Read 2 Samuel 18 and Ezekiel 25.
This devotional is about Ezekiel 25.
The German language has a word, schadenfreude, that I hear being used in English more ad more often. The word means “satisfaction or pleasure felt at someone else’s misfortune” and it describes how Israel’s enemies felt about the defeat and exile of Israel and Judah. In this chapter of Ezekiel, God spoke a word agains the schadenfreude that other nations felt. He spoke here against the Ammonites (vv. 1-7), the Moabites (vv. 8-11), the Edomites (vv. 12-14), and the Philistines (vv. 15-17). In each of these cases God promised judgment and punishment for the attitude of these nations. God’s faithfulness to his promises is demonstrated by the fact that Israel exists today [1] but not one of these other nations is still around.
But why would these people take such delight in the decimation of Israel and Judah? On one level, their pleasure is the understandable reaction to the defeat of an enemy. As a Detroit Lions fan, I rejoice when the Packers, Vikings, and Bears lose a game, so some amount of national pride factors into the reaction these nations had to the demise of God’s people.
But there is more to the schadenfreude of the nations than just national pride. Verse 3 told the Ammonites that they would be punished “because you said ‘Aha!’ over my sanctuary when it was desecrated…” Likewise, the Moabites said, “Look, Judah has become like all the other nations” in verse 8. The defeat of Israel and Judah, then, was interpreted as proof positive that Israel’s God either did not exist or, at least, was no more powerful than the gods of these nations. In other words, their happiness at the defeat of God’s people was due to their unbelief–their willful desire not to believe–in Israel’s God. God’s punishment, then, was designed to prove to them how wrong they were: “I will destroy you, and you will know that I am the Lord” says verse 7 while verses 11 and 17 echo the same idea.
People who don’t want to believe in God today are looking for proof of his non-existence as well. This is why people celebrate when a Christian leader has a public moral failing or the church is exposed for covering up crimes. Likewise–and more importantly, really–if you or I are known to be Christians but fail to live up to God’s commands, the unbelievers around us will quickly dismiss the genuineness of our faith and the importance of believing in our God.
We need God’s grace to walk with him daily and He has promised it to us in his word. We need to walk with God because we love him. We should follow his word because we know that sin damages us. But we should also remember that our lives speak powerfully to non-believers and that, apart from God’s saving grace in their own lives, they are looking for reasons to disregard our testimonies. One reason to live for God, then, is to testify about him to the world around us.
[1] Note, for instance, that verse 10 said, “the Ammonites will not be remembered among the nations…”