18 The word of the Lord came to me: 2 “What do you mean by repeating this proverb concerning the land of Israel, ‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge’? 3 As I live, declares the Lord God, this proverb shall no more be used by you in Israel. 4 Behold, all souls are mine; the soul of the father as well as the soul of the son is mine: the soul who sins shall die.
This chapter has as its subject the law of individual responsibility. First of all, in 1-4, there is a statement of the teaching and the principle involved. Then, in 5-20, Ezekiel gives three cases to illustrate the point. Finally, in 21-32, it is the case of a changed life. In these verses, then, we have a statement of the teaching and the principle. God challenges people's use of the proverb in 2. The meaning is simply that they had assumed as a working principle that the sufferings and misfortunes of one generation were due to the misdeeds of their forebears. And Ezekiel disabuses them of this mistaken idea, saying, 'No: every man bears his own responsibility. The soul that sinneth, it shall die'. The implications in this are considerable and important. The issue is not a simple one, for in fact the Scriptures do teach the reality of collective and corporate responsibility: Exodus 20:5 speaks of God visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation. Ezekiel, however, can hardly be supposed to be contradicting Scripture. Rather, what he is doing is to check and contradict distortion or misapplication of this teaching, for it was being used to excuse responsibility for sin, and it was this that Ezekiel was challenging. The exiles were hiding themselves behind an unbalanced view of their national responsibility in order to avoid the prophetic demand for repentance and a new way of life. That all this has relevance for today is surely obvious, and we shall examine this in the next Note.