Ezekiel 3:5, 7 For thou art not sent to a people of a strange speech and of an hard language, but to the house of Israel:…But the house of Israel will not hearken unto thee; for they will not hearken unto me: for all the house of Israel are impudent and hardhearted.
A Hard Heart Brings Ignorance
When I was a teenager, I was with my family in Chihuahua, Mexico. One day while walking the aisles of a store, I passed a man who looked at me, stopped, and said, “What’s happening man?” Trying to sum up the meager Spanish I actually knew, I replied, “Que pasa, hombre.” That was the end of the conversation because neither of us knew anything more to say, but we were both proud of what little we did know.
Visiting a foreign country is memorable for most people. Trying to understand what’s going on around you, when you don’t have the same language, or culture, or geography can be a challenge. And yet, a hard heart keeps many more people in ignorance than a hard language ever did.
When God sent Ezekiel to give His message to His people, He basically told Ezekiel in Ezekiel 3:5-6, “Look, I’m not sending you to people who don’t understand your words, and don’t know your language. I’m sending you to your own people. Now, if I’d sent you to people that didn’t know your language and were foreigners, they would probably listen to you. But my people and yours will not listen.”
Ezekiel 3:7 says, “But the house of Israel will not hearken unto thee, for they will not hearken unto me: for all the house of Israel are impudent and hardhearted.” In other words, they were hard headed, impudent, and hardhearted. They wouldn’t listen to Ezekiel because they wouldn’t listen to God. Ultimately, their problem was not ignorance, it was arrogance. Yet that ignorance produced ignorance. They were people who didn’t know what they could know because they didn’t want to know. It was a matter of attitude.
The lesson we learn from reading these verses is that the unwillingness to accept the truth produces more ignorance than the inability to understand it. When a person responds to authority by wrinkling his brow and saying, “I don’t understand why we have to do this!” or “This doesn’t make sense to me!”, the primary problem is attitude, not understanding. May God help us to have a heart that hears and a mind that will understand.