In biblical times, Jerusalem was known as the city of God. It was the place where the temple, and therefore God’s presence, resided. It was the place many would make pilgrimage to; it was where the rulers of importance sat, and it was the power of the day. Of course, it had its difficult times, and as I was reading the book of Ezekiel today, chapter 22, I saw a section where God was very unhappy with Jerusalem. In the passage, God is very specific about what Jerusalem has done wrong. You can read a section of it for yourself;

In you they have treated father and mother with contempt; in you they have oppressed the foreigner and mistreated the fatherless and the widow. You have despised my holy things and desecrated my Sabbaths. In you are slanderers who are bent on shedding blood; in you are those who eat at the mountain shrines and commit lewd acts. In you are those who dishonor their father’s bed; in you are those who violate women during their period, when they are ceremonially unclean. In you one man commits a detestable offense with his neighbor’s wife, another shamefully defiles his daughter-in-law, and another violates his sister, his own father’s daughter. In you are people who accept bribes to shed blood; you take interest and make a profit from the poor. You extort unjust gain from your neighbors. And you have forgotten me, declares the Sovereign LORD. Ezekiel 22:7-12

Why am I highlighting this passage today? Well, my overriding emotion as I read it was – how different are we in our cities today? Whilst there are some contextual things here that we don’t practice as such today, so much of what is mentioned here is as bad, if not worse, today. This saddens me. It’s such a shame that we have forgotten God in culture today. He is too often an afterthought, if thought of at all. He is seen as a peripheral figure, a concept or idea to whom we can sort of pay some kind of attention when we need help. When God is sidelined, our desires take center stage, and any kind of righteousness also takes a back seat. We only need to open the news sites today to see the horrendous acts we commit against one another, and those are only the worst, most illegal ones. Every day, in every community, there are more ways that we ‘extort unjust gain’ from our neighbors.

I have no idea how to conclude this except to say – we might not have changed too much from God’s view of Jerusalem in Ezekiel, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have the ability to change. If we can once again put God front and center in our lives and in our cities, we can once again return to being a people and a place where righteousness reigns!