8 Therefore thus says the Lord God: “Because you have uttered falsehood and seen lying visions, therefore behold, I am against you, declares the Lord God. 9 My hand will be against the prophets who see false visions and who give lying divinations. They shall not be in the council of my people, nor be enrolled in the register of the house of Israel, nor shall they enter the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the Lord God. 10 Precisely because they have misled my people, saying, ‘Peace’, when there is no peace, and because, when the people build a wall, these prophets smear it with whitewash, 11 say to those who smear it with whitewash that it shall fall! There will be a deluge of rain, and you, O great hailstones, will fall, and a stormy wind break out. 12 And when the wall falls, will it not be said to you, ‘Where is the coating with which you smeared it?’ 13 Therefore thus says the Lord God: I will make a stormy wind break out in my wrath, and there shall be a deluge of rain in my anger, and great hailstones in wrath to make a full end. 14 And I will break down the wall that you have smeared with whitewash, and bring it down to the ground, so that its foundation will be laid bare. When it falls, you shall perish in the midst of it, and you shall know that I am the Lord. 15 Thus will I spend my wrath upon the wall and upon those who have smeared it with whitewash, and I will say to you, The wall is no more, nor those who smeared it, 16 the prophets of Israel who prophesied concerning Jerusalem and saw visions of peace for her, when there was no peace, declares the Lord God.
Next, in these verses, comes the charge against the prophets for encouraging a false security. Ezekiel's words are very stern and grim; God was against these men, and they were to be totally disinherited. The reference in 9 about not being written in the writing of the house of Israel means, according to the scholars, being 'struck off from the civil register of full citizens, so losing one of the most cherished rights of any adult Israelite male'. But, relating to our own day, we could well paraphrase this to mean that when the moral and spiritual history of the 20th century is written, these false 'way-out' men will not figure in it, for the Lord will not permit their names to be recorded. In 10ff we are told that under the influence of the false prophets the people built flimsy walls and daubed them with untempered mortar; and in time of stress, down they went. This is a spiritual picture, and the metaphor in what Ezekiel is saying is this: These false prophets had their following, they had their work, they were doing their work, and to the undiscerning eye, it seemed as if things were being built. People were listening to Ezekiel and saying, 'Surely, Ezekiel, you are being too critical, you are being too hard on these men; they are doing their work, look at the houses they are building'. But Ezekiel says, 'Wait until God's storms blow, and you will see what sort of building they have been building in people's lives'. This surely provides a dramatic illustration of both our Lord's parable about the house built on the rock and the house built on sand (Matthew 7:24ff), and Paul's teaching in 1 Corinthians 3 about building wood, hay and stubble instead of gold, silver and precious stones. The great test, both in Ezekiel's day, and in New Testament times, as indeed today also, is whether the building will stand in time of stress and storm, or whether it will crumble.