Context for Ezekiel 20:1-44
God declares to the Jews that He has not abandoned them. Indeed, God declares that His intent is to remake them into the people He wishes them to be through the hard test of conquest and exile. Through that test, God will purify His people and make them holy, then He will restore them to their place as heirs to His kingdom.
Ultimately, it was not the physical idolatry of the people of Israel that condemned them, but the idolatry of their hearts. In their hearts, they forsook their God and replaced Him with idols made of their own hands, idols that reflected their selfish pursuit of the way of the world.
We often look on that idolatry with a mixture of fascination and revulsion. In our modern era, especially in the Western world, we cannot imagine such a thing as worshiping a statue or a tree, let alone sacrificing our hard-earned resources or, worse, our children to them.
Yet, our conceit on those very things betrays the idolatry of our own hearts. In our modern society, our idols may not be wood or stone, plant or mountain, but they are idols all the same. We replace God and His will for us with the pursuit of gain, with the pursuit of success, with the pursuit of leisure, or with the pursuit of convenience.
How much of our time, talents, and treasure do we sacrifice to these things? Granted, gain, success, leisure, and convenience are not evil in themselves, but when these things supplant what we know to be the will of our God, they are just as much idols as if we erected statues to them in our homes.
The goal then is, as always, to keep to our faith by seeking first our God’s kingdom and His righteousness by keeping ourselves in the Word and by seeking out how we can apply our faith to everything we do everyday with our lives. By doing so, we conform ourselves to God’s will and keep ourselves firmly on the path to our goal of Heaven.
