Commentary - Ezekiel 23:36-39

Bird's-eye view

In this searing passage, the prophet Ezekiel is summoned by God to act as a prosecuting attorney in a covenant lawsuit. The defendants are Oholah and Oholibah, the allegorical names for Samaria and Judah. Having laid out their long history of spiritual harlotry in the preceding verses, God now moves to the formal indictment and summary of charges. This is not a gentle rebuke; it is a declaration of their abominations. The core sins are twofold and intertwined: adultery and murder. Their adultery is idolatry, a flagrant violation of their marriage covenant with Yahweh. Their murder is the literal shedding of blood, culminating in the horrific practice of child sacrifice. The passage drives home the high-handed nature of their sin by repeatedly emphasizing the timing. They would commit these grotesque acts and then, on the very same day, walk into God's sanctuary and profane His Sabbaths, demonstrating a level of hypocrisy that is simply breathtaking. This is the legal basis for the devastating judgment that God is about to bring upon them.

What we are reading is God's legal brief against His own people. The language is blunt because the sin is grotesque. The Lord is detailing how His bride has not only been unfaithful, but has become a bloodthirsty monster, sacrificing the very children He gave her. And she does all this while maintaining the outward charade of religious observance. This is the heart of apostasy: not just the abandonment of God, but the attempt to merge the worship of God with the worship of demons, and to do so in His own house.

Outline

Context In Ezekiel

This passage serves as the judicial summation of the graphic allegory that makes up the bulk of Ezekiel 23. The entire chapter uses the metaphor of two sisters, Oholah (Samaria, the northern kingdom) and Oholibah (Judah/Jerusalem, the southern kingdom), who are raised by God and married to Him, only to become prostitutes, chasing after foreign powers and their gods. After detailing their respective affairs with the Egyptians, Assyrians, and Babylonians in verses 1-35, the tone shifts here in verse 36. The allegory is dropped for a moment, and God speaks to Ezekiel in direct, legal terms. This section functions as the formal list of charges, the declaration of abominations that justifies the severe punishment described both before and after this passage. It is the hinge between the description of the crime and the execution of the sentence. Ezekiel, ministering in exile among those already deported, is explaining to them precisely why the final destruction of Jerusalem is both necessary and just.

Key Issues

The Same Day Abomination

The central horror of this passage is captured in the repetition of "on the same day." This is not an incidental detail. It is the very heart of the indictment because it reveals the heart of the people. Their sin was not a momentary lapse followed by shame and a period of hiding from God. No, their sin was integrated directly into their religious life. They had achieved a state of spiritual schizophrenia where they could engage in the most demonic practices imaginable and then immediately pivot to the formal worship of Yahweh without missing a beat. This shows that their hearts were utterly hard. They no longer saw any contradiction between serving Molech and serving Yahweh. Their worship of God had become so hollow, so external, that it was nothing more than a ritual to be performed, a box to be checked. It was a form of godliness that coexisted peacefully with the depths of depravity. This is a terrifying state, for it is a soul that has lost its conscience, its ability to even feel the dissonance of its own rebellion. It is one thing to sin and hide; it is another thing entirely to sin and then stroll into the sanctuary as if you own the place.

Verse by Verse Commentary

36 Moreover, Yahweh said to me, “Son of man, will you judge Oholah and Oholibah? Then declare to them their abominations.

The Lord's question to Ezekiel, "will you judge," is not seeking his permission. It is a formal commissioning, a command. It is the equivalent of a king telling his prosecutor, "It is time to read the charges in open court." Ezekiel is to stand as God's legal representative and pronounce the verdict. And the substance of his speech is to be a declaration of their abominations. This is a strong, technical term in the Old Testament. It refers not to minor sins or ethical slip-ups, but to practices that are utterly detestable to God, things that pollute the land and violate the very core of the covenant relationship. God is about to list the reasons why His judgment is not only just, but unavoidable.

37 For they have committed adultery, and blood is on their hands. Thus they have committed adultery with their idols and even caused their sons, whom they bore to Me, to pass through the fire to them as food.

Here are the two capital charges: adultery and murder. The adultery, as the text clarifies, is their affair with idols. In the covenant God made with Israel at Sinai, He was the husband and they were the bride. The first and greatest commandment was to have no other gods before Him. To worship an idol was therefore not just a theological error; it was an act of cosmic infidelity. It was cheating on God. And this spiritual adultery led directly to literal bloodshed. Idolatry is never a victimless crime. The false gods of the Canaanites demanded blood, and Israel, in their spiritual stupor, gave it to them. The most horrific expression of this was child sacrifice. And notice God's possessive language: "their sons, whom they bore to Me." These were covenant children. God claimed them as His own. By sacrificing them to idols, Israel was not only murdering their own offspring; they were stealing from God and offering that stolen property to demons. They were feeding God's children to the fire of His enemies.

38 Again, they have done this to Me: they have defiled My sanctuary on the same day and have profaned My sabbaths.

This verse adds the charge of sacrilege to the indictment. Their sin was not done in a corner; it was dragged right into the center of their religious life. The sanctuary was the place where God's presence dwelt, the holy center of their world. The Sabbaths were the sacred sign of the covenant in time. Israel managed to pollute both. And the key phrase is on the same day. There was no interval for repentance, no sense of shame. They would come from the high places, the smoke of their abominable sacrifices still on their clothes, and walk into God's house. They treated the holy things of God with contempt, mingling the sacred with the profane. This was a direct insult to God, a high-handed act of defiance. They were not just breaking the covenant; they were spitting on it.

39 For when they had slaughtered their children for their idols, they entered My sanctuary on the same day to profane it; and behold, thus they did within My house.

God repeats the charge for emphasis, making the timeline brutally clear. He wants no one to miss the shocking sequence of events. First, the slaughter of their children. Then, the entry into His sanctuary. The purpose of their entry was not to seek forgiveness, but to profane it, to render it unclean by their unholy presence. The house of God became a stage for their hypocrisy. The phrase "behold, thus they did" is the prosecutor pointing to the evidence. It is God saying, "Look at this. See what they have done. This is the reality of their supposed worship." Their religion was a hollowed-out shell, a set of rituals utterly detached from the reality of their lives. They had turned the Father's house into a den of murderers.

Application

It is easy for us to read a passage like this and thank God that we are not like those ancient Israelites. We don't have idols of wood and stone, and we don't literally pass our children through the fire. But the spirit of Oholah and Oholibah is a perennial temptation for God's people. Spiritual adultery is simply giving our ultimate loyalty and affection to anything that is not the triune God. We can make idols out of our careers, our politics, our comfort, our reputation, or our sexual autonomy. And our idolatry also leads to bloodshed. We live in a culture that has sacrificed millions of children on the altar of convenience, and the church has too often been silent, or even complicit.

The deepest warning here is against the "same day" abomination. It is the warning against a bifurcated faith, where we can live one way from Monday to Saturday and then show up on Sunday to go through the motions of worship. It is the warning against a Christianity that is all form and no substance, where we can sing praises to God with hearts that are still loyal to the idols of the age. This passage calls us to an integrated faith, a faith where our worship on the Lord's Day is the genuine overflow of a life lived in submission to Christ every day. The only cure for this hypocrisy is the gospel. We must confess that we are all adulterers at heart, and that our only hope is the perfect faithfulness of the true Bridegroom, Jesus Christ. He went to the cross to cleanse His unfaithful bride, to wash her clean not just from her outward acts, but from the very idolatry of her heart, so that He might present her to Himself, holy and without blemish.