Ezekiel 13:1-12, “Untempered Mortar”

There is an important picture in the OT.  We are told that God is our refuge.  In Ps. 2:12 and many other passages, the word “trust” has this idea of keeping yourself in the refuge that God has created for you.  If you step outside that refuge you are on your own.  God has not forsaken you; rather, you have forsaken His refuge.

One important aspect to this “refuge” was the prophet.  He spoke for God, in essence pointing to the refuge, calling people to repent and find their place back in the place where they would know God’s blessing and protection.  Ezek. 13:6 speaks of this prophetic ministry, as he reproves the “foolish prophets” in his day: “You have not gone up into the gaps to build a wall for the house of Israel to stand in battle on the day of the LORD.”

Instead, the false prophet in that day proclaimed “’Peace!’ when there is no peace – and one builds a wall, and they plaster it with untampered mortar” (13:10).  God’s message to the people in Judah was to give up to the Babylonians because they were His servants.  That is where they would find refuge.  The message of the false prophets was, “resist the Babylonians; they will not take this city; God won’t let that happen.”  They had built a wall that would not stand.

The word “untampered” has a root meaning that has to do with “folly, foolishness” (TWOT, Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament).  This mortar is like “’sand without lime, mud without straw’ (Grotius).  Fairbairn translates, ‘plaster it with whitewash.’  But besides the hypocrisy of merely outwardly ‘daubing’ to make the wall look fair (Mt. 23:27,29; Acts 23:3), there is implied the unsoundness of the wall from the absence of true uniting cement; the ‘untempered cement’ answering to the lie of the prophets, who say, in support of their prophecies, ‘Thus saith the Lord, when the Lord hath not spoken’ (Ezek. 22:28)” (from Jameson-Faucette-Browne).

Another indication of what the foolish prophets did is seen in the term “wall” in 13:10.  It is actually the only time this term is used in the OT.  It’s not your normal wall that will stand strong against the siege of the enemy.  TWOT, following many others, translates it “party-wall" by which they mean a “thin wall.”  So not only is this wall of foolishness not bound by strong cement; it is so thin that the enemy will have an easy time knocking it down.

This is a picture we need to visualize as we read throughout the Bible the dangers of false teachers, apostles and prophets.  We need to know that those who “shepherd the flock” of which we are part, that they are men who obey the command, “Be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth” (2 Tim. 2:15).  We need to know that we are people like that ourselves as we provide a “refuge” for our families and others for whom we provide a refuge.