The Taste of Judgment Text: Ezekiel 12:17-20
Introduction: Prophetic Street Theater
We live in an age drowning in information and starving for wisdom. We have more words, more images, more data flying at us than any generation in human history, and as a result, words have become cheap. We are inoculated against warnings. We scroll past alarms. We hear sermons, nod our heads, and then go to lunch, and the words evaporate like morning mist. God, being a master communicator, has always known this about us. And so, from time to time, He resorts to what we might call prophetic street theater. He tells His prophets not just to say something, but to do something. He tells Isaiah to walk around half-naked for three years. He tells Jeremiah to buy a linen loincloth, bury it, and then dig up the ruined thing. He tells Hosea to marry a prostitute.
And here in Ezekiel, God has His prophet engage in a whole series of these sign-acts. Ezekiel has already packed his bags and dug through a wall to act out the coming exile. And now, God commands him to perform another drama, a much quieter but no less potent one. He is to turn the most basic human activities, eating and drinking, into a sermon. He is to make his lunch a prophecy. God is not content for His warnings to remain in the realm of the abstract. He wants the people to see, to feel, and in this case, to taste the consequences of their sin.
Our culture is riddled with anxiety. We have pills for it, therapies for it, and a thousand distractions to numb it. But what we are about to see is that there is a kind of anxiety that is not a disorder to be medicated, but rather a judgment to be heeded. It is the spiritual tremor that precedes a seismic moral collapse. The people of Jerusalem were living in a bubble of self-assured rebellion, deaf to the warnings of the prophets. They believed their covenant status was a magical forcefield. So God tells Ezekiel to show them what it looks like when the foundations are removed, when the most ordinary comforts of life, like a simple meal, become fraught with terror. This is a warning that the consequences of sin are not just external; they get inside of you. They curdle your food and poison your water. And God does this for a very specific reason, a reason that echoes throughout this entire book: "So you will know that I am Yahweh."
The Text
Moreover, the word of Yahweh came to me saying, “Son of man, you shall eat your bread with trembling and drink your water with quivering and anxiety. Then you will say to the people of the land, ‘Thus says Lord Yahweh concerning the inhabitants of Jerusalem in the land of Israel, “They will eat their bread with anxiety and drink their water with desolation because their very soil will be made desolate of its fullness on account of the violence of all who inhabit it. The inhabited cities will be laid waste, and the land will be a desolation. So you will know that I am Yahweh.” ’ ”
(Ezekiel 12:17-20 LSB)
The Prophetic Performance (v. 17-18)
We begin with the divine command to the prophet.
"Moreover, the word of Yahweh came to me saying, 'Son of man, you shall eat your bread with trembling and drink your water with quivering and anxiety.'" (Ezekiel 12:17-18)
Notice the authority. This is not Ezekiel's idea. The "word of Yahweh came to me." The prophet is a man under orders. He is not sharing his feelings or his personal insights. He is a mouthpiece and, in this case, a living diorama for the message of God.
The command is to take the two most fundamental acts of sustenance, eating bread and drinking water, and to infuse them with dread. These are the things that are supposed to bring strength and refreshment. A meal is meant to be a time of peace, of fellowship, of gratitude. But Ezekiel is commanded to act out a mealtime that is the exact opposite. He is to eat "with trembling" and drink "with quivering and anxiety." Imagine the scene. The other exiles are watching him. He sits down to eat, and his hands are shaking so badly he can barely get the bread to his mouth. He lifts a cup of water, and it is sloshing over the sides because of his quivering. This is not a subtle act. It is designed to be unsettling. It is meant to provoke the question, "What on earth is wrong with you?"
This is a portrait of a man whose world is coming apart at the seams. This is the physical manifestation of deep, internal terror. It's the kind of fear you feel during a siege, when you hear the battering ram against the city walls, and you know that your supplies are running out. Every bite of food is not a pleasure, but a reminder of scarcity. Every sip of water is a reminder of how little is left. God is making Ezekiel embody the coming psychological state of the inhabitants of Jerusalem. Their sin has sown the wind, and they are about to reap the whirlwind, and that whirlwind will blow right through their souls.
The Divine Explanation (v. 19)
God does not leave the people to guess the meaning of this bizarre behavior. The sign-act is designed to create a teachable moment, and now God provides the script for the lesson.
"Then you will say to the people of the land, ‘Thus says Lord Yahweh concerning the inhabitants of Jerusalem in the land of Israel, “They will eat their bread with anxiety and drink their water with desolation because their very soil will be made desolate of its fullness on account of the violence of all who inhabit it." (Ezekiel 12:19)
Ezekiel's personal, acted-out anxiety is a preview of a coming city-wide, corporate anxiety. The people in Jerusalem, who are currently living in arrogant denial, will soon be eating their meals in the exact same state of terror. But notice the connection God makes. Their internal anxiety will be a direct result of an external reality: desolation. Why will they be anxious? Because their land, their soil, will be stripped bare. The blessing of the covenant was a land flowing with milk and honey. The curse of the covenant is a land that vomits out its inhabitants.
