Ezekiel 18:1-3 The word of the LORD came to me again, saying,… There is a sense in which that proverb was then, and is now, perfectly true. No generation starts fresh in the race of being. It is the offspring of a past; it is the parent of a future. It is so; and it must be so. The England of today, the Church of today, the grown man, and the little child of today, is not and cannot be what any one of these would have been if it had had no yesterday; if each or any of them had not had an ancestry as well as a history. There is a sense in which the proverb is perfectly true and applicable to almost everybody — "The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge." But this was not the use made of the proverb by the contemporaries and countrymen of Ezekiel. They represented not that their outward condition alone, their national or individual circumstances, but that their spiritual state, their spiritual destiny, depended upon that for which they were not responsible. God was displeased at them for sins not their own. It was vain to approach Him with the cry of penitence or the prayer for grace. A sentence of wrath and reprobation had gone forth against them, and to struggle against it was to fight against God. This terrible view of life is combated at length in the chapter. (Dean Vaughan.) Parallel Verses KJV: The word of the LORD came unto me again, saying, |
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