Ezekiel 20:25 - Exposition

I gave them also statutes that were not good, etc. The words have sometimes been understood as though Ezekiel applied these terms to the Law itself, either as speaking of what St. Paul calls its "weak and beggarly elements" ( Galatians 4:9 ), or as unable to work out the righteousness which it commanded ( Romans 3:20 ), and the language of Hebrews 7:19 and Hebrews 10:1 has been urged in support of this view. One who has studied Ezekiel with any care will not need many words to show that such a conclusion was not in his thoughts at all. For him the Law was "holy and just and good," and its statutes such that a man who should keep them should even live in them (verses 13, 21). He is speaking of the time that followed on the second publication of that Law, and what he Says is that the people who rebelled against it were left, as it were, to a law of another kind. The baser, darker forms of idolatry are described by him, with a grave irony, as statutes and judgments of another kind, working, not life, but death. Sin became, by God's appointment, the punishment of sin, that it might be manifest as exceeding sinful. So Stephen says of Israel that "God turned, and gave them up to worship the host of heaven" ( Acts 7:42 ). So St. Paul paints the corruptions of the heathen world as the result of God's giving them up to "vile affections" ( Romans 1:24 , Romans 1:25 ). So in God's future dealings with an apostate form of Christianity, the same apostle declares that "God shall send them strong delusions that they should believe a lie" ( 2 Thessalonians 2:11 ). Psalms 81:12 may have been in Ezekiel's thoughts as asserting the same general law.