Ezekiel 33:12

It would have been enough to illustrate the earnest exhortation, Turn ye, why will ye die? (Ezekiel 33:11) by the assurance that if the wicked turns his past sins will not be remembered against him (Ezekiel 33:16). But the prophet states the truth in a more general form. His purpose is to teach also the general truth that the past of one's life does not of necessity determine the future either in itself or in the judgment of God. This, next to the assurance of God's gracious will regarding men (Ezekiel 33:11), was the truth most needed to comfort the people and awaken them out of the stupor which lay on them into a moral life and activity again.

It is merely to distort the prophet's words to say that he teaches that a man's past life goes for nothing, and that he will be judged merely according to what he is found doing "at the moment" of the judgment. The prophet is not speaking of moments. He speaks to men overwhelmed by a judgment of God which seemed to leave no hope for the future, and he lays down the principle needful for the moral awakening of the people that the past is not irrevocable, that a future of possibility lies before them. It is too true that the evil of a man's past life prolongs itself into the future and that sin cannot at once be done with. Yet we "believe in the forgiveness of sins;" and this is the truth which the prophet desires to teach his countrymen, over whelmed with the thought of their own evil past. When he says the righteous shall "live" he means by living the complex thing, having the favour of God and having an external felicity corresponding to this.

Old Testament prophets and saints were hardly able to conceive the first of these two things existing apart from the second. And the prophet probably still considers them inseparably connected. And hence, when teaching that the son shall not suffer for the sins of the father, and that the righteous shall "live" and the wicked "die," he has been charged with inculcating a doctrine more false to reality than the old one which it was designed to supersede. But here again a certain injustice is done to the prophet. No doubt when he uses the word "live" he employs it in the pregnant sense, viz. to enjoy the favour of God and to have this favour reflected in outward felicity. But just as Jeremiah relegates the principle that the children shall not suffer for the sins of the father to the new era about to dawn, so Ezek. agrees with him. Neither prophet is laying down a new principle which is to obtain in the world, the world going on as it had done before. Ezek. feels himself, as all the prophets do, on the threshold of a new Epoch, the era of the perfect kingdom of God, and it is in this new era that the principle which he enunciates shall prevail. See at the end of ch. 18.