The prophet Ezekiel prophesied during the early period of Babylonian captivity, some six centuries before the birth of Christ.  Ezekiel was a prophet to the Hebrew people and contemporary with fellow exile, Daniel.  Ezekiel was taken into captivity during the second deportation of Judah in 597 B.C. with King Jehoichin and several thousand others.  About five years later he received word from God to speak to the people God's message and for the next twenty to twenty-five years he boldly spoke all that God command him to speak.

        To his people, Ezekiel was the voice of conscience; he was the voice of realism; he was the voice of exhortation and admonition; he was the voice of hope!  Ezekiel is called the "son of man" about one hundred
times in his book.  Later this would be one of the favorite designations of Jesus about himself in the New Testament.

        Ezekiel's prophecies looked in three different directions.  He looked intently and prophesied earnestly about his people and the destruction that was coming to Jerusalem.  He looked intently and prophesied against the evil of the heathen and paganistic nations.  Lastly, he looked and prophesied earnestly about the future and painted a desperately needed picture of hope for the captives!

Ezekiel and the Wages of Sin
by Paul D. Fisher

        The Jewish people of Ezekiel's day like most people in our world today had a problem with sin.  Part of this problem was and is a failure to realize that sin has it's price or wages.  The apostle Paul, being
inspired of God to write, and writing to the Christians at Rome wrote about this problem, "For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord" (Romans 6:23).  Whereas sin paints a beautiful picture of itself, showing just the good times, God reveals the whole picture and the end results or the price one has to pay for sin.  This was one of the tasks of Ezekiel, to reveal the whole picture to the Jews in captivity, that there is a payday for sin.  Most of the first thrity-three chapters of Ezekiel's book are used to reveal the whole picture to the Jewish nation, which was at this time reaping their sinful wages.  Many times we fail to understand that nothing that God has revealed, no book, chapter, verse, word or even syllable ever
loses it's power to inform, to move and instruct mankind in righteousness.

        Sin is an individual thing.  You do not inherit it; it is not a sickness or disease that suddenly attacks you; you do not have a gene in your DNA that causes you to sin.  We sin because we are attracted by the
picture sin reveals.  Ezekiel 18:20 refutes the Calvinistic foundation of "Total Hereditary Depravity", "The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him."  Satan, the devil, is the one who is behind sin, but we as individuals pick it up by our own free will.  Someone can entice you to sin, they can lure you to sin, but you sin of your own free will.  This was the problem that Judah faced during the time of Isaiah when repentance would have prevented them going into captivity.  This was the problem they faced during the time of Jeremiah and Ezekiel when they still needed to repent
of their sins.  This is the problem that we face today, the recognition that sin has its wages and we need to repent of our sins!  Our society does not like to think about sin, so it has changed the names of many
sins and has tried to shift the blame for them from the individual to anything it can think of.  Drunkenness is now not a sin, but a disease called alcoholism by our society.  Homosexuality and deviant sex is referred to as an alterative lifestyle, with some even going so far as to claim these people were made that way by God!  We need to realize that sin is still sin no matter what we as a society call it.  Sin is still an individual thing and it still is something that will gladly pay wages to all who commit it!  Only through Jesus Christ can we find forgiveness of our sins.  Praise God for His great gift.
 

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