Mike Focht 12/12/2025
You have despised My holy things and profaned My Sabbaths. In you are men who slander to cause bloodshed; in you are those who eat on the mountains; in your midst they commit lewdness. In you men uncover their father’s nakedness; in you they violate women who are set apart during their impurity. One commits abomination with his neighbor’s wife; another lewdly defiles his daughter-in-law, and another, in you, violates his sister, his father’s daughter. In you they take bribes to shed blood; you take usury and increase; you have made profit from your neighbors by extortion, and have forgotten Me, says the Lord God.
Ezekiel 22:8-12
In this passage, God commands Ezekiel to rebuke the sins of His people in Jerusalem. Remarkably and vividly, God literally wants to place their sins before their eyes so that they can see them in all their defilement and wickedness. So God calls Ezekiel to show her all her abominations!
First, God rebukes His people because they have despised My holy things and profaned My Sabbaths. Their sin caused them to view holy things as if they were not holy. Also, they had used time meant for fellowship with God and worship and given it to sinful practices.
Their sin—of which God is about to speak very directly—is wrong in so many ways! It deadens the sense of holiness and therefore causes us to despise what would typically be set apart for the Lord. So too, our marriage bed, our entertainment, our friendships, our finances, our churches, our times of rest, our workplace, and our very minds and hearts can become places of horrible defilement. Even the most instinctual social relationships, such as husband and wife, neighbor, father, daughter, sister, etc., are now wickedly defiled and have become abominations.
Also, their Sabbaths—or the time where God should be worshiped and known—were no longer sacred. The word profane carries the idea of being outside the temple. It is the opposite of being sanctified. A young Jewish boy would never dream of asking to rent out the temple for his birthday party. Why? Not because birthday parties are sinful, but because the temple was sanctified—or set apart for God and His purposes. Sin defiles sanctity with profanity.
When divine lines of sanctification were crossed, and the temple or the Sabbath, which were to be set apart for God, were used for other purposes, the people of Israel had become profane. So the rebuke comes to our lives! When the time that we should sanctify for God is given over to selfish pursuits, or the service of God is manipulated to gratify our sexual or material lusts, we, too, have become profane. Like the ancient Jewish temple in Ezekiel’s day, God sadly watches as the holy and sanctified things in our lives are defiled. Why would God want Israel to see this? So they would fall before Him and repent!
Does God see in us what He saw in His own people? Where He desires to find holiness, does He see worldliness? Where He desires for us to set aside time to worship and seek Him, does He see men gladly hunting for bribes, violence, or personal entertainment? Where God desires to fellowship with us, does He see us sexually interacting with others impurely, and twistedly ignoring fundamental sexual laws to fulfill our sexual lusts with wives, mothers, daughters, in-laws, neighbors, and sisters?
God desired fellowship with the Israelites despite how perverted they had become! God rebukes sin and sexual perversion of His people to destroy the disease, destroying proper fellowship with Him. May we see it, may we hear it, and may it humble us to repent where it is appropriate for us to repent.
Finally, God finishes His rebuke with this simple indictment: and have forgotten Me! We must not forget the Lord our God. Turn back to Him and find mercy. Hear His rebuke and let it begin a purifying work in your heart and life. The Jews of Ezekiel’s day did not heed God’s gracious and loving reproof. Will we?