Ezekiel 14:9 says, "If the prophet is induced to speak anything, I the LORD have induced that prophet, and I will stretch out My hand against him and destroy him from among My people." A surface reading of this verse, out of context from the rest of the Bible, can seem as though God caused these prophets to lie and then punished them for doing so. But this simplistic reading is incorrect.

The Bible is clear that God does not lie (Titus 1:2, Hebrews 6:18). Lying is a violation of the Ninth Commandment (Exodus 20:16), and James 1:13 plainly says, "God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does He Himself tempt anyone." This does not contradict the statement in Ezekiel 14:9, but rather it gives us a lens for understanding what is really being said.

Jesus taught that whoever seeks God will find Him (Matthew 7:8), and Jeremiah 29:13 echoes this: "You will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart." God reveals Himself to those who look for Him and is merciful to those who seek Him, but those who reject Him are separated from Him by their sin" (Isaiah 59:2).

Israel did not seek God, and false prophets continually plagued them as a result. By the time of Ezekiel's writing, Judah's sins had separated them from God to an extent that required severe and imminent punishment. For generations, they had beaten, scorned and killed God's true prophets, who always brought a message of repentance that could have saved them from punishment. At the same time, Israel sought out and glorified false prophets who told them that they would not suffer, saying, "Do not prophesy to us right things; speak to us smooth things, prophesy deceits" (Isaiah 30:10). Israel got exactly what they asked for, and this spirit of willful rebellion is the context of Ezekiel 14:9.

Because the people had turned away from God so thoroughly and had so stubbornly refused His true prophets, God finally rejected them and turned them over to punishment. Paul's letter to the Romans puts it this way: "God gave them up to uncleanness . . . who exchanged the truth of God for the lie . . . For this reason God gave them up to vile passions . . . God gave them over to a debased mind" (Romans 1:24-28).

Ezekiel 14:9 is understood to mean that God, at that point, withdrew Himself from trying to correct the prophets and stop them from speaking lies. Rather than continuing to simply tell them that they were wrong, the time came to show them that they were wrong by carrying out the long-withheld punishment. This punishment was not a surprise—it had been clearly laid out from the beginning in Deuteronomy 28:15 and warned of repeatedly and with tears by all of God's prophets.

The great lesson for us is that we must not allow ourselves to "only hear what we want to hear," as Israel and Judah did to the point of destruction. Instead, we must be diligent to seek God, for He has promised that we will find Him if we truly seek Him (Jeremiah 29:13).