This is how one historian describes the way the Assyrian people handled their slaves. The Assyrians learned a lot when they studied the slavery revolt in Egypt and other nations and created methods to ensure the same didn't happen to them. This is what's happening to Israel in Ezekiel 18. They're living under Assyrian captivity and things aren't good.
There was collective wisdom at the time among the Hebrews that brought about the phrase found in verse 2 "the parents eat the sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge."
What does that phrase mean, and why is God so bent on the people not saying it anymore?
The phrase its self is nothing too complicated. Essentially, the current Jews in captivity believe they are there because their parents and grandparents sinned and left God. They believe that it's their lot in life to reap the punishment for this betrayal. They believe they are taking the pain and suffering from God himself, and that God is still angry at their parents and grandparents, and that his wrath now falls on them. They believe there's nothing they can do about this. So they sit around each other night after night in a sort of Old Testament version of learned helplessness and say the phrase to each other.
"Our parents ate the sour grapes, yet our teeth are set on edge."
Break it down and you get something more basic.
"We are taking the punishment intended for our ancestors."
Break it down to its most basic level and you get two simple words.
Not fair.
The same sentiment is seen again in Lamentations 5, to paraphrase "our parents sinned and we're paying for it".
This, and this alone, is why my life is the way it is.
I'm in this position because of the actions of others. I'm helpless.
This sentiment stands like a brick wall in between people and their healing.
God, through Ezekiel, spends the rest of the chapter building the case that each person stands on their own before God and that no sin of anyone is held over their children or anyone else.
Incidentally, the alternating "good men" and "bad men" God uses in his metaphor mirrors the Kings of Israel and which ones were "good" or "evil."
Israel heard God combating the groupthink that had infiltrated their hearts and minds.
At the end of the passage God tells them he will judge them each on their own. Then he says that they can get a "new heart."
A new heart?
Have you ever heard someone go through a traumatic experience and then say something like, "I'm over it, but I'll have some scars from this".
Or this, "I'll carry these wounds forever".
Have you ever had your heart broken?
When it comes to healing a broken heart, I usually for some reason imagine a literal heart, made out of glass or something. All of a sudden a crack appears in it, and then someone comes along and tapes the crack up. If that heart gets broken again, a new crack, then someone else comes over and wraps it in gauze. Then, if the heart's broken a third time, maybe a hole struck into it, another person comes and patches that up.
What you're left with doesn't really look like a "healed" heart does it? It looks like a patched up fraction of its former self. A heart that has been left with scars.
The healing God offers, a new heart, is the only way to end up with a new complete fully healed heart. When you say, "I'll carry scars from this" God says "why?"
When your heart gets a crack, rather than coming in a taping it up, God brings in a brand new one, clean and perfect and exactly what it looked like before it was broken.
Back to Israel. The reason God is so insistent that they quit using this saying is because full healing that God offers cannot come when you or I wear the victim hat.
His complete healing is the only perfect healing. He can't offer that to us when we won't let him.
Israel, or anyone else with a broken heart, has got to quit it with the sour grapes.
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