Ezekiel 20:25

25. Wherefore I gave them also statutes that were not good Does this refer to certain Mosaic regulations which were “permitted because of the hardness of their hearts?” (Matthew 19:8.) Or does it express the common Scripture truth that Jehovah is so fully the supreme ruler of Israel that when the people attempt to escape from his rule the edicts of evil kings (such as the “statutes of Omri” (Micah 6:16) and Jeroboam (1 Kings 12:28-33), the utterances of false prophets (Ezekiel 14:9), and even the cruel statutes and ordinances of the heathen worship which they chose to obey, become really divine chastisements which Jehovah gives to them? (Ezekiel 5:8; Ezekiel 5:10; Ezekiel 7:4; Ezekiel 7:9; Ezekiel 7:22; Ezekiel 7:26-27; see especially, note Ezekiel 14:9.) Or does it only mean that Jehovah has given up these willful transgressors to the unclean law which has been written by persistent sin upon the tablets of their hearts? (Compare 2 Thessalonians 2:11.) In either case the ethical principles justifying Jehovah’s action are nearly the same. Laws for the disobedient and criminal cannot be the same as for the obedient and pure. Such laws are not “good,” but they are the best possible under the circumstances. “The soul that sinneth, it shall die” (Ezekiel 18:4), is just as truly a divine law as that which offers life through obedience (Ezekiel 20:11). It is God’s law that the man who willfully follows the false will finally lose the power to follow or even to know the true. Since God is the author of this law the New Testament rightly declares that it is God who blinds the eyes and hardens the heart of the impenitent. This does not mean that God desires any man to lose his spiritual eyesight. It simply means that, by refusing to obey God’s laws of mercy obedience to which might have saved him his sight he has necessarily become subject to God’s law of judgment under which he must inevitably, if unrepentant, suffer the penalty of blindness. (See notes Mark 4:12; Luke 8:10; John 12:40; Romans 1:21-28; Romans 11:9.) Because of willful rejection of the truth he has become unable to see and therefore unable to obey the truth. The very agencies which were intended to be to him a savor of life unto life have become a savor of death unto death (2 Corinthians 2:16; Exodus 14:4). He has brought himself under the dominion of the divine statutes which were ordained for the government of incorrigibles, and he finds them to be hard and painful.