The God Who Strikes Text: Ezekiel 7:1-19
Introduction: Our Sanitized God
We live in an age that has domesticated God. For many in the modern West, and tragically, for many in the modern church, God has been tamed, housebroken, and made respectable. He is a celestial therapist, a divine affirmation machine, a cosmic grandfather whose only job is to dispense hugs and overlook our little foibles. He is all mercy and no majesty, all patience and no purity, all love and no wrath. He is, in short, a God of our own making, an idol carved from the syrupy sentimentality of our therapeutic culture.
And this God is a lie. He is a fiction. He is as much a pagan deity as Baal or Molech. The great task of the faithful church in every generation is to tear down these idols and to present the God who has actually revealed Himself in the pages of Scripture. And there are few places in Scripture where the true God, the living God, reveals His character in a way more calculated to offend our modern sensibilities than in this seventh chapter of Ezekiel.
This chapter is a bucket of ice water in the face of a sleepy, compromised church. It is a divine declaration of war against sin. Here we meet a God who says His eye will have no pity. A God who says He will not spare. A God who takes full and complete credit for the calamity that is about to fall, saying, "then you will know that I, Yahweh, do the striking." We must not flinch from this. We must not apologize for this. If we do not understand the God of Ezekiel 7, we cannot possibly understand the grace of the cross. If we do not know the God who strikes, we cannot know the God who saves. This is not a passage to be explained away; it is a passage to be trembled at, and then, by God's grace, to be understood as the necessary backdrop for the gospel of peace.
The Text
Moreover, the word of Yahweh came to me saying, “Now as for you, son of man, thus says Lord Yahweh to the land of Israel, ‘An end! The end is coming on the four corners of the earth. Now the end is upon you, and I will send My anger against you; I will judge you according to your ways and put all your abominations upon you. For My eye will have no pity on you, nor will I spare you, but I will put your ways upon you, and your abominations will be among you; then you will know that I am Yahweh!’
“Thus says Lord Yahweh, ‘A calamitous evil, a unique calamitous evil, behold, it is coming! An end has come; the end has come! It has awakened against you; behold, it is coming! Your doom has come to you, O inhabitant of the land. The time has come; the day is near, confusion rather than joyful shouting on the mountains. Now it is near when I will pour out My wrath on you and spend My anger against you and judge you according to your ways and put on you all your abominations. My eye will show no pity, nor will I spare. I will give to you according to your ways, while your abominations are among you; then you will know that I, Yahweh, do the striking.
‘Behold, the day! Behold, it is coming! Your doom has gone forth; the rod has blossomed; arrogance has budded. Violence has grown into a rod of wickedness. None of them shall remain, none of their multitude, none of their moaning, nor anything eminent among them. The time has come; the day has arrived. Let not the buyer be glad nor the seller mourn; for wrath is against all their multitude. Indeed, the seller will not return to himself what he sold as long as they both live; for the vision regarding all their multitude will not return empty, nor will any of them strengthen his life by his iniquity.
‘They have blown the trumpet and made everything ready, but no one is going to the battle, for My wrath is against all their multitude. The sword is outside, and the plague and the famine are inside. He who is in the field will die by the sword; famine and the plague will also devour those in the city. Even when their survivors escape, they will be on the mountains like doves of the valleys, all of them moaning, each over his own iniquity. All hands will hang limp, and all knees will become like water. They will gird themselves with sackcloth, and horror will cover them; and shame will be on all faces and baldness on all their heads. They will throw their silver into the streets, and their gold will become an impure thing; their silver and their gold will not be able to deliver them in the day of the fury of Yahweh. They cannot satisfy their soul, nor can they fill their stomachs, for their iniquity has become an occasion of stumbling.
(Ezekiel 7:1-19 LSB)
The Unflinching Verdict (vv. 1-4)
The oracle begins with a tolling bell of finality.
"An end! The end is coming on the four corners of the earth. Now the end is upon you..." (Ezekiel 7:2-3)
This is not a warning; it is a verdict. The time for prophetic warnings, for calls to repentance, for patience and longsuffering, is over. The cup of Israel's iniquity is full, and now it must be drunk. God is announcing the termination of the existing order. And notice the basis for this judgment: "I will judge you according to your ways and put all your abominations upon you."
This is the principle of the moral boomerang. God’s judgment is not arbitrary or capricious. It is the perfect, righteous, and inevitable harvest of what a people has sown. He is simply giving them what they asked for. They filled the land with their abominations, with their idolatry, their injustice, their sexual perversion. Now, God says, He is going to make them lie in the bed they have made. He is going to rub their noses in their own filth. This is not cosmic child abuse; it is the act of a righteous Judge who takes sin seriously.
And this leads to one of the most jarring statements in all of Scripture: "For My eye will have no pity on you, nor will I spare you." We must understand this. God's pity is an attribute of His character, but it is not the only one. So is His justice. So is His holiness. For generations, Israel had presumed upon His pity. They had treated His covenant patience as divine indifference. They thought they could sin with impunity. But there comes a point where divine forbearance gives way to divine fury. A judge who always pitied the criminal and never passed sentence would not be a good judge; he would be a corrupt one. God's holiness demands that sin be punished.
And what is the ultimate purpose of this terrible judgment? It is theological. "Then you will know that I am Yahweh!" They had forgotten who their God was. They had refashioned Him into a tribal deity they could manage. Through this devastating judgment, God was going to reintroduce Himself. They would know Him as the holy God who judges sin, the sovereign Lord of history, the covenant-keeping God who will not be mocked.
The Divine Author of Calamity (vv. 5-9)
In the next section, God doubles down on the message, leaving no room for misunderstanding.
