As I Live

"If our transgressions and our sins be upon us, and we pine away in them, how should we then live?" That is the question today's verse answers, and it comes from the people themselves. They are exiles, far from home. They have added up what they have done and decided there is nothing left but to wait for the end. It is exhaustion talking, and it has settled into a belief: we are what we have done, and it is too late.

God's reply comes under oath: "As I live, saith the Lord GOD." He swears by the one thing that can never be taken from Him, His own life, and then He says what He wants: "I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked." He had said the same thing twice before, in chapter eighteen. Once it was a question: "Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die?" Once it was a plain statement: "For I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth." That makes three times, in a book full of siege and judgment.

Keep the hard verse in view while you hold this one. Deuteronomy warns that "as the LORD rejoiced over you to do you good," "so the LORD will rejoice over you to destroy you." That is in the Bible too, and Ezekiel does not explain it away. What Ezekiel adds is that the death of the wicked gives God no pleasure, and their turning does: "turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways; for why will ye die, O house of Israel?"

Then God makes the offer concrete. "If the wicked restore the pledge, give again that he had robbed, walk in the statutes of life, without committing iniquity; he shall surely live, he shall not die. None of his sins that he hath committed shall be mentioned unto him." Not one of them will be brought up again. That is the promise, sworn by the life of God to people who had already written themselves off, and it is offered to you on the same terms.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 356 is Cast Your Burden on the LORD (Psalm 55:22).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two