The Atoning Silence of Grace Text: Ezekiel 16:60-63
Introduction: Grace That Shames
We live in a therapeutic age, an age that has declared war on shame. Our culture treats shame as the ultimate evil, a psychological poison to be purged at all costs. The high priests of our secular religion, the therapists and self-help gurus, tell us that the path to wholeness is through self-acceptance, self-esteem, and the complete eradication of any feeling that might suggest we are anything less than wonderful. To feel shame is considered a pathology, a sign of an unhealthy mind. The solution is to assert your goodness, to celebrate your brokenness, and to never, ever let anyone make you feel bad about who you are.
Into this festival of self-congratulation, Ezekiel 16 lands like a meteor. The chapter leading up to our text is perhaps one of the most brutal, searing, and graphic denunciations in all of Scripture. God, through the prophet, details the history of Israel using the metaphor of a foundling child whom He rescued, cleaned, raised, adorned, and married. And this bride, Jerusalem, took all His gifts, all His blessings, and used them to become the most profligate and shameless prostitute in history, worse than her sisters Samaria and Sodom. The language is designed to shock. It is designed to strip away every last shred of self-justification.
And just when the condemnation reaches its absolute peak, when the judgment seems final and irrevocable, God does the last thing our world would expect. He doesn't offer a twelve-step program for building self-worth. He doesn't say, "Now, don't be so hard on yourself." He says, "Nevertheless, I will remember My covenant." He promises a unilateral, unconditional, sovereign grace. But here is the kicker, the part that scrambles all the circuits of our modern therapeutic mindset. The result of this astonishing grace is not high self-esteem. The result is shame. A profound, silencing, God-given shame. This is not the toxic shame of the world, which whispers that you are worthless. This is the holy shame of the gospel, which thunders that He is worthy, and you are not, and yet He loves you anyway. This is the shame that leads not to despair, but to a silent, awestruck worship. It is the grace that shames, and in that shaming, saves.
The Text
"Nevertheless, I Myself will remember My covenant with you in the days of your youth, and I will establish an everlasting covenant with you. Then you will remember your ways and feel dishonor when you receive your sisters, both your older and your younger; and I will give them to you as daughters, but not because of your covenant. Thus I will establish My covenant with you, and you shall know that I am Yahweh, so that you may remember and be ashamed and never open your mouth anymore because of your dishonor, when I have atoned for you for all that you have done,” declares Lord Yahweh.
(Ezekiel 16:60-63 LSB)
Sovereign Remembrance (v. 60)
The entire passage pivots on a single, glorious word: "Nevertheless."
"Nevertheless, I Myself will remember My covenant with you in the days of your youth, and I will establish an everlasting covenant with you." (Ezekiel 16:60)
After fifty-nine verses detailing Israel's spiritual adultery, her political whoredom, her child sacrifice, and her utter degradation, we have earned nothing but wrath. By every standard of justice, the story should end with "Therefore, I will destroy you." But God says, "Nevertheless." This is the logic of grace. It is a logic that does not compute in a world of merit and karma. Grace is not a response to our worthiness; it is a response to His promise. God's faithfulness is not contingent on our faithfulness. If it were, heaven would be empty.
Notice the emphasis: "I Myself will remember." The initiative is entirely His. Israel had forgotten the covenant, trampled it underfoot. But God remembers. His memory is not a passive recollection; it is an active, covenant-keeping power. When God "remembers" His covenant, He acts upon it. He is remembering the promises He made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, promises made long before the law, promises of pure grace.
And what He remembers, He re-establishes. But it is more than a simple renewal. He will establish an "everlasting covenant." This points forward, beyond the Mosaic covenant which was broken, to the New Covenant sealed in the blood of Jesus Christ. The old covenant was conditional on Israel's obedience, and they failed spectacularly. The New Covenant is secured by Christ's perfect obedience. It is an everlasting covenant precisely because it depends not on our fickle hearts, but on the finished work of the Son and the unbreakable promise of the Father.
Grace That Gathers and Humbles (v. 61)
The effect of this grace is twofold: it humbles the recipient and expands the family.
"Then you will remember your ways and feel dishonor when you receive your sisters, both your older and your younger; and I will give them to you as daughters, but not because of your covenant." (Ezekiel 16:61)
God's remembering triggers our remembering. But our memory is different. We remember our ways, our sin, our treachery, and the result is dishonor, or shame. This is not a groveling self-pity. It is the clear-eyed recognition of what we are in the light of who He is. It is the prodigal son in the pigsty, coming to his senses. It is Peter, after the rooster crows, weeping bitterly. This shame is a sign of spiritual health, not sickness. It is the proper response to unmerited favor.
And look at the fruit of this grace. God promises to bring in her "sisters," Samaria (the northern kingdom) and Sodom (a byword for pagan wickedness), and give them to Jerusalem as "daughters." This is a staggering picture of Gentile inclusion. The very people Jerusalem despised and considered more wicked than herself will be brought into the covenant family. Grace always overflows its expected boundaries. The gospel is for the worst of us. It is for Sodomites and Samaritans.
