Ezekiel’s Wife
What is the one blessing in your life that causes you the greatest amount of joy? What is the desire of your heart? What if that one thing that has become the pinnacle of your existence was to be removed? How would you respond?
In the book of Ezekiel God sends a very difficult message to Judah by way of a sign in the life of this faithful prophet. Can you guess what it is? Ezekiel’s wife dies. That’s right, she dies. Ezekiel is even then told by God that he is not to mourn at the sudden loss of his wife but to rather sigh in silence. He is commanded by God not to let any tears run down his face. Instead, he is to dress normally, live normally, and refrain from eating the bread of sorrow. But why? God wanted the people to come to understand their terrible and unforgivable mistake. They had placed the desires of their hearts on things other than him.
After God had delivered the Jews from Egypt and placed them in Canaan, somewhere along the way they got lost. Oh, they were home in their land – they knew where they were by location. But they lost their way because they stopped being thankful to God. They lost their way because they got distracted by their blessings. They lost their way because they began to worship the gods of the world.
So God took away their blessings. He removed them from their homeland and exiled them to Babylon and made them slaves to a godless people. In the same way, when we leave God he lets us be enslaved to the desires of our hearts that are not him. These temporary physical desires never satisfy. They only lead us to a land that is far away from the home God originally intended for us.
When I read this message about Ezekiel’s wife in chapter 24, I realize that God is making a point about how we should respond when we lose someone or something very important to us. Are we not allowed to grieve? Of course, we are allowed! But in this case, God is making an exception with Ezekiel in order to teach his people a lesson. They had left God without tears. God says in this book that they had basically shunned him and treated him as a woman in her days of impurity. There were no tears in losing God! But rather they had left him consciously and had placed the desires of their hearts on other things.
There is going to be a time in the future when all of the things we hold dear in this life are going to be taken from us. This could be by death or by the coming of our Lord – but you can be sure that this moment is coming to us all. If we are in the correct place concerning the desires of our heart, we will not be sad in this moment. Instead, we will rejoice for what we will be gaining. But if we have placed our heart’s desire on something that is not God, we are crying for things that do not last, that do not satisfy, and that will never deliver us and save us from this sick and sinful world.
We need to remember that, for God, we were always first. We were always wanted most. And even in our sin and rebellion, God gave his only Son on the cross to get us back. His greatest loss was us because his greatest love was us. We are his heart’s desire.
“By this we know love, because He laid down His life for us” – 1 John 3:16.
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AUTHOR: Jeremiah Tatum
