Ezekiel 16:16

And what was the return? "But you trusted in your beauty and played the whore because of your renown." It is a sad picture, and every bit as true as it is sad. The beauty of Jerusalem was for every passer-by. "And of your garments you took and made for yourself high places with various colours." [Or patches, as the prophet's word may mean. He says it in contempt of the hangings the Jewish women wove for heathen gods and goddesses, Astarte in particular.] The idolatrous uncleanness of Jerusalem was beyond anything that had been or was to be. And this was its mark. Every one of the countless favours of her divine husband — her Maker was exactly that to her — she squandered on the filthy idols of the heathen.

The story of Israel's failure comes next. Sadly, all her privilege and all her wealth of blessing became for her only the means of a deeper and more fatal fall. The root of it all was their self-confidence. How easily self-confidence still shows itself in people who owe all they have to grace alone! And we may build ourselves up just as Israel did, on privileges that only God's grace could have given us. We take the glory that is His due and dress ourselves with it!

In Israel, departure from God took the outward form of making "high places." It was only a heathen habit. It played on the imagination with a worship that has no heart in it. Men still try to satisfy themselves in the same way — with music, architecture, drapery, and that most typical "dim religious light" — and in it they worship a God who is Light itself, and in whom there is no darkness. Such things work on nature. They produce a feeling that is widely taken for the reality it lacks. So on the mountain-tops man could imagine himself nearer to God than in the valleys… There is indeed a witness to God in all these things; who would want to deny it? Yet it is just here that man so often makes the fatal mistake. He puts what is merely natural in the place of what is spiritual, and so deceives himself.

When someone else falls, our first instinct is to thank God that we are not like other men. It should instead show us that we stand only by faith. If we become proud, we shall fall. The moment we think ourselves to be something, we only deceive ourselves. We forget that grace alone makes us different. Like Jerusalem, instead of looking at the perfect beauty God has put on us, we trust in our own beauty.

In reading Ezekiel 16, remember that the subject is Jerusalem, and not Israel… He had given life to what was in misery and had no beauty. He had cleansed it, adorned it and anointed it. But Jerusalem had used all that Jehovah gave her in the service of her idols… So she was to be judged as an adulterous woman. Jehovah would bring against her the very ones she had sought… Jerusalem is justly condemned and humbled, and yet God will act in full grace towards her. He will re-establish her, remembering His love and His covenant.