Ezekiel 20, child sacrifice, and the judgement of being given over
“I gave them also statutes that were not good.”
Those words in Ezekiel 20:25 can sound startling when read alone. The following verse makes the difficulty sharper by connecting the judgement with offerings of the firstborn. Did God command child sacrifice? Was He admitting that His own law was evil?
The words deserve a serious answer. But a serious answer must consider the whole argument, including what God says about His commands, Israel’s rebellion, and the practices that followed.
Read in that setting, the passage is best understood as describing God giving rebellious people over to destructive practices after they rejected His good laws.
The contrast begins before verse 25
Three times in Ezekiel 20, God describes His ordinances as bringing life to those who practise them: verses 11, 13, and 21. The chapter establishes their goodness repeatedly.
It also distinguishes God’s commands from other statutes. In verses 18–19, God warns the next generation against following their fathers’ statutes and idols, directing them instead to His own ordinances.
Verse 24 then explains the judgement: they rejected His statutes, desecrated His Sabbaths, and pursued their fathers’ idols. Only after this comes the declaration about statutes that were not good.
The sequence matters. God gave life-giving commands; Israel rejected them; destructive judgement followed. Verse 25 reverses the earlier promise of life. It does not suddenly erase the distinction between God’s commands and Israel’s rebellion. Ezekiel 20.
What about the child sacrifice?
Verse 26 must be faced directly. It connects the firstborn offerings with defilement and devastation. Verse 31 makes the character of the practice explicit: offering their children is associated with their idols and continuing uncleanness. This is an indictment, not a commendation.
Elsewhere, God’s condemnation is unmistakable. Jeremiah records His denunciation of burning children as offerings to Baal:
“which I commanded not, nor spake it, neither came it into my mind.”
Jeremiah 19:5
That is an emphatic rejection of the claim that God prescribed such worship. Jeremiah 19:5.
Nor does the requirement to give God the firstborn establish a command to kill firstborn sons. Exodus explicitly distinguishes the treatment of sacrificial animals from that of sons, who must be redeemed. Reading the firstborn requirement without its redemption provisions creates a misleading impression of the law. Exodus 13:12–15.
Why does God say that He “gave” the statutes?
Scripture sometimes describes God’s judgement through His handing people over to the course they insist upon pursuing.
Psalm 81:12 describes God giving His people up to their own stubborn hearts. Romans 1 repeatedly describes God giving people over after they reject the truth about Him. Their resulting conduct remains sinful; being handed over to it does not make it an approved command. Psalm 81:12 and Romans 1:24, 26.
Second Thessalonians presents a similar sequence. People refuse the truth, and for that reason God sends delusion. The judicial action follows their rejection; it does not turn falsehood into truth or wickedness into righteousness. 2 Thessalonians 2:10–12.
This gives us an established pattern through which to understand Ezekiel. God’s permission is judicial: He gives people over to the corruption they have chosen. He remains the judge, while their practices remain evil.
E. W. Bullinger discusses this under a biblical idiom in which active language can describe permission. He applies the explanation to several New Testament passages, including those concerning hardening in Romans 9 and 11. This is an interpretive principle, not an automatic replacement of every active verb with “allow.” The surrounding argument must justify its use. In Ezekiel 20, the movement from rejected commands to destructive judgement provides that justification. Bullinger, Figures of Speech Used in the Bible, “Idioma”.
An explanation shared by Jewish and Christian interpreters
This understanding is not a recent apologetic invention.
Rashi, following Targum Jonathan, understands verse 25 as God surrendering the people to their sinful inclination, through which they adopted destructive ordinances. On verse 26, he explains that they corrupted the consecration of the firstborn by directing those children to Molech. God’s judicial action and Israel’s wicked practice are distinguished. Rashi on Ezekiel 20:25–26.
John Wesley makes the same central distinction in his notes: God did not enjoin these harmful statutes but permitted the people to make them for themselves. His explanation of their pollution likewise concerns God permitting their self-defilement.
John Calvin likewise rejects identifying the bad statutes with the law given through Moses. He understands them as invented, idolatrous forms of worship to which God subjected a people who refused His good government. Calvin explicitly connects the passage with Romans 1:24–26: rejection of the truth is followed by being handed over to error. His account includes active divine judgement and blinding as well as permission; it is not merely passive non-intervention. Nevertheless, the central distinction is the same: these destructive practices express judgement upon rebellion, not God’s approval of evil worship. Calvin on Ezekiel 20:25.
The agreement is significant across Jewish, Reformed, and Methodist interpretation. These commentators differ in their wider theology and in how they describe divine agency, but their shared reading does not depend upon one denominational framework. Their agreement corroborates the contextual argument; it does not replace it.
These interpreters do not remove judgement from the passage. They explain how God can attribute that judgement to Himself without making the condemned practice part of His moral instruction.
Reading difficult words fairly
We ordinarily interpret someone’s difficult statements in the light of their clearly expressed convictions. If a person repeatedly condemns an action as abhorrent, we do not immediately treat an ambiguous remark as proof that they commanded it—especially where a recognised manner of expression offers a coherent explanation.
The same fairness belongs in biblical interpretation.
Some scholars understand Ezekiel as attributing a punitive command of child sacrifice to God, in tension with other biblical texts. That reading exists and should be represented honestly. But its existence does not make it equally persuasive within a reading of Scripture as a coherent revelation. David Frankel, Contemporary Jewish Theology, pp. 8–10.
The judicial interpretation accounts for the chapter’s contrast, God’s explicit condemnation elsewhere, and the wider pattern of people being handed over after rejecting truth. Those are positive reasons for accepting it. Reading difficult words in the light of clear statements is responsible interpretation, not special pleading.
A brief aside about Marcionism belongs here: the New Testament’s own language of hardening and delusion prevents us from simply assigning severe judgement to an inferior Old Testament deity. The same question of divine agency arises in both Testaments.
Ezekiel’s warning remains searching. Rejecting God’s good commands does not leave people beyond the reach of His judgement. It can leave them subject to the destructive ways they preferred. The horror of the passage lies in that surrender to corruption—and in what human beings may do when they persistently refuse the God who calls them to life.