Ezekiel 16 Devotional

Covenant Love Outlasts Betrayal

“But I will remember the covenant I made with you in the days of your youth, and I will establish an everlasting covenant with you.”Ezekiel 16:60 (BSB)

Chapter 16 uses deliberately shocking imagery. God tells Jerusalem's story as a newborn girl abandoned in a field, unwanted and unwashed, until he passes by and commands her to live (16:4-6). He raises her, enters into a covenant with her, and lavishes gifts on her until she is famous for a beauty that came from him (16:8-14). Then she trusts in that beauty and gives his gifts, and even her children, to idols (16:15-21). Through it all she never remembers where she came from (16:22).

The chapter pictures that betrayal as unfaithfulness in marriage, because idolatry is exactly that toward a God who loved her first. The judgment is severe and just (16:59). Yet God says he will remember the covenant he made with her in her youth, establish an everlasting one, and make atonement himself for all she has done (16:60-63). She forgot; he remembers. Paul says Christ stays faithful even when we are not (2 Timothy 2:13). Your hope rests on his faithfulness, not on the strength of yours.

To think about: Which of God's gifts to you have you started to treat as your own achievement, and what would it mean to remember where they came from?