"You became very beautiful and rose to be a queen..... 'But you trusted in your beauty and used your fame to become a prostitute. ... At the head of every street you built your lofty shrines and degraded your beauty, offering your body with increasing promiscuity to anyone who passed by."
This is all from Ezekiel 16. I think it gives us a "beautiful," ha, picture of how God understands beauty. He made Israel beautiful, and it meant so much more than outward appearance. It was about heart, about devotion and faithfulness. It was about relationship, relationship with Him. And then they threw it away. They tossed it away completely, and honestly to use God's language here "whored themselves out" to anyone, not even seeking 'payment.' The allegorical language in this chapter is very strong. It tells the story of a beautiful woman, who "degrades her beauty" by selling herself to everyone and anyone, at the same time essentially defecating all over the beautiful covenant relationship that God had entered into with her. This is how God saw, and sees beauty; again, about relationship, about the heart, about the inside, not the out. One more time…
Ezekiel 16:14-25 (greatly abridged): "You became very beautiful and rose to be a queen..... 'But you trusted in your beauty and used your fame to become a prostitute. ... At the head of every street you built your lofty shrines and degraded your beauty, offering your body with increasing promiscuity to anyone who passed by."
The fall of God's beautiful maiden. The fall of beauty. Because of age? No. Because of disfigurement? No.
So what was it that degraded Israel’s beauty? What was it that so deeply tainted them in the eyes of God, their lover?
It was unfaithfulness, ungratefulness, and dirty, sordid behavior. It was, at it’s root,
Broken relationship.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Hi. How are you?
ReplyDeleteI am update with:
Muslim- Christian debate: Crucifixion Fact or Fiction
Have a look at it...
Hello,
ReplyDeleteI can't seem to comment on your site... So I'll see if you see my comment here.
I can see you're rather passionate about your Islamic faith. I respect that. What I find particularly interesting though is how overtly "anti" Christian you seem to be. I am not saying attempting to reach out to others for your faith is wrong. But the general intentions I saw on your blog were to discredit Christianity as a whole. I mean, I take that you are fairly motivated since you came onto my site and left me a comment :-)
Anyway, I would be willing to discuss some things with you if you like. I am fine with that. But I just wanted to mention that I am not about getting into an exchange of disparaging remarks about the other person's faith. I would rather hope that we could simply have a fair and balanced discussion as to why we follow our convictions, and then maybe go from there into the more rationale based questions of why we believe what we believe.
But again though, thanks for the comment