Ezekiel 18:32

For I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth, saith the Lord GOD: wherefore turn yourselves, and live ye.

EXPOSITORY (ENGLISH BIBLE)

Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary

18:30-32 The Lord will judge each of the Israelites according to his ways. On this is grounded an exhortation to repent, and to make them a new heart and a new spirit. God does not command what cannot be done, but admonishes us to do what is in our power, and to pray for what is not. Ordinances and means are appointed, directions and promises are given, that those who desire this change may seek it from God.

Barnes' Notes on the Bible

Equal - literally, "weighed out, balanced." Man's ways are arbitrary, God's ways are governed by a self-imposed law, which makes all consistent and harmonious.

Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary

32. (La 3:33; 2Pe 3:9). God is "slow to anger"; punishment is "His strange work" (Isa 28:21).

Matthew Poole's Commentary

Another argument to persuade to conversion, taken from the gracious nature of God, who taketh pleasure in the return of a sinner; for that is the meaning of the words: sinners displease God when they undo themselves, they please him when they return.

Turn yourselves; do what you can, leave what sins you have loved.

Live ye; it is a promise.

Gill's Exposition of the Entire Bible

For I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth,.... Which is not to be interpreted simply and absolutely, and with respect to all persons afflicted and punished by him; for he does take delight in the exercise of "judgment" and "righteousness", and "laughs" at the "calamity" of wicked men, Jeremiah 9:24; but comparatively, as in Hosea 5:6. The sense is, that he takes no pleasure in the afflictions, calamities, and captivity of men, which are meant by death here; but rather that they would repent and reform, and live in their own land, and enjoy the good things of it; which shows the mercy and compassion of God to sinners:

wherefore, he renews his exhortation,

turn yourselves, and live ye; or, "ye shall live" (r); I take no delight in your present deaths, your captivity; it would be more agreeable to me would you turn from your evil ways to the Lord your God, and behave according to the laws I have given you to walk by, and so live in your own land, in the quiet possession of your goods and estates.

(r) "et vivetis", Pagninus, Montanus.

Geneva Study Bible

For I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth, saith the Lord GOD: wherefore turn yourselves, and live ye.

EXEGETICAL (ORIGINAL LANGUAGES)

Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges

32. The appeal to turn from evil sustained by reference to the prevailing nature of God. He is the God of salvation; his will is that men should live. The A.V. marg. to “turn yourselves (cf. Ezekiel 18:30) or others” is altogether false. The active form “turn” is either used intransitively, or yourselves (lit. your faces) is understood, cf. ch. Ezekiel 14:6.

(1) The place of the present chapter may be explained by connecting it with the Messianic prophecy immediately preceding (ch. Ezekiel 17:22-24); the passage enunciates the principles and conditions of entering the perfect kingdom. The same principles are stated in two other passages, ch. Ezekiel 3:16-21, and ch. Ezekiel 33:1-20. They are properly in place in the last passage. The prophet feels himself, however, essentially a prophet of the new age, and writing his Book after the fall of Jerusalem he may have expanded principles less fully developed at an earlier time. The age before which he stands is an ideal one, and principles realized but imperfectly now shall then have full prevalence (ch. Ezekiel 12:16, Ezekiel 14:22).

(2) The principle which the prophet insists upon is not the strict retributive righteousness of God, but the moral freedom and independence of the individual person. The individual is not involved in the destiny of his fathers or of his people; neither does he lie under an irrevocable doom pronounced over him by his past life. The immediate relation of every spirit to God and its moral freedom to break with its own past raises it above both these dooms. What Ezekiel teaches regarding God is that he hath no pleasure that the wicked should die. The prophet’s whole purpose is practical, to strike off from the people the shackles of a despair that was settling upon them, whether they looked to themselves or to God. What he says of men is that each stands in immediate relation to God and shall live or die according as he repents or continues in his sin; and what he teaches of God is that in spite of the dark clouds of judgment behind which he seems now hidden his prevailing will is that men should live.

(3) The conception of the prophet is a complex or double one, having an internal and an external side. The inward element in the conception is the spiritual relation of the individual person to God; the outward element is the form “life” and “death” in which this internal relation is made manifest, rewarded or punished in God’s treatment of the individual person. We perceive a cleavage taking place between these two elements. The principles enunciated by the prophet refer to the spiritual relation of the individual to God, and are true when limited to this. The individual shall not, in this sense, suffer for the sins of his people, nor the child for the sins of his father; and even his own past life does not weave an inexorable fate around him from which there is no escape. In all cases consequences evil enough may descend upon the son from the father, or upon himself from his own past life, but not this particular consequence. His moral freedom and independence raises him above these consequences, and brings him as an independent person into direct relation with God, over against others and even over against his former self. And this is really all that the prophet is teaching of new truth here. It is truth which the New Testament teaches, and which is the foundation of all morals. To charge the prophet with cutting up the individual human life into sections which have no moral relation to one another, or with teaching that a man shall live or die according to the condition in which he shall be found “for the moment” when the judgment overtakes him, is grossly to distort his language.

