The Bitter Grace of Self-Loathing Text: Ezekiel 6:8-10
Introduction: Judgment as a Mercy
We live in a soft and sentimental age. Our therapeutic culture has taught us that the worst possible thing is to feel bad about ourselves. Self-esteem is the summum bonum, the highest good. The idea of loathing oneself is treated as a psychological disorder, a pathology to be medicated away. But the Word of God is not sentimental, and it is certainly not therapeutic in the modern sense. The Word of God is a sword, and it cuts. It cuts away the cancer of our pride so that we might live.
In our passage today, we find ourselves in the middle of a blistering prophecy of judgment against the mountains of Israel. God, through Ezekiel, has just promised utter devastation. The high places will be desolate, the idols will be smashed, the altars will be broken, and the bones of the idolaters will be scattered around those same altars. It is a picture of total covenantal ruin. And right in the middle of this terrible storm of divine wrath, God plants a flag of hope. But it is a strange kind of hope. It is a hope that begins not with a warm feeling, but with a gut-wrenching self-loathing. It is the hope of the remnant.
This is a crucial biblical theme. God’s judgments are never the final word for His people. His judgments are purgative, not merely punitive. He tears down in order to build up. He scatters in order to gather. He wounds in order to heal. And the turning point, the hinge upon which this great reversal swings, is the grace of Spirit-wrought repentance. But we must be very clear about what biblical repentance looks like. It is not a polite apology. It is not simply turning over a new leaf. It is a profound, inward revulsion at what we are and what we have done. It is seeing our sin from God's point of view, and agreeing with His verdict so thoroughly that we come to loathe ourselves for it. This is not a popular message, but it is the only message that leads to life.
The Text
“However, I will leave a remnant, for you will have those who escaped the sword among the nations when you are scattered among the lands. Then those of you who escape will remember Me among the nations to which they will be carried captive, how I have been broken over their adulterous hearts which turned away from Me, and by their eyes which played the harlot after their idols; and they will loathe themselves to their own faces for the evils which they have done, for all their abominations. Then they will know that I am Yahweh; I have not said in vain that I would do this calamitous evil against them.”
(Ezekiel 6:8-10 LSB)
Sovereign Preservation (v. 8)
The passage begins with a great adversative, a "However" that cuts against the grain of the preceding judgment.
"However, I will leave a remnant, for you will have those who escaped the sword among the nations when you are scattered among the lands." (Ezekiel 6:8)
After promising total destruction, God promises preservation. This is not a contradiction; it is the logic of the covenant. God's covenant has curses for disobedience and blessings for obedience. Israel had earned the curses down to the last letter. But God’s covenant also contains His unconditional promise to Abraham, a promise to preserve a people for His own name's sake. So even in the midst of a judgment that Israel thoroughly deserved, God acts unilaterally to save some. "I will leave a remnant."
Notice the agency. The remnant does not leave itself. They do not escape because they were faster runners, or cleverer hiders, or morally superior to those who perished. They are left. They are preserved. It is a sovereign act of divine reservation. Paul picks up on this very theme in Romans, quoting Elijah’s day: "But what is the divine response to him? 'I have kept for Myself seven thousand men who have not bowed the knee to Baal.' In the same way then, there has also come to be at the present time a remnant according to God’s gracious choice" (Romans 11:4-5). Salvation, whether from the Babylonian sword or from eternal hellfire, is always according to God’s gracious choice.
This remnant is defined by two things: they have "escaped the sword" and they are "scattered among the lands." This is a picture of grace in the midst of judgment. They are alive, which is grace. But they are exiles, which is judgment. This is the state of every Christian in this life. We have been saved from the sword of final condemnation, but we still live as pilgrims and sojourners in a foreign land, scattered among the nations, awaiting our final gathering.
The Gift of Memory and a Broken God (v. 9a)
Verse 9 describes the internal transformation that takes place in the hearts of this preserved remnant. The first step is remembrance.
"Then those of you who escape will remember Me among the nations to which they will be carried captive, how I have been broken over their adulterous hearts which turned away from Me, and by their eyes which played the harlot after their idols..." (Ezekiel 6:9a)
In their affliction, in their captivity, they will "remember Me." Sin is, at its root, a form of spiritual amnesia. It is forgetting God. Repentance begins with remembering Him. But what do they remember? They remember a God who has been "broken over their adulterous hearts." This is one ofthe most startling anthropomorphisms in all of Scripture. The impassible God, the sovereign Lord of heaven and earth, describes Himself as heartbroken, grieved, crushed by the infidelity of His people.
The language used here is the language of covenant marriage. Israel’s sin is not presented as a mere infraction of an abstract legal code. It is adultery. Their hearts are adulterous, and their eyes "played the harlot." Idolatry is not an intellectual mistake; it is spiritual prostitution. It is taking the love, loyalty, and worship that belong to our covenant Lord and giving it to some cheap, powerless, man-made thing. It is cheating on God. And God says this breaks His heart.