"Thus says Lord Yahweh, ‘A calamitous evil, a unique calamitous evil, behold, it is coming! ... then you will know that I, Yahweh, do the striking." (Ezekiel 7:5, 9 LSB)
This is not just another war, another famine, another blip in the chaotic history of the Ancient Near East. This is a "unique" calamity. This is a bespoke judgment, tailored by God Himself for this people at this time. And God takes full credit for it. He is the one striking the blow. He is not a passive observer, wringing His hands in heaven as Babylon gets out of control. No, God is sovereignly wielding the pagan empire of Babylon as the axe of His judgment (cf. Isaiah 10:5).
This is a profound challenge to our modern deism, which wants to attribute everything bad to secondary causes, to chance, or to the devil. The Bible is clear: God is sovereign over disaster. "Does disaster come to a city, unless the LORD has done it?" (Amos 3:6). This does not make God the author of evil, but it does make Him the author of calamity. He is the one who strikes. And until we reckon with this biblical truth, we will have a truncated, powerless view of God's sovereignty. The same God who sends the sunshine and the rain is the God who sends the sword and the famine as instruments of His righteous judgment.
The Harvest of Pride (vv. 10-13)
The prophet then identifies the root sin that has brought all this about.
"Your doom has gone forth; the rod has blossomed; arrogance has budded. Violence has grown into a rod of wickedness." (Ezekiel 7:10-11 LSB)
The judgment that is coming, the "rod," is not an alien imposition. It is the natural flowering of their own sin. The seed was arrogance, and the full-grown plant is the rod of wickedness. Arrogance is the primal sin. It is the creature shaking his fist at the Creator, declaring his autonomy, setting himself up as the center of his own universe. This pride inevitably gives birth to violence and wickedness, because once a man rejects God as his ultimate authority, he will have no problem violating his fellow man.
This arrogance had so saturated the culture that it brought about a total societal collapse. "Let not the buyer be glad nor the seller mourn." All the normal rhythms of life, of commerce, of society, are about to cease. When God's wrath falls, your stock portfolio is irrelevant. The real estate market will not save you. The economy is a creature, not the Creator, and when the Creator strikes the land, all the creaturely systems built on rebellion will fall with it. The judgment is so final that the seller will never return to his property. This is not a downturn; it is a demolition.
The Great Reversal (vv. 14-19)
The final section of this oracle is a devastating portrait of utter helplessness. God systematically dismantles every false refuge in which the people trusted.
"They have blown the trumpet and made everything ready, but no one is going to the battle, for My wrath is against all their multitude." (Ezekiel 7:14 LSB)
First, their military strength is useless. The trumpet sounds the call to arms, but no one responds. Why? Because God's wrath instills a paralyzing terror. There is no courage, no will to fight. You cannot withstand an invading army when the God of armies is fighting against you.
Second, there is no safe place. "The sword is outside, and the plague and the famine are inside." Whether you flee to the country or hide in the city, judgment will find you. God's wrath is inescapable.
Third, their very bodies fail them. "All hands will hang limp, and all knees will become like water." This is the physiology of sheer terror. Their survivors are not defiant rebels but are "moaning like doves," each consumed by his own iniquity. This is not the godly sorrow that leads to repentance, but the worldly sorrow of being caught, which leads only to death.
And last, in the most poignant reversal of all, their wealth becomes worthless.
"They will throw their silver into the streets, and their gold will become an impure thing; their silver and their gold will not be able to deliver them in the day of the fury of Yahweh." (Ezekiel 7:19 LSB)
The very thing they lived for, the idol they worshipped, the source of their security and pride, now becomes a disgusting burden. They throw it into the streets like garbage. Why? Because in the day of God's fury, you cannot eat gold. Your silver cannot bribe the plague. Their ultimate value system is exposed as a catastrophic failure. The idol has failed them in their moment of greatest need. This is what all idolatry comes to. The thing you worship instead of God will utterly fail to deliver you when you have to stand before God.
The Cross: Where the Striker Was Struck
This is a terrifying chapter. And if the story ended here, we would be left with nothing but despair. If this is who God is, a God of pitiless wrath, what hope could any of us have? We, like Israel, are arrogant. We, like Israel, have our abominations. We, like Israel, deserve the rod.
But the story does not end here. This entire chapter is a dark and terrible backdrop that makes the light of the gospel shine with breathtaking brilliance. Every element of the wrath described here found its ultimate fulfillment not on Jerusalem in 586 B.C., but on one man, on a hill outside Jerusalem, some six centuries later.
On the cross, God the Father looked upon His only begotten Son, and His eye had no pity, nor did He spare. On the cross, Jesus was judged "according to our ways," and all our abominations were put upon Him. On the cross, a unique calamity unfolded as the Creator of the universe was executed by His creatures. And as the darkness fell, all creation knew that it was Yahweh who was doing the striking.
The sword of God's justice found Him. The famine of God's presence fell upon Him as He cried, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" His hands, nailed to the wood, hung limp. He was stripped bare, and shame covered His face. He became, for us, an "impure thing," so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him (2 Corinthians 5:21).
The God who strikes is also the God who saves. But He does not save us by compromising His justice. He saves us by satisfying His justice. He poured out the full measure of the fury of Ezekiel 7 onto His own Son, so that He could pour out the full measure of His grace onto all who would believe in Him. The only shelter from the God who strikes is the God who was struck. Therefore, do not trust in your silver or your gold, your strength or your righteousness. Throw your idols in the street, repent of your arrogant rebellion, and flee to the cross of Christ. For there, and only there, the fury of Yahweh has been exhausted, and we find not a rod of wickedness, but a scepter of grace.