It may be true that the prophet has not yet been able fully to analyse his own complex conception and separate completely the spiritual relation of the mind to God from the person’s external conditions. No Old Testament writer probably has been able to do this consciously and formally, although it is often done in principle and in moments of spiritual elevation (Psalm 73:23 seq., Ezekiel 17:14-15). But the ideal character of the age which the prophet feels to be about to dawn, and to which he applies his principles, marks an approach towards completing the distinction. This future though imminent ideal time, the time of the perfect kingdom of God, is that which corresponds to our idea of heaven, or another future world, in which external condition will perfectly correspond to spiritual state. The prophet’s ideal world, in which spiritual relation would be perfectly bodied out externally, was still the earth. “Life” and “death,” in the ordinary sense of these words, were the only means by which inward spiritual relations could find proper outward expression.

Pulpit Commentary

Verse 32. - Turn yourselves, etc. As in Ezekiel 14:6, but there is no ground for the rendering of "turn others," suggested in the margin of the Authorized Version. So we close what we may rightly speak of as among the noblest of Ezekiel's utterances, that which makes him take his place side by side with the greatest of the prophets as a preacher of repentance and forgiveness. In the next chapter he returns to his parables of history after the fashion of those of ch. 17.



Ezekiel 18:32

Keil and Delitzsch Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament

The vindication of the ways of God might have formed a fitting close to this divine oracle. But as the prophet was not merely concerned with the correction of the error contained in the proverb which was current among the people, but still more with the rescue of the people themselves from destruction, he follows up the refutation with another earnest call to repentance. - Ezekiel 18:27. If a wicked man turneth from his wickedness which he hath done, and doeth right and righteousness, he will keep his soul alive. Ezekiel 18:28. If he seeth and turneth from all his transgressions which he hath committed, he shall live and not die. Ezekiel 18:29. And the house of Israel saith, The way of the Lord is not right. Are may ways not right, O house of Israel? Is it not rather your ways that are not right? Ezekiel 18:30. Therefore, every one according to his ways, will I judge you, O house of Israel, is the saying of the Lord Jehovah. Turn and repent of all your transgressions, that it may not become to you a stumbling-block to guilt. Ezekiel 18:31. Cast from you all your transgressions which ye have committed, and make yourselves a new heart and a new spirit! And why will ye die, O house of Israel? Ezekiel 18:32. For I have no pleasure in the death of the dying, is the saying of the Lord Jehovah. Therefore repent, that ye may live. - For the purpose of securing an entrance into their hearts for the call to repentance, the prophet not only repeats, in Ezekiel 18:27 and Ezekiel 18:28, the truth declared in Ezekiel 18:21 and Ezekiel 18:22, that he who turns from his sin finds life, but refutes once more in Ezekiel 18:29, as he has already done in Ezekiel 18:25, the charge that God's ways are not right. The fact that the singular יתּכן is connected with the plural דּרכיכם, does not warrant our altering the plural into דּרכּכם, but may be explained in a very simple manner, by assuming that the ways of the people are all summed up in one, and that the meaning is this: what you say of my way applies to your own ways, - namely, "it is not right; there is just measure therein." לכן, "therefore, etc.;" because my way, and not yours, is right, I will judge you, every one according to his way. Repent, therefore, if ye would escape from death and destruction. שׁוּבוּ is rendered more emphatic by השׁיבוּ, sc. פניכם, as in Ezekiel 14:6. In the last clause of Ezekiel 18:30, עון is not to be taken as the subject of the sentence according to the accents, but is a genitive dependent upon מכשׁול, as in Ezekiel 7:19 and Ezekiel 14:3; and the subject is to be found in the preceding clause: that it (the sinning) may not become to you a stumbling-block of iniquity, i.e., a stumbling-block through which ye fall into guilt and punishment. - The appeal in Ezekiel 18:31 points back to the promise in Ezekiel 11:18-19. השׁליך, to cast away. The application of this word to transgressions may be explained from the fact that they consisted for the most part of idols and idolatrous images, which they had made. - "Make yourselves a new heart and a new spirit:" a man cannot, indeed, create either of these by his own power; God alone can give them (Ezekiel 11:19). But a man both can and should come to God to receive them: in other words, he can turn to God, and let both heart and spirit be renewed by the Spirit of God. And this God is willing to do; for He has no pleasure בּמות המת, in the death of the dying one. In the repetition of the assurance given in Ezekiel 18:23, המּת is very appropriately substituted for רשׁע, to indicate to the people that while in sin they are lying in death, and that it is only by conversion and renewal that they can recover life again.