Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 356 · December 22
As I Live
“Say unto them, As I live, saith the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live: turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways; for why will ye die, O house of Israel?”
If our transgressions and our sins be upon us, and we pine away in them, how should we then live? That is the sentence this verse answers, quoted from the people themselves, exiles a long way from home who have added the account up and concluded there is nothing to do but wait to be finished off. That is exhaustion talking, and it has arrived at a settled position: we are what we have done, and it is too late.
The reply is put under oath. As I live, saith the Lord GOD. God swears by the one thing he cannot be separated from, to say what he prefers: I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked. He had said it twice already in an earlier chapter, once as a question, Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die? and once flat, I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth. Three times, in a book full of siege and judgment, on a subject nobody had asked about.
Keep the hard verse in view while you hold this one. Deuteronomy says 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 book too, and it is not explained away here. What Ezekiel adds is that the destroying gives him no pleasure and the turning does, and then he 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 mentioned. That is the promise, sworn by the life of God, to people who had already written themselves off.
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).