- Ezekiel 6 BSB ↗
People sometimes talk to places. A man walks through the house where he grew up before it is sold and speaks to the empty rooms; a woman stands at a river where something terrible happened and addresses the water. Ezekiel is told to do the same thing across a thousand kilometres of desert: set your face toward the mountains of Israel and speak to them. He is sitting in Babylon; the hills are far away. But the hills are where the trouble lives — the ridges and valleys crowded with altars — so it is to the land itself, and not only its people, that the word goes out.
Where it sits in the story: Still in Act 3, the story of Israel is nearing the exile its prophets warned of. Kings has told how local altars on the high places were repeatedly built, torn down by reforming kings like Hezekiah and Josiah, and built again. Ezekiel, a priest in Babylon, now pronounces the last word on them: the whole landscape of rival worship will be emptied.
What this chapter is doing: To extend judgment from the city to the whole countryside and its shrines, and to introduce a note that will grow through the book: a remnant, scattered among the nations, will come to its senses and know the LORD.
- 6:1–7 — Ezekiel addresses the mountains, hills, ravines and valleys. The sword will come; the altars will be smashed and the incense stands broken; the dead will lie in front of their idols, their bones scattered around the altars they served. Then 'you will know that I am the LORD' — a refrain that echoes through the book.
- 6:8–10 — A turn: some will escape the sword and be scattered among the nations. There they will remember God, and remember how he was grieved by hearts that wandered away from him. They will loathe themselves for what they did, and know that his warnings were not empty words.
- 6:11–14 — Ezekiel is told to clap his hands and stamp his foot and cry 'Alas!' Sword, famine and plague will reach far and near, and the land will be left desolate from the southern wilderness to Diblah in the north — wherever the hilltop altars once stood.
Key verse: Ezekiel 6:9 · So what: The chapter's hardest line is also its tenderest: God speaks of being grieved, even broken, by his people's wandering hearts. Judgment here is not cold. And the remnant's turning comes not in the homeland but far away, when everything familiar is gone. Many people find their way back to God in exactly that kind of place — after loss, not before it.