Tea and a Freaky Prophet

Well, we had our first Girls Only tea party yesterday at 3:00 p.m. Bad weather, funky work schedules, and lack of notice conspired to shrink our group to four teenagers and myself. But four turned out to be a lovely number for a tea and Bible study.

We brewed Irish breakfast in two teapots and gobbled sugar cookies (my great-grandmother’s recipe, very fatty) for about half an hour and chatted about sleepovers, cats, and friends. Then when it was time to open the Bible, we moved our chairs and teacups close to the heater and cozied up together.

The passage was from Ezekiel. Now, I don’t know if you’ve read Ezekiel (which I used to read too much, if that’s possible), but he was a little freaky. Parts of his book read like a bad horror novel, and parts read like pulp fiction. And the chapter I was going to read to the girls happens to use the word “whore” more than any other chapter in the Bible, as far as I can remember.

And how was it that I came to be reading the “whoring” chapter, Ezekiel 16, to a group of teenage girls? Well, as I was preparing for the study in the nights before, I looked up the word “beauty” in the ESV online. My plan was to teach about inner beauty– the kind God cultivates in us when we become His. So I’m reading through all these verses that talk about God’s beauty, Israel’s beauty, Rebekah’s, Rachael’s, etc., when I came across this snippet: “But you trusted in your beauty and played the whore because of your renown and lavished your whorings on any passerby; your beauty became his.” Yeah. So I had to check that out.

Turns out that God had a message for Jerusalem. He compares her throughout the chapter to a foundling baby, whom he rescues and washes. Then she grows up, and he takes her for his wife and clothes her like a princess and makes her gorgeous. But instead of showing gratitude and love in return, Jerusalem runs off to use her beauty for prostitution. Only she doesn’t get paid for it; she pays her lovers with all the gifts God gave her, and bribes them to defile her. And it gets worse and worse until even the Philistines are ashamed of her, and God finally gets so angry that he turns her over to her lovers and condemns her to be stripped of her finery and ripped to shreds.

But then, in the end, instead of destroying her as she deserves, he says, “Yet I will remember my covenant with you in the days of your youth, and I will establish for you an everlasting covenant. Then you will remember your ways and be ashamed. . . I will establish my covenant with you, and you shall know that I am the Lord, that you may remember and be confounded, and never open your mouth again because of your shame, when I atone for you for all that you have done, declares the Lord God.” (emphasis added) He’s talking about Jesus, who was stripped and torn apart for the sake of a faithless bride.

And what was Jerusalem’s prostitution really about? It was her idolatry and her reliance on the nations around her, rather than her love and worship and reliance on God, who chose her not for her merit, but for His grace.

For the girls and me, it was a hard-hitting message about God’s redemption and our reaction to it. We talked about how God chooses us while we’re still wallowing in our sin, rescues us, washes us, and makes us new and beautiful inside. He makes a covenant with us and calls us His, part of His bride, the church. But even after all the undeserved gifts He lavishes on us, we still have a tendency to turn to other, broken sources to meet our needs. We look for love and satisfaction from boys, food, things, and activities. We throw our gifts away to get grief in return. God calls it spiritual adultery.

But rather than deal with us as we deserve, He afflicted His own Son in our place, and gave us to Him as a bride, who is being made holy and perfect, even as we speak. So we are disciplined as daughters now, not to death, but to life, just as Hebrews 12 tells us. We are gently corrected and brought back to Him over and over, until we learn to trust Him for what we need.

That speaks volumes to girls who can’t trust their own fathers, who are seeking hard to be loved by just about anyone. So even with the twenty-some very ugly words, it turned out to be a beautiful story for all of us, with a good cup of tea to boot.

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