Of course, we know that God does not experience passions and pains as we do. But this language is designed to reveal to us the profound personal betrayal that our sin represents. He is not a distant deity, indifferent to our rebellion. He is a jealous husband, and our idolatry is a deep, personal offense to Him. The remnant, in exile, finally begins to see their sin not from their own self-serving perspective, but from the perspective of their wounded husband. They remember His pain. And this is a grace. True repentance is never just about our own misery; it is about the grief we have caused God.
The Grace of Self-Loathing (v. 9b)
This remembrance of God’s grief leads directly to a new perspective on themselves.
"...and they will loathe themselves to their own faces for the evils which they have done, for all their abominations." (Ezekiel 6:9b)
This is the pivot. Once they see how their sin has grieved God, they stop making excuses for it and start hating it. They "loathe themselves." The Hebrew here is visceral. It means to be disgusted, to feel revulsion. It’s the feeling you get from something foul and nauseating. And they feel it "to their own faces." This is not a hidden, private shame. It is an open, honest, self-confrontation. They look in the mirror and are sickened by what they see.
This is the opposite of the world’s wisdom. The world says, "Forgive yourself, love yourself." God says, "See your sin for the abominable thing it is, and hate it. Loathe yourself for it." This is not a call to a morbid, permanent state of self-hatred. It is the necessary, violent reaction to seeing our own filth in the light of God’s holiness. It is what Job meant when he said, "I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees You. Therefore I retract, and I repent in dust and ashes" (Job 42:5-6). It is what Isaiah felt when he cried, "Woe is me, for I am ruined!" (Isaiah 6:5).
This kind of self-loathing is a profound gift of grace. It is the only soil in which true humility can grow. You cannot truly appreciate the grace of the gospel until you have been disgusted by the sin that made it necessary. You cannot treasure the righteousness of Christ until you have loathed your own unrighteousness. This is the godly sorrow that produces a repentance without regret (2 Corinthians 7:10).
The Great Realization (v. 10)
This entire process of preservation, remembrance, and repentance culminates in a foundational theological realization.
"Then they will know that I am Yahweh; I have not said in vain that I would do this calamitous evil against them." (Ezekiel 6:10)
This phrase, "Then they will know that I am Yahweh," is a refrain that echoes throughout the book of Ezekiel. God’s ultimate purpose in both judgment and salvation is the revelation of His own character. He wants His people, and all the nations, to know who He is. And who is He? He is Yahweh, the covenant-keeping God. He is the God who keeps His promises, both the promises of blessing and the promises of cursing.
The remnant, having gone through the fire of judgment and the cleansing of repentance, finally gets it. They realize that God’s warnings were not empty threats. He means what He says. "I have not said in vain that I would do this calamitous evil against them." God’s Word is potent. It accomplishes what it says. When God threatens judgment, that judgment is not a bluff. And this is actually a source of profound comfort. Why? Because if God is faithful to His threats of judgment, then we can be absolutely certain that He will be faithful to His promises of grace. The same God who scattered them in His wrath is the God who will gather them in His love. The God whose word of judgment proved true is the God whose word of salvation in Jesus Christ will also prove true.
The Cross as the Ultimate Calamity
As with all Old Testament prophecy, we must read this through the lens of the cross of Jesus Christ. This entire pattern of judgment, remnant, and repentance finds its ultimate fulfillment in Him.
We are all idolaters. Our hearts are adulterous, and our eyes have played the harlot after a thousand different idols: money, sex, power, approval, comfort. We have all earned the sword of God’s judgment. And for those who are not in Christ, that sword will fall with final, eternal force.
But God, in His sovereign grace, has chosen to leave a remnant. He preserves a people for Himself, chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world. And how does He do it? He does it by taking the "calamitous evil" that we deserved and pouring it out on His own Son. The cross was the ultimate fulfillment of God’s covenant curses. There, Jesus was scattered and abandoned. There, God’s own heart was truly broken, as the Father turned His face from the Son who bore our adulterous sin.
And when the Holy Spirit opens our eyes to see this, when we "remember" what happened at Calvary, the result is the same as it was for the remnant in Ezekiel. We see the grief our sin caused God, displayed in the suffering of Christ, and we are brought to that place of godly self-loathing. We look at our sin, which nailed Him to that tree, and we are disgusted by it. We are sickened by our own treachery.
And in that moment, we come to "know that He is Yahweh." We know that He did not speak in vain. He is a holy God who truly punishes sin. But we also know that He is a gracious God who, in Christ, has provided the only way of escape. Our repentance, our self-loathing, does not save us. It is the gift that God gives us that turns us toward the only One who can save. It drives us out of ourselves and into the arms of Christ, where we find that the very God who was broken over our sin is the only one who can make us whole.