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Ezekiel 8:14 "Then he brought me to the entrance of the north gate of the house of the Lord; and behold their sat women weeping for Tammuz."

 

In advance of a vision Ezekiel is to have of Jerusalem's destruction, an angel is leading him around the holy city, showing him all the abominations by which the Jews are calling down the coming punishment on themselves. Here, the angel shows Ezekiel women weeping for a false deity, Tammuz, a fertility god whose worship emphasized female mourning of his consignment to the netherworld in hope that he would be brought back from the dead by their tears ("The women’s tears recalled the supposed tears of Ishtar that brought Tammuz back." "Who Was Tammuz?" GotQuestions.org) Worse, they are carrying out this "worship" in the very gate of the Temple.

 

The false gods we raise almost always have some aspect of the true God attributed to them. God is Creation itself, all things spring from His creative Fiat and Will. In His plan, He has designed us to participate in this Creation by giving us the gift of fertility (a gift He will take away if we continue to use it so abominably; something He may be in the process of doing right now, if we consider how we are abusing our sexuality and procreation in conjunction with the falling fertility rates around the world!), but that gift is being attributed to a false god by these women. God also will send his Son to die for us and to be raised from the dead, allowing us to achieve eternal life with Him, so this is another aspect of God being attributed to Tammuz, but not one that the weeping women could have known of yet.

 

These Jewish women, and the people of Jerusalem, should have known God. They had the law and the prophets, unlike the pagan nations that had thought up Tammuz. Yet here these women sit, in the gate of the Temple, having attributed the creative aspects of the God who has revealed Himself intimately to them to a fictional character, a false god. Further, by this weeping, they are worshiping this false god in God's holiest place. One can see how very far away from God they have become, and how God's anger is justifiable.

 

But I think it was worse than God being angry, I think He also saw the impossibility of bringing these women back in any other way but the loss of everything they held dear. They were too far gone, as was most of the rest of Jerusalem, as we see from the other abominations Ezekiel is shown. When God gets angry with His people, I think His anger is directed both at the devil, or the spirit of evil, that constantly puts these idols before us, and at our weakness in falling for this over and over again. We know God, or we should, yet we continue to attribute His qualities to "non-God" things and put all our hopes in them, just as these women were. I think God's anger with these women, Jerusalem, and us when we do this, is mixed with deep sadness that it has come to this; that He must now destroy some of His favorite parts of Creation in order to wake us up. Have you ever been shockingly betrayed by someone you love? There is certainly anger, but it grows out of deep sadness, a feeling that the person really did not love you the way you loved them, a horrible hurt that they chose something else over their relationship with you. That is how God feels, I think, when we enage in this behavior.

 

Yet God continues to love Jerusalem, these women, and all of us, and He knows our only true happiness lies in our relationship with Him. So He will do whatever He has to in order to turn us away from our "Tammuz's". That is why He is showing these things to Ezekiel, so Ezekiel will understand why, in the very next chapter, God will send his angels through the city slaying all but those who are marked for having lamented what was happening there.

 

God's chastisements are difficult, but sometimes we have allowed ourselves to fall so far into confusion, sin, and idolatry, that there is no other way to bring us back. I think we can look around today and see that chastisements are necessary again, probably some very great ones (especially since we seem to be ignoring or explaining away the lesser ones!). At the same time, we must continue to pray and lament what is happening. We can go to the "temple" and weep for the right reasons. In that way, we can be a remnant, people who are lamenting what is happening, and we very well may bring others around through our prayer, making the remnant greater, and perhaps lessening the chastisements.

 

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"And there followed him a great multitude of the people, and of women who bewailed and lamented him. But Jesus turning to them said, 'Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children.'" Luke 23:27-28.