Contemplative Bible Reading

Ezekiel 9:9 (New Living Translation)

Then he said to me, “The sins of the people of Israel and Judah are very, very great. The entire land is full of murder; the city is filled with injustice. They are saying, ‘The Lord doesn’t see it! The Lord has abandoned the land!’

The situation: the sins of the people are very, very great.

The response: Yahweh has left. He doesn’t see this.

After all the the LORD had done, the people still don’t understand. They attribute to the LORD the same abilities as people have. The LORD is not here. If you are not here, you cannot see what is happening here.

The LORD is omnipresent, i.e., everywhere at once. The people, however, have limited the LORD’s presence and the LORD’s vision.

They didn’t understand the ways of the LORD.

Am I any better at understanding the ways of the LORD? I should be. I mean, I have these (hi)stories to read and contemplate. I should be able to learn from them. I guess I do learn, but then I become tired and angry and all those other things and I fall back into what the people described by Ezekiel are doing.