Fertility | Wayfarer

At every street corner you built your lofty shrines and degraded your beauty, spreading your legs with increasing promiscuity to anyone who passed by.
Ezekiel 16:25 (NIV)

Jerusalem is a fascinating city. It is a city filled with tensions. And it is amazing to experience. It’s crazy to think that a tiny little Canaanite town thousands of years old became, and remains to this day, the most political and religious hot spot of the entire world.

Today’s long chapter is a prophetic message God gave to Ezekiel specifically about the city of Jerusalem. To make sense of Ezekiel’s message, it helps to know a little about Jerusalem’s history.

Jerusalem began as a Canaanite village. It was David who made it his Capital city. At the time he did so, it was a Jebusite city. Only after David’s reign was it considered Israelite. Its multi-cultural history made it a city of political and religious tension from the beginning.

Ezekiel’s message is a long metaphorical story about a non-Jewish baby girl thrown into a field and left to die. God wills the girl to live, cares for her as she grows, and when she flowers into a woman He marries her. She, however, is unfaithful to God, her husband. She becomes an adulterer and a temple prostitute for pagan worship. She sacrifices her children in pagan rituals. Eventually, she then runs after her clients and freely gives herself to them seeking their protection.

If you read the chapter, and I encourage you to do so, it gets rather graphic in its descriptives of her “spreading her legs” for her neighbors and even describes one of them, Egypt, as having an – ahem – very large penis. I confess my curiosity this morning and, just for fun, I pulled up that verse in Bible Gateway and compared every English translation to see how translators handled the reference. Fascinating, some ignored it completely. Some disguised it in vague euphemisms such as “great of flesh” and “lustful.” Others went with a little more specific “well-endowed,” “large member,” or “large genitals.”

Of course, Ezekiel was pulling no punches and the people of his day would have known exactly what he was talking about. He was accurately describing actual Egyptian fertility idols, common in that day, depicting an Egyptian man with a protruding giant erect penis.

And this is the point. The prophets like Ezekiel get very graphic in their messages because the extreme nature of the sins that they were addressing, including ritualized sexual immorality and ritual child sacrifice.

I have to remember that Ezekiel is living in Babylon and the Babylonians had their own version of sex and fertility cults and rituals. The Ishtar Festival, in particular was known for its sexual and moral debauchery. This may very well have fueled the metaphorical rawness of his message.

The adulterous wife was an apt description of Jerusalem. While it had become the chosen city of God’s people, the city itself remained the hometown of both Jews and pagan Canaanites. The pagan residents may have politically gone along with prevailing wind of Jewish authority, but it would always struggle to be faithful to the God of David.

God’s judgment on Jerusalem is pronounced as the just consequences of her adultery, prostitution, infanticide, and social injustices. What is fascinating, however, is that this judgment is not final. God promises to remain faithful, to restore, and to redeem His bride. Not only that, but God declares that He will personally make atonement for her sins:

So I will establish my covenant with you, and you will know that I am the Lord. Then, when I make atonement for you for all you have done…

Fast forward about 500 years and this is exactly what Jesus did when He died on the cross outside the very city of Jerusalem, over which He lovingly laments:

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing. Look, your house is left to you desolate.”

With Jesus, the metaphor switches from Jerusalem being the bride to Jerusalem being the prodigal child. Jesus moves the bride metaphor and applies it to His followers. Which, for me, means that as the bride I find in Ezekiel’s explicit message to Jerusalem both a warning and a comforting truth. If I stray from Jesus, I can expect to experience the consequences of my thoughts, words, and actions. However, while it’s easy to focus on Jerusalem’s sins, the most amazing and important piece of the message is God’s sacrificial love and faithfulness in spite of those sins. This reminds me that no matter how much I stray or how deeply I may fall into sin, His sacrificial love and infinite grace will always extend further and deeper.

If you know anyone who might be encouraged by today’s post, please share.

“Consider now: Who, being innocent, has ever perished?
Where were the upright ever destroyed?
As I have observed, those who plow evil
and those who sow trouble reap it.
Job 4:7-8 (NIV)

When I was young, I began to notice that men and women have very different sub-textual conversations. I became fascinated with a phenomenon I observed in my female friends. I would be in a social setting with a female when another female enters the room. My friend would suddenly turn and whisper some critical remark about the stranger. A few probing questions led me to the realization that within a nano-second my female companion had sized up the female who just entered the room and had filled out a complete mental dossier on her competition. She knew what the other female was wearing, her socio-economic status, what kind of person she was, and exactly where she was to be filed in the categorized file cabinet of her brain. The hi-speed, interpersonal judge, jury, and executioner from across the crowded room.

Along the journey I have continued to observe this non-verbal social world of women. I have, after all, spent much of my life in an estrogen wonderland surrounded by females. I find it fascinating. (Personal Note: I realize that I’m making a broad generalization here. I’m not picking on women. Men have similar unspoken judgments, but in my experience it just looks and behaves differently. That’s another blog post for another day.)

As Wendy and I were in the depths of our journey through infertility, I became aware of just how deep and strong women’s thoughts and core beliefs around pregnancy and motherhood can run. In this unspoken, invisible world of non-verbal female communication there exists a sub-culture in which fertility is spiritual currency. If you are a woman who gets pregnant at the drop of a hat and cranks out multiple children in succession, then you are a female all-star, blessed and living right. If you are a woman struggling to conceive then there are some serious question marks surrounding you and this curse you are experiencing. There must be some reason God is withholding this fundamental female blessing from you.

In yesterday’s chapter we left Job and his three friends on the ash heap. For seven days the four of them sat in silence when Job finally opened his mouth to speak. What poured out what was a highly emotional rant of despair that you might have expected from a man who had lost his children, his workforce, his wealth, and his livelihood before breaking out in painful sores all over his body.

Today, the first of his three friends opens his mouth to speak. His name is Eliphaz, and he comes from the ultra-religious wing of society for whom life is very simple. Everything in life fits neatly into their black and white box and it parallels the thinking I’ve observed around fertility in certain subsets of the female population. If you are visibly prospering you must be living upright and piously because God is blessing you. If you are visibly suffering then you must have done something to deserve God’s punishment. Plain and simple.

Too simple. Eliphaz asks, “Who, being innocent ever perished?” Stop right there, Eli. Let me give you a short list off the top of my head:

Still born and miscarried children
The millions who were marched into the Nazi gas chambers
Millions of civilian war victims throughout history
The journalists who were beheaded on video by ISIS to make a point
The Christian couple I read about in Pakistan who just last week were beaten to death by the Muslims in their village.
My friend who was hit by a drunk driver
My friends and loved ones whose lives were cut short by incurable diseases

Job has suffered incredible tragedy and the first thing he hears from his friend is a backhanded accusation that he must have done something to bring down God’s wrath upon himself. Eli’s words reveal his heart. He is less concerned with showing love, empathy, and compassion to his friend, and more concerned with trying to reconcile what he’s witnessed with the rose-colored glasses through which he sees a simple black and white world.

Today, I am thinking about those who suffer around me in ways I can’t comprehend. I am determined that I do not want to be a friend like Eliphaz. Trying to reconcile irreconcilable suffering within my personal world-view is less important than simply loving a suffering friend without reservation or judgment.