Ezekiel 18 and 33: 10-20 contain
Ezekiel's most important contribution to the Jewish understanding of God.
Jeremiah had already said that the time was coming when each person would be
responsible to God for his own sin; no longer would the sins of the fathers
result in the punishment of their children. Ezekiel teaches that this is how the
exiles must under¬stand their immediate situation and suffering. Many of the
exiles, and more especially those who had been born in exile, took a despairing
attitude towards their situation. They felt that they were being punished for
the sins of their ancestors and that there was nothing they could do about it.
They had a sense of inherited guilt and also a sense of corporate guilt, that
is, guilt stemming from the community as a whole. Ezekiel offers his fellow
exiles the way of escape from this predicament in which they felt trapped. He
maintains that the children did not carry the punishment of their fathers but
were punished for their own sins alone: 'It is the one who sins who will die. A
son is not to suffer because of his father's sins.... If an evil man stops
sinning and keeps my laws, if he does what is right and good, he will not die;
he will certainly live. All his sins will be forgiven, and he will live,
because he did what is right' (Ezekiel 18: 20-22).
Ezekiel 18 goes into the problem
of sin and punishment in detail, although the prophet does not provide an
answer to the problem of corporate guilt. He does say, however, that no man can
hide behind the excuse that it is the fault of others that he is being
punished. Corporate guilt or inherited sin should not be an excuse for blaming
God for present problems. The individual was responsible to God, who desired
that he should live and not die. Ezekiel offers a way of escape from the
predicament that many of his fellow Jews felt they were in. If they turned
sincerely to God and followed his laws, leaving their previous evil ways, they
would be forgiven by God and would live a worthwhile life. In understanding
this passage, we have to remember that at this time there was still no belief
in a meaningful life after death. Physical death meant the end of worthwhile
life. Ezekiel was affirming that God is concerned with the life of the
individual. ' "Do you think I enjoy seeing an evil man die?" asks the
Sovereign LORD. "No, I would rather see him repent and live'" (Ezekiel
18:23).
There is one point at
which we must be careful as we try to understand the teaching of both Jeremiah
and Ezekiel about the responsibility of the individual before God. In their
teaching there is none of the extreme individualism that we often find in the
modern world. The community is made up of individuals and the individual needs
to live in a community to be fully human. In the ideal community, each
individual experiences a relationship of love with God and with his fellow-men.
In their historical situation, both prophets were correcting the idea that God
worked out a kind of average over the whole community, of good actions and bad
actions, to reach either a credit or debit balance for the whole people, on
which would depend whether they were blessed or punished. Such an attitude was
obviously wrong; the thinking behind it assumed that the good actions of some
in the community would cancel out the bad actions of others, or vice versa,
leaving the individual with very little motive for taking responsibility for his
own actions.