But God adds a crucial qualifier: "but not because of your covenant." The old translation says "not by thy covenant." This means their inclusion is not based on the terms of the Mosaic covenant, which Israel had broken and which excluded such Gentiles. It will be on the basis of a new and better arrangement, a covenant of pure grace that grafts in wild branches. This is a death blow to all spiritual pride and ethnic exclusivism. Salvation is not a reward for being a good Jew, or a good American, or a good anything. It is a free gift that brings harlots and pagans into the family of God.
The Goal of Grace: To Know Yahweh (v. 62)
God states the ultimate purpose of His covenant action in verse 62.
"Thus I will establish My covenant with you, and you shall know that I am Yahweh," (Ezekiel 16:62)
The goal of salvation is not ultimately our happiness, our comfort, or even our forgiveness, though it includes all those things. The ultimate goal is that we might know God. "And you shall know that I am Yahweh." To know Yahweh is not to know about Him in an abstract, academic sense. It is to know Him personally, experientially, as the covenant-keeping, promise-fulfilling, sin-forgiving God. It is to know Him as He truly is.
And how do we come to know Him this way? Through the establishment of His covenant. We see His character most clearly not in the mountains or the stars, but in the brutal story of the cross and the glorious story of the empty tomb. It is in the covenant of grace, where His perfect justice and His unfathomable mercy meet, that we truly come to know that He is Yahweh. He is the God who is holy enough to demand payment for sin, and gracious enough to provide that payment Himself.
The Atoning Silence (v. 63)
The final verse brings us to the heart of the matter, the place where God's grace produces a profound and holy silence.
"so that you may remember and be ashamed and never open your mouth anymore because of your dishonor, when I have atoned for you for all that you have done,” declares Lord Yahweh." (Ezekiel 16:63)
Here it is again. God's purpose in atoning for our sin is so that we would remember and be ashamed. This is the opposite of the world's gospel. The world says, "Forget your past, hold your head high, you are worthy." God says, "Remember your sin, be rightly ashamed, and know that your worth is found entirely in My grace."
And the result of this shame is a closed mouth. "And never open your mouth anymore because of your dishonor." What does this mean? It means the end of all self-defense. It means the end of all boasting. It means the end of all complaining against God. It means the end of all finger-pointing at our sisters, Samaria and Sodom. When you truly grasp the depth of your sin and the height of God's grace, you have nothing left to say in your own defense. All your arguments, all your excuses, all your what-abouts, they all turn to dust in your mouth.
This silence is not the silence of terror, but the silence of awe. It is the silence of Job, who, after arguing with God for thirty-seven chapters, finally sees Him and says, "I lay my hand on my mouth" (Job 40:4). It is the silence of Zacharias, struck dumb in the temple, overwhelmed by the promise of God. It is the silence of a sinner standing at the foot of the cross, with no arguments left.
And what is the foundation of this silencing shame? It is the atonement. "When I have atoned for you for all that you have done." The Hebrew word for atone is kaphar, which means to cover. God covers our sin. He propitiates His own wrath. In the cross of Jesus Christ, God atoned for all that we have done. He took the filthy rags of the prostitute bride and clothed her in the perfect righteousness of His Son. And when a sinner understands this, truly understands it, the only possible response is to fall silent in wonder, love, and praise. The mouth that was once full of boasts and excuses is now shut, only to be opened again to sing the praises of Him who called us out of darkness into His marvelous light.
Conclusion: The Gospel That Shuts You Up
The gospel preached in many modern churches is a gospel designed to make you feel good about yourself. It is a flimsy, man-centered message that avoids the hard truths of sin and judgment, and consequently can only produce a shallow and self-centered faith. It is a gospel that makes you want to talk all about yourself.
The gospel of Ezekiel 16, the gospel of the Bible, is altogether different. It is a gospel that first wrecks you. It holds up a mirror to your soul and shows you the adulterous bride, worse than Sodom. It strips you of all your pride, all your excuses, all your righteousness. It leaves you undone.
And then, into that devastation, it speaks a unilateral, sovereign, unconditional "Nevertheless." It tells you of a God who remembers His covenant when you have forgotten. It tells you of an everlasting covenant sealed not by your efforts, but by the blood of another. It tells you of an atonement so complete that it covers all that you have done.
And the result of this true gospel is not a strutting self-esteem, but a profound, holy, silencing shame. It is a shame that stops your mouth from boasting and opens it for worship. It is a shame that makes you fall on your face and say, "Woe is me! For I am a man of unclean lips... for my eyes have seen the King, Yahweh of hosts!" (Isaiah 6:5). This is the only kind of grace that can truly save. It is the grace that finds us in our filth, and loves us anyway. It is the grace that atones. And it is the grace that, for all our proud arguments, finally and gloriously shuts us up.