Casting Silver into the Streets

In reading and studying Ezekiel I came across this timely verse:

"They cast their silver into the streets, and their gold is like an unclean thing. Their silver and gold are not able to deliver them in the day of the wrath of the Lord. They cannot satisfy their hunger or fill their stomachs with it. For it was the stumbling block of their iniquity." Ez. 7:19

Here we see that in the judgment of God upon Israel one of the many demonstrations of His judgment in this prophecy is that wealth, gold and silver lose their value. Rather then accumulating wealth the people of Israel cast it into the streets. This is unusual, for as commentator John Calvin puts it years ago:

"For we know that men are more anxious about those possessions than about life itself....men are so attached to their gold and silver that it grieves them to be torn from what they so much love: no less than if you tore away their entrails." Ezekiel, 262.

I do not doubt Calvin's point that for many one would rather part with their innards then part with their money. For that person wealth has become more important then life because wealth is their life. However, when God's wrath came upon Israel men and women were under such judgment that even their wealth lost all value. There was no security. They flung their wealth into the streets, because wealth had lost its very definition.

It is judgment indeed when God takes away from a people the very value of money, and what panic would strike a people when this occurs. As this passage says gold and silver was treated as if it were "unclean." Gold and silver rather then being precious metals has become leporsy. As the New American Standard Bible puts it, gold and silver have become "abhorrent."

To abhor wealth is foreign to any nation, yet in this case, when God judged Israel wealth, rather then being adored and accumulated, became abhorrent and cast away into the street to be trampled upon.

Value vanished.

May love of wealth vanish from the heart of God's people, the church, and may love of God and hunger for Him become our Satisfaction and Security.