Ezekiel 18:31

The chapter these verses close answers a proverb the exiles kept repeating: “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge” (Ezekiel 18:2). By it they meant that they were suffering for their ancestors’ sins, and it let them blame the past and feel no call to change. God answered with a plain rule, “the soul that sinneth, it shall die” (Ezekiel 18:4), and then worked it out case by case: a righteous man (verses 5–9), his wicked son (verses 10–13), and a son who sees his father’s sins and lives differently (verses 14–20). A wicked man who turns from his sins shall live, and God declares that he desires the life of the wicked rather than his death (Ezekiel 18:21–23).

Verse 30 draws the conclusion with “Therefore”: “I will judge you, O house of Israel, every one according to his ways.” God addresses the whole nation, the bayith Yisrâʼêl, and in the same breath he names “every one” within it. His judgment and his call both come to each person. The word for ways, derek, comes from a root meaning to tread and is the ordinary word for a road or path. Here it means the course of a life: the conduct, habits and choices that show which way a person is walking. God weighs the real direction of each life, and each person answers for his own road, whatever road his father walked. “Saith the Lord GOD”, Adonai Yᵉhôvih, sets the LORD’s own authority behind the sentence.

Ezekiel spoke this to the Jewish exiles in Babylon, who had been carried off in the deportation of 597 BC, in the years before Jerusalem was destroyed in 586 BC. Far from their land and the temple, they were asking whether God was just and whether they were still his covenant people. Their suffering came from their own idolatry and unfaithfulness, and the proverb hid that from them. So this word was hard and hopeful at once. It told them that their own sin was the trouble, and it told them that their own turning mattered for their future, even in exile.

“Repent, and turn yourselves” is the same Hebrew verb twice, shûwb, in two different forms. It means to turn back or to return. Scripture can use it of anger that subsides, and when God speaks it to people as a command it calls for a change of direction. The KJV renders the first “Repent” and the second “turn yourselves”, and the doubled verb presses the call home. Since a person’s ways are a road, the picture is of a traveller who stops and goes back the other way.

“From all your transgressions” takes in every one of them. The word is peshaʻ, a transgression in the sense of rebellion, an act by which someone defies an authority, and the plural counts the separate acts. God calls his people to turn from each act of revolt against him.

Turning engages the whole person. It means owning our sin, grieving over it with godly sorrow, and deciding to forsake it and live by God’s revealed will. It reaches the thoughts, attitudes and desires, and from there the actions, and it turns a person toward God as well as away from sin. It is also a lifelong habit, because believers keep coming back to God in this way all their days.

Verse 31 adds a second command. “Cast away” is shâlak, to throw or hurl something away, often something rejected. God’s people are to fling their transgressions from them as things they refuse to keep. The verse repeats its own root, “all your transgressions (peshaʻ), whereby ye have transgressed (pâshaʻ)”, and the doubling fixes attention on what these sins were: acts of rebellion that the people themselves had committed. The same people who committed them are told to throw them away.

Then comes the command that reaches the inside: “make you a new heart and a new spirit.” The heart, lêb, is the centre of a person in Hebrew thought, the seat of the mind, the will, the feelings and the moral character, the inner self from which actions flow. The spirit, rûwach, is the word for wind, breath and spirit, and here it is a person’s inner disposition and life. Both are to be châdâsh, new or fresh, different from what came before. The verb “make” is ʻâsâh, the ordinary word for doing or making. So God calls for change at the deepest part of a person, where the course of a life is set, and changed conduct follows from there.

Verse 31 ends with a question: “for why will ye die, O house of Israel?” God asks it to make his people see that death is a senseless end when life is offered and the way to it is open. In the question we hear his grief and his love for a rebellious people, and he asks it of the whole covenant community. The same question returns later in the book: “turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways; for why will ye die, O house of Israel?” (Ezekiel 33:11).

The verb is mûwth, to die, used literally and figuratively. The death in view is death as God’s judgment on sin: the loss of covenant life, of God’s favour and blessing, and separation from him, the source of all life. Unrepented sin can bring bodily death as well, and the chapter’s concern is the whole outcome of a life that stays in rebellion, set against the life God gives to the one who turns.

Verse 32 gives the reason behind the plea: “For I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth, saith the Lord GOD.” The verb châphêts means to like, to be pleased with or to desire, and it speaks of the heart’s attachment. The word for death, mâveth, comes from the root of mûwth, so the sentence sets the dying man and his death side by side. God speaks of his own feelings in human words so that we can know his heart toward sinners, and that heart is set on their life.

Scripture says the same elsewhere. “For he doth not afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men” (Lamentations 3:33). The Lord is longsuffering, “not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9), and his patience is the same heart this verse shows.

“Wherefore” ties the command to God’s heart: because he desires life, he tells them to turn. “Turn yourselves” is shûwb once more, and the promise is “live ye”, from châyâh, to live. This life is the opposite of the death in verse 31. It is life with God, reconciled to him and under his blessing.

Moses set the same choice before Israel: “I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life” (Deuteronomy 30:19). Isaiah gives the call with its promise of mercy: “let him return unto the LORD, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon” (Isaiah 55:7).

Jesus began his preaching with this same call: “Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 4:17). His apostles preached it after him. Peter told the crowd at Pentecost, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins” (Acts 2:38), and later, “Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out” (Acts 3:19). In the gospel, turning to God means turning to Christ himself.

He is “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). The iniquity that would have been our ruin he bore in his death, and through him God forgives all our trespasses and blots out what stood against us (Colossians 2:13–14). The new heart and new spirit belong to the new covenant made in his blood (Luke 22:20), in which the Holy Spirit renews believers (Titus 3:5) so that they walk in newness of life (Romans 6:4).

God’s lack of pleasure in death shows most clearly in the sending of his Son. God so loved the world that he gave his Son, and he sent him to save the world (John 3:16–17). “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 6:23). Jesus is “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6), and in him the call “turn yourselves, and live ye” finds its fullest answer.

Each of us answers to God for our own way. That frees us from carrying a family’s past as if it sealed our future, and it calls us to look honestly at our own lives and own our sins by name. The God who will judge us is the God who pleads with us, and his plea is meant to be heard today.

The call to turn is also lasting comfort. However deep our transgressions or long our failures, God holds the way to life open to the one who turns, and he gives the new heart he asks for. And since he takes no pleasure in anyone’s death, we can carry his question, “why will ye die?”, and his promise, “live ye”, to people who are still far from him.