When the youth is slaughtered and sacrificed to our idols

Ezekiel 16: 19 – 21 And the food I provided for you—the fine flour, olive oil and honey I gave you to eat—you offered as fragrant incense before your idols. That is what happened, declares the Sovereign LORD. And you took your sons and daughters whom you bore to me and sacrificed them as food to the idols. Was your prostitution not enough? You slaughtered my children and sacrificed them to the idols.

Nowhere else the story of God’s people as the unfaithful wife of a gracious God who loved them more than anything else, is told more graphically than in Ezekiel 16.
The people of Israel became a whore when she used God’s blessings and affectionate gifts of gold, fine clothes and the best food, to adorn the false gods of their neighboring nations.

When the gifts that God gives in love, become the reason why we embrace a way of live where not our Lord, but the prosperous lifestyle he grants us is the most important love of our lives, our unfaithfulness becomes an unbearable shame and the reason for both God’s broken heart and his wrath.

The worst moment in the life of God’s people though, is when our unfaithfulness to the Lord impacts on the lives of the children that we bore to God! When the reality of abusing the blessings, the tokens of his love, lead to not only our shame and judgment, but to life choices and life styles where our children are “slaughtered and sacrificed to our idols.”

When the children of those who are called God’s people become the victims of their materialism, selfishness, greed, self-indulgence and unfaithfulness to God, it results in a youth whose lives are ruined by godless greed, immorality, addictions and profane high risk pleasure-seeking, we are to be blamed and shamed. And more importantly, when we in this way sacrifice our children to our idols, God comes to the end of his patience with our infidelity.

When children, God’s greatest gift, become the victims of our choices and preferences, we arrive at the place where we have to finally choose between loving or leaving our Saviour.

Ezekiel phrases it as follows in Ezekiel 18: 30 – 32:
Therefore, you Israelites, I will judge each of you according to your own ways, declares the Sovereign LORD.
Repent!
Turn away from all your offense, then sin will not be your downfall.
Rid yourselves of all the offenses you have committed, and get a new heart and a new spirit. Why will you die, o people of Israel? For I take no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Sovereign LORD.
Repent and live!