And God gives the precise reason for this judgment. The soil will be made desolate "on account of the violence of all who inhabit it." This is crucial. The land itself is being judged because of the moral corruption of the people. There is a direct link between the moral fabric of a society and the physical prosperity of that society. When a people fills the land with violence, with bloodshed, with injustice, the land itself sickens. God's creation is not a neutral stage for our sin. It groans under the weight of our rebellion (Romans 8:22). Here, the sin is specified as "violence." This is not just random street crime. It refers to systemic injustice, oppression of the poor, shedding of innocent blood, and a complete breakdown of God's law. They had sown violence, and now they will reap a harvest of desolation. The bread they eat will taste of anxiety because the ground it came from was polluted with injustice.
The Inescapable Result (v. 20)
The conclusion is stark and sweeping. This is not a localized problem; it is a total societal collapse.
"The inhabited cities will be laid waste, and the land will be a desolation. So you will know that I am Yahweh." (Ezekiel 12:20)
The whole structure of their civilization will be dismantled. The cities, the centers of their culture, commerce, and idolatry, will be laid waste. The land, the source of their wealth and sustenance, will become a desolation. The judgment is total. It is the undoing of their world. God is hitting the reset button, but He is doing it through the terrifying agency of the Babylonian army.
And here we come to the ultimate purpose statement. Why is God doing this? Is it random? Is it because He has lost His temper? No. The purpose is theological. It is doxological. "So you will know that I am Yahweh." This phrase, or ones very much like it, appears over sixty times in the book of Ezekiel. It is the central point of the whole book. God's judgments are revelatory. They are designed to strip away all idols, all false refuges, all proud self-reliance, until the people are left with the bedrock reality of who God is. They had forgotten Him. They had begun to think He was just another tribal deity, a tame god who would overlook their sin because they were "His people." They had come to believe that the Philistine gods, the Moabite gods, and the Egyptian gods were real options.
Through this terrible judgment, God is going to reintroduce Himself. He is demonstrating that He is the sovereign Lord of history. He is a God who keeps His covenant promises, both the blessings for obedience and the curses for rebellion, which they had heard about for centuries (Leviticus 26; Deuteronomy 28). When their cities are rubble and their land is barren, when they are eating their meager rations with trembling hands, they will have nowhere else to look. The idols will have failed them. The foreign alliances will have failed them. Their own strength will have failed them. And in that desolation, they will know that Yahweh, the God of Israel, is the one true God who speaks and then does what He has spoken.
Conclusion: The Bread of Life in a Desolate Land
This is a hard word. It is a word of judgment. But we must understand that God's judgments are never the final word. They are a severe mercy, designed to bring about the knowledge of Him, which is the foundation of repentance and restoration.
We too live in a land filled with violence. We have sanctioned the shedding of innocent blood in the womb on an industrial scale. We have celebrated sins that God calls an abomination. We have sown injustice and corruption. And as a result, a deep and pervasive anxiety runs through our culture. We eat our bread with trembling, though we try to hide it with our frantic entertainments and medications. We are anxious because we have made our land desolate of the knowledge of God.
The sign-act of Ezekiel points us to a greater reality. The judgment he predicted came to pass. Jerusalem was destroyed. But that was not the end. God's purpose was to bring His people to the end of themselves so that they would know Him.
And this points us to the ultimate meal, the ultimate sign-act. On the night He was betrayed, the Lord Jesus took bread and broke it. He took a cup and gave it to His disciples. He instituted a meal to be eaten not with trembling and anxiety, but with faith and thanksgiving. And how is this possible? It is possible because He drank the cup of God's wrath for us. He endured the ultimate desolation on the cross. He was forsaken by the Father so that we would never be. He cried out, "I thirst," so that we could drink the water of life freely.
Because of His sacrifice, we can now eat and drink to the glory of God. The Lord's Supper is the ultimate anti-Ezekiel meal. It is not a sign of coming judgment, but a sign of judgment passed. It is a declaration that because Christ was laid waste for our sins, our land can be healed. It is a promise that because He endured the ultimate anxiety, we can have His peace. The final invitation of the gospel is not to a meal of trembling, but to a feast of joy. "Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price" (Isaiah 55:1). The purpose is still the same: that we might know that He is the Lord. But now we know Him not just as the righteous Judge, but as our gracious Savior.