THE BLAME GAME

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In Christ, Mark

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The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.

The word of the Lord came to me: “What do you people mean by quoting this proverb about the land of Israel: ‘The parents eat sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge’”?

“As surely as I live,” declares the Sovereign Lord, “you will no longer quote this proverb in Israel. For everyone belongs to Me, the parent as well as the child—both alike belong to Me. The one who sins is the one who will die.”

Ezekiel 18:1-4

This ends today’s reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.

Have you ever known someone who likes to play the blame game?

You know what this kind of person looks like, right?

They complain about their circumstances ad nauseum and then proceed to blame everyone else for their problems, as if they hold no accountability for their own actions.

The example I love the most here is the one where a child grows up into adulthood and then proceeds to blame their parents for everything, especially when they fall on hard times in some way. Usually this centers on their childhood upbringing and things their parents either did or didn’t do with the implication that they have fallen on hard times because of their parents even though when you look into things, the parents actually didn’t have anything to do with the matter the child has gotten themselves into. It’s just easier to place the fault in others than it is to look at yourself as the cause of the issue.

Now don’t read this as if there is no culpability for parents negatively affecting their children’s lives because there have certainly been more than a few incidents of abusiveness that scarred a child and then went on to impact their life as an adult. I am in no way trying to slight those who have suffered this horrific life experience and have to try and cope with it afterwards. I am only calling out those who did not go through abuse and yet still chose to blame Dad and Mom for their problems, something that as we see in our scripture passage today is not just a modern day phenomenon. For the blame game was alive and well in the days of Ezekiel too. Look at the opening verses of Chapter 18:

The word of the Lord came to me: “What do you people mean by quoting this proverb about the land of Israel: ‘The parents eat sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge’”?

“As surely as I live,” declares the Sovereign Lord, “you will no longer quote this proverb in Israel. For everyone belongs to Me, the parent as well as the child—both alike belong to Me. The one who sins is the one who will die.”  Ezekiel 18:1-4

As we have grown accustomed to see by now, the Lord is sending His words to His prophet Ezekiel and as Chapter 18 opens, we find those words formed in the way of a question. Specifically, the Lord wants to know what the Israelites men when they used the following quote:

“The parents eat sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.”

What did the quote allude to?

Essentially, children were blaming their circumstances on their parents. If the parents committed sins for example, the children would later be punished as a result of those sins. Or in other words, the children would not see themselves as sinners deserving of God’s consequences in their own right. Any hardship they fell under was the fault of their parents.

Well, as we see in our scripture passage, God wasted no time setting things straight with His people. He wanted them to know one important fact:

If you get punished, it’s from no fault but your own.

This was because the judge of sin was God Himself and all, parents as well as their children, belonged to Him. Think about that a minute because parents sometimes get this wrong. They don’t own their children. Rather, the children they have belong to God, just as they do. God simply entrusts children who are His to the care of the parents He chooses and those parents are fully accountable to God for taking care of the kids who are rightfully His. Thus, a child doesn’t all of a sudden move from the possession of their parents to the custody of God when they reach adulthood. No, they were always God’s from the very start.

Given this, every person is accountable to God for their own actions. The one who sins will be the one who is judged for those sins and pay whatever price God chooses. There is no blame game. A sinner has no one to fault but themselves.

Friends, this is a message we need to hear, not just today but every day. For we all belong to a God who made us and is Master over us. He is our God and we are His people. He watches each of us individually, blessing us when we choose to live in His righteousness and sending consequences when we decide to sin because as we know He despises sin and wants nothing more than to eradicate it from us.

In the end translation, God would want us to stop the blame game and focus more on the way we are living in His sight, understanding that He will hold each of us accountable for our own actions.

Amen

In Christ,

Mark
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