Days of Vengeance - The Preterist Archive

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action throughout history in separating the chaff from
His holy wheat (Job 21:18; Ps. 1:4; 35:5; Isa. 17:13;
Luke 3:17). The threshing floor is also symbolic of the
marriage relationship: The union of Boaz and Ruth
took place on his threshing floor (Ruth 3), and the
action of grinding at a mill is a Biblical image of sexual
relations (Job 31:10; Isa. 47:2; Jer. 25:10). 4 Thus,
instead of consummating her marriage to God through
worship at His threshing floor, the Bride went whoring
after every other threshing floor, prostrating herself
before strange gods and alien altars.
Apostate Jerusalem is the Harlot-city; this theme
becomes even more prominent in the prophecy of
Ezekiel, particularly in Ezekiel 16 and 23, where it is
clear that her “adulteries” consist of religious-political
alliances with powerful heathen kingdoms (see, e.g.,
Ezek. 16:26-29). The people of Jerusalem in Ezekiel’s
day had abandoned the true faith and had turned to
heathen gods and ungodly nations for help, rather than
trusting in God to be their protector and deliverer. It is
important to note that while Israel herself seems to
have regarded these relationships in primarily political
terms, the prophets emphasized that the religious issue
was central. The reliance of the Covenant nation on
heathen powers could not be viewed as mere political
expediency; it was nothing less than harlotry. Using
language so graphic and explicit that most modern
pastors won’t preach from these chapters, 5 Ezekiel
condemns Jerusalem as a degraded, wanton whore:
“You spread your legs to every passerby to multiply your
harlotry” (Ezek. 16:25). Ezekiel’s sarcastic portrayal of
Israel’s adultery is sharp and vivid: She lusts after the
(supposedly) well-endowed Egyptians, whose sex
organs are the size of donkeys’ genitals, and who
produce semen in such prodigious amounts that it rivals
that of a horse (16:26; 23:20). Her adulterous desire
(inflamed by pornographic pictures, 23:14-16) is so
great that she is willing to pay strangers to come to her,
rather than the other way around (16:33-34); she even
masturbates with the “male images” she has made (16:
17). Ezekiel’s prophecy was crude, and he most
certainly offended many of his listeners; but he was
simply giving them a faithful description of how
offensive they were to God. In the view of the all-holy
God who spoke through Ezekiel, nothing could be more
obscene than the Bride’s apostasy from her divine
Husband.
The same was true of Israel in the first century. At the
very moment when the promised Bridegroom arrived,
Israel was fornicating with Caesar. The sight of her true
Husband only drove her further into adulterous union
with “the kings of the earth.” Rejecting Christ’s
kingship (cf. 1 Sam. 8:7-8), the chief priests cried: “We
have no King but Caesar!” (John 19:15).
The apostasy of Jerusalem led the whole nation into
religious and political fornication. Those who dwell on
the Land – the Jewish people (see comments on 3:10)
– were made drunk with the wine of her fornication,
seduced into such a spiritual stupor that they did not
recognize their own Christ. Intoxicated by their
apparently successful relationship with the imperial
power-state, the Jews did not realize that it was a trap:
They were being drugged in preparation for their own
execution.
3 We have already seen the Woman in the wilderness,
where she fled from the oppression of the seven-headed
Dragon (12:6, 14). But that wilderness sojourn was out
of necessity, and for a specified time. The True Bride
does not dwell in the wilderness – the sign of the Curse,
the habitation of demons (Matt. 12:43) 6 – by
preference. To the False Bride, however, the wilderness
is her element; she chooses to remain there rather than
follow the Spirit to the promised land. The wilderness
is thus her heritage, and her destiny (cf. Num. 13-14;
Zech. 5:5-11). This is, again, a familiar prophetic
picture: Apostate Jerusalem is a Harlot, plying her
obscene trade alongside wilderness roads like a wild ass
in heat (cf. Jer. 2-3; Hos. 2).
It is as if the Woman of Revelation 12, having fled to
the wilderness for protection, has become accustomed
to desert life and established an intimate relationship
with the Dragon. St. John sees her sitting on a scarlet
Beast. It is not immediately clear whether the Scarlet
Beast is the Dragon or the Sea Beast. Like the Sea
Beast, it is full of blasphemous names (cf. 13:1); and
like the Dragon, it has seven heads and ten horns (cf.
12:3; the order is reversed for the Sea Beast, which has
ten horns and seven heads, 13:1). Since she is seated “on
many waters” (v. 1) and on the Scarlet Beast as well, the
imagery seems to suggest that the Beast has risen up out
of the sea (cf. 11:7; 13:1). The most likely solution is
simply to see the passage as a reference to Jerusalem’s
apostate intimacy with both Satan and the Empire.
Rome was the devil’s reigning political incarnation,
and the two could certainly be considered together
under one image. Israel was dependent upon the
Roman Empire for her national existence and power;
from the testimony of the New Testament there is no
doubt that Jerusalem was politically and religiously “in
bed” with institutionalized paganism, cooperating with
Rome in the crucifixion of Christ and the murderous
persecution of Christians.
4. For a full discussion of this point, see Calum M. Carmichael, “Treading in the
Book of Ruth,” ZAW 92 (1980), pp. 248-66.
5. The attitude of the Rev. H. Foster, Rector of Clerkenwell in the early
nineteenth century, is probably representative. Discussing the propriety of
preaching from Canticles (the Song of Solomon), he says: “I have preached
from various independent texts in the Canticles. I once went through Ezekiel
16, but dared not do it again.” Quoted in John H. Pratt, cd., The Thought of
the Evangelical Leaders: Notes of the Discussions of the Eclectic Society, London,
During the Years 1798-1814 (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, [1856]
1978), p. 441. In a more down-to-earth age, John Calvin was able to be much
more explicit in his lectures – so much so that his nineteenth-century
translator simply deleted several passages, with this note: “The Reformer
dwells so minutely on the language of the Prophet, that the refined taste of
modern days will not bear a literal translation of some clauses.” Thomas
Myers, in Calvin’s Commentaries on the First Twenty Chapters of the Book of the
Prophet Ezekiel (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1979 reprint), Vol. 2, p.
127. Cf. another translator’s omission of Calvin’s comments on Gen. 38:8-10
(Commentaries on the First Book of Moses, Baker Book House, 1979, Vol. 2, p.
281).
6. See on 12:6; cf. remarks on the wilderness theme in David Chilton, Paradise
Restored: A BibiicaI Theology of Dominion (Ft. Worth, TX: Dominion Press,
1985), pp. 24, 46, 50-53.
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