Ezekiel 20:35 · World English Bible
Ezekiel 20:35 Meaning I