woman answering, I will be your wife and you'll be my husband. The Hebrew divorce formula was the opposite. You're not my wife. I'm not your husband. Although the Israelites looked upon marriage as a mutual belonging, Hosea 2, 7, 18, and, of course, the Song of Songs. Here, the prophet highlighted Yahweh's initiative. He raised his hand, and he entered into a covenant relationship with her. But his relationship with Jerusalem would not involve exploitative and oppressive domination of his wife, as the sequel shows in his unsparing efforts to ensure her happiness and genuine well-being. His actions were over the top in terms of generosity, responsibility, and compassion. Fourth, Yahweh cleansed and anointed her. We're not sure about the significance of these actions. Some suggest this is a ritual signifying the end of her previous vulnerable identity and her transfer to a new identity, secure in her relationship with her husband. Indeed, old Babylonian texts dealing with marriage rituals speak of a day of bathing as part of that process. The washing and anointing with oil were part of the wedding ritual itself, tender expressions of love and devotion. Even so, the rinsing of the blood is a problem by any interpretation. While some associate it with menstrual bleeding, it probably refers to virginal bleeding, the effects of the first intercourse. The young woman whom Yahweh had rescued was an innocent maiden, a virgin untainted by the lust that later consumed her. The bathing and anointing with oil were part of her initiation into her new status and represented indulgences from a husband who truly loved her. This was passion for her well-being and affection from a man that she had never experienced before. Fifth, Yahweh clothed her in the finest garments, verse 10. Specifically, he dressed her in elegantly embroidered cloth like that worn by queens, Psalm 45, 15, and noble women, Judges 5, 30, and was used for decoration for the houses of royalty, as in the tabernacle. He dressed her feet with luxury goatskin leather sandals, an expression used elsewhere only of the tabernacle coverings. The traditional interpretation, skin of dolphins or porpoises or dugongs or sea cows, this is based on the similarity of the word to Arabic, tuqas. However, living in Babylon, Ezekiel was probably familiar with the related Akkadian word, dushu, which referred to sheep or goat leather, specially tanned and treated and colored. The color of the dushu stone. So this is luxury goatskin leather. Since the word wrapped, havas, was used especially of headgear. Look at Exodus 29, 9 of Priests. The cryptic, I wrapped you, suggests some kind of turban made out of luxury linen. A loan word from Egypt here, which refers to the superior quality of the linen in contrast to ordinary linen. That's a different word, adim or pishtah. The last expression, mashih, occurs only here and in verse 13. ESV reads silk, but this is unlikely. Since Aristotle was the first to mention silk in the West, and that's centuries later, apparently it was not introduced to this part of the world until the fourth century. Alexander may have brought it from India, but this would have happened more than two centuries after Ezekiel. These clothing obviously represented much more than a mere covering of her nakedness. Yahweh had robed Jerusalem from head to toe with garments fit for a queen. But this is not all. Yahweh adorned her with the finest jewelry. The items listed in verses 11 to 13 reflect ancient Near Eastern ideals of beautiful adornment. Bracelets for the wrists, necklaces and rings on the nose and ears, and a glorious tiara on her head. Now the last item was not merely the coronet of a Hebrew bride being treated as a ceremonial queen for a week, as in the Song of Songs, 311, but this was the mark of a true queen. Verse 13a summarizes the previous three verses with a notable addition of gold and silver jewelry. Also, Yahweh provided her with royal food. Jerusalem's dining fair included the choicest flour, this is not the ordinary word for flour, it's the equivalent of flour produced in Saskatchewan from high-protein, hard spring wheat. It was used in the king's household, 2 Kings 5-2, and reserved for honored guests, Genesis 18-6, as well as in sacrificial meals, Exodus 29-2. Honey and oil were necessary ingredients for her luxury bread, though the word lechem, bread, may also be a generic expression for food more broadly, everything that's on the table. While these lavish provisions portray a husband with boundless love for his wife, the account reaches its climax in the stunning notice of the effects of his kindness. Jerusalem had become the most beautiful woman in the world. Ezekiel highlighted her superlative beauty in four ways, with the idiom, with muchness, muchness, bim-od-mo-od, that means superlative beauty, as beautiful as could be. Or, secondly, the use of analogy. She achieved the rank of royalty. Third, the reference to her reputation. She became famous. She, a name for her beauty among all the surrounding nations. And fourth, the description of her beauty as total, perfect, khalil. And then, finally, the climactic declaration. Yahweh made her his queen. This remarkable rags-to-riches story ends with a final, extremely important reminder. Jerusalem's beauty was not innate. It was a gift, graciously bestowed upon her by Yahweh and reflective of his own splendor. She had become his trophy of grace, a glorious witness to the power of divine love, a showcase of divine splendor. The language of Ezekiel's description of Jerusalem, Yahweh's wife, invites interpretation at another level. It is hardly coincidental that the clothing he provided for her involved embroidered cloth and fine linen. These expressions occur elsewhere, most frequently in the descriptions of the tabernacle, its curtains, and the priestly vestments. And references to luxury leather, of which her sandals were made, occur only in contexts involving the tabernacle. Furthermore, her special food, fine flour and oil, figured prominently in the sacred offerings. In short, Yahweh had clothed Jerusalem, his bride, with the garments that clothed the sanctuary, and he fed her with the food of its offerings. As the bride of Yahweh, Queen Jerusalem was a surrogate for the temple. Really. Elsewhere referred to as the beauty of his adornment, 720, and the delight of his eyes, machmad einau, 2416. Without naming Zion in this description, Ezekiel offered his interpretation of Zion theology in its ideal form. To Yahweh, Jerusalem was the absolute perfection of beauty, Yahweh's delight. And as a representative of Israel as a whole, her status was that of a treasured people, amsegola. That's a jewelry expression as well. A kingdom of priests, mamleketh kohanim, and a holy nation, agoy kadosh. All of this from Exodus 19, 5 to 6. Compare Deuteronomy 7, 6, and elsewhere. Yahweh had indeed set her high above the nations for praise, renown, and glory. All he asked in return was that she be faithful to him and serve him for the praise of his glory. It is interesting that the word for glorier, tiferet, appears in the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. Elsewhere, outside of Deuteronomy 26, 19, only of the high priest's garments to represent the glory of God. This was Israel. This was Jerusalem. All Yahweh asked in return was that she be faithful to him and serve him to the praise of his glory. However, the rest of the chapter will bring realism to this ideal vision. Like the woman in this story, Jerusalem owed her very existence and her status in his household and in the world entirely to the grace of God. What can we say about theological and practical implications for ourselves in our time? The lessons to be drawn from this incredible story should actually be quite obvious. First, at one level, Jerusalem's fate at the beginning of the story illustrates the fate of millions of children conceived and born but then rejected by their parents. In the ancient world, philosophers and lawmakers often recommended abandonment and exposure to the elements as means of disposing sickly, ill-formed, or unwanted children. In ancient Arabia, poor women would often abandon their children, especially if they were girls. And the same was true in Greece, and this still happens today. The unequal intolerance of female fetuses is a particular problem in China and India to this day. It used to be thought that the higher rate of aborting female fetuses or disposing of female infants in China was linked to the economic status of the mother or to traditional Confucian culture. But this theory has been debunked by the fact that with increased wealth and better education, the discrepancies have actually increased. According to a recent article in The Economist, The War on Baby Girls, Genderside, prenatal ultrasound scans and selective abortions have proved even deadlier to girls than the cruel dictates of village elders. The real problem is the, quote, the fateful collision between overweening son preference, the use of rapidly spreading prenatal sex determination technology, and declining fertility. Apparently in India today, parents who wanted a son but balked at killing baby daughters, they chose abortion in their millions. Some time ago I came across an anecdote concerning six baby girls who had been marked for death in India but were rescued by a Christian organization based in New Delhi. The children were born in the southern state of Tamil Nadu where numbers of villagers kill unwanted female children by feeding them milk laced with poison. The girls were unwanted because of the high dowries their parents must pay when they get married. Well, lest we be preoccupied with a molt in the foreigner's eyes, we should acknowledge the beans in our own. In our country, in a recent survey of persons who had had an abortion, of those who gave the primary reason for agreeing to the procedure, the most common were the timing is not right, 25%, they could not afford the baby, 23%, they were done with having children or had enough of other people depending on them, 19%. Remarkably, resolving a rape or incest issue accounted for only 1.5% and concern for the health of the baby or the mother only 7%. For most, the declared motives lack any hint of concern for the well-being of the most innocent and vulnerable life of all. And where is the loving and compassionate maternal instinct for even less than physically and mentally perfect children that has driven female behavior since the beginning of time? As for the paternal instinct to protect and care for those under a male's charge in a world of unwed mothers and absent fathers, that issue has been marginalized completely. Efforts to ban sex-selective abortion through legislation in state assemblies have often been opposed by the American Civil Liberties Union and family planning clinics. Ironically, organizations that seek to protect and empower women turn a blind eye to the most egregious form of discrimination against females. In our pseudo-civilized world of throwaway kids, we witness an unprecedented dehumanization of adults, male and female, that is evident in the epidemic of child abuse, cruelty, and abandonment, not to mention the abortions that will snuff out almost, if not more, than one million precious lives in North America this year. Ours is a self-absorbed culture that would have embarrassed ancient Amorites and Hittites. Every time a female child, or any child that has been conceived, is willfully disposed of, we have presumptuously interrupted God's creation of another image of himself. What arrogance. What chutzpah. But second, as already intimated, the destitute condition of Jerusalem in the opening paragraph is a figure not only of Israel in its infancy, but of all humanity in its natural state. The dominant gene in the human family tree is depravity. Left to their own resources, even persons with the most noble and privileged cultural heritage are utterly helpless and without hope. The sentence of death hangs over all from the outset, Romans 3, 23. Third, verses 6 to 14 offer the most vivid picture of the grace of God in the entire Bible. Several dimensions of divine grace stand out. First, the source and motivation of divine love lie entirely in God himself. Nothing within us calls for or warrants this grace. Divine favor is unconditional and unaffected by the impressive quality or potential utility of the object, Deuteronomy 7, 7-9, Romans 5, 6-11. Second, the reach of divine love knows no limits. God not only rescues the destitute from death, he lavishes on them his gifts with unrestrained generosity. Ephesians 1-5. Third, the seriousness of divine love is expressed in the covenant relationship that he establishes with those to whom he reaches out. In God's covenant faithfulness, the helpless may find perfect security. And fourth, the power of divine love is displayed in its miraculous ability to transform a wretched and filthy person into the most beautiful trophy of grace, a glorious witness for all the world to see. Apart from God's love, we are nothing, but as its object, we are elevated to the status of royalty to showcase the divine splendor. My friends, if God is able to take a cynic like Chuck Colson and turn his life inside out, God is able to take the vilest drug peddler and make him his own. God is able to take a prostitute and make her a queen, Rahab. And God is able to take our children and our neighbors and our coworkers in the office and make them show pieces of his grace. And that's what he invites us to be. May we be that wherever he puts us.