". . . the focus of chap. 6 is on the individual responsibility of the people and prepares the way for the subsequent spoken messages."121
6:1-2 The Lord directed Ezekiel to pronounce an oracle of judgment against "the mountains of Israel."This phrase occurs 16 times in Ezekiel and nowhere else in the Old Testament.122The mountains of Israel on the one hand represent the whole land of Israel, especially Jerusalem. By contrast, Babylonia was very flat. On the other hand, the mountains of Israel also stand for the centers of pagan worship where the Israelites practiced idolatry. The expression "set your face toward"always means to turn toward something with hostile intentions in all 14 of its occurrences in Ezekiel.
"If the practice of turning to Jerusalem for prayer was already catching on among the exiles (cf. Dn. 6:10), there would be particular irony in his [Ezekiel's] doing this in an act of condemnation."123
6:3-7 Ezekiel was to announce to his audience of exiles that God would bring warriors against Israel's mountains, hills, ravines, and valleys, namely, the places where the people worshipped at pagan shrines (cf. 2 Kings 23:10). The object of His judgment would be the high places of worship that stood throughout the land.124God would destroy the altars, and the people who worshipped before them would fall slain around them. The idols would not be able to defend their worshippers. The Lord would defile these altars with the bones of the Israelites who died before them (cf. Lev. 26:30; 2 Kings 23:20; Ps. 53:5; 141:7; Jer. 8:1-2). Scattered animal bones often marked these places of sacrifice, but human bones would pollute them in the future. Pagan altars of all types that the people had built would be broken down throughout the country along with the cities. Many people would die, and God's people would know that He had judged them.
"Judgment is a pervasive theme of all the prophets of Israel, but none exceeds Ezekiel in the abundance and intensity of his messages of divine retribution. Moreover, none reiterates as much as Ezekiel the pedagogical purposes of the visitations of the Lord: that they [Israel and the nations] might know Yahweh.' Judgment, then, is not only retributive but redemptive. God's purpose in judgment is not to destroy the peoples He has created but to bring them back into harmony with His creation purposes for them."125
6:8-10 The Lord would leave a remnant alive, however, when He brought this judgment and scattered His people in captivity. They would despise themselves when they remembered how their adulterous hearts and lustful eyes had hurt their Lord. The Hebrew word gillulim, translated "idols,"literally means "dung-gods."126They would remember that the Lord's promised judgments for their sins were not vain (cf. v. 7).
"What idolatry most reveals about the people who practice it is not merely another faith, but also an actual lack of faith. Modern idolatry, like the ancient Israelite-Near Eastern kind, is essentially materialistic (1 John 2:15-17; 5:21). Instead of full reliance on God, while we may not deny His existence, we don't trust Him to take care of us materially. Thus we do everything we can to gain worldly possessions, to secure our future, to have a comfortable' retirement, to succeed in a competitive world. With this comes the danger of losing our own souls' because we cannot serve God and money (Matt. 6:24). When we fail to trust God for our needs, we go far beyond the bounds of providing for our basic requirements and can thus trap ourselves in modern idolatry, which is nothing other than materialism (1 Tim. 6:6-10)."127
6:11-14 The people and Ezekiel were to express derision that the sword, famine, and plague (cf. 5:1-3, 12; Rev. 6:4-8) would come and judge these evil abominations (cf. 21:14-17; 22:13; 25:6; Lam. 2:15; Nah. 3:19). These three instruments of judgment, summarizing the full range of divine punishment (cf. 2 Sam. 24:13; Jer. 27:13; 29:17), would affect various parts of the people and touch them all. The people would recognize Yahweh at work in judgment when they observed so many Judahites slain beside their pagan places of worship. He would make the land of Judah more desolate than the wilderness near Diblah.128The purpose of God's judgment was to restore the people to their proper relationship with Him (vv. 7, 10, 13, 14).129
"In every generation God's judgment and discipline is misunderstood by most people. God's chief desire is to bring people to himself--or back to himself. When mankind willfully refuses to turn to him, God mercifully uses discipline and judgment to cause the people to recognize that he is the only true God, always faithful to what he has said in his word!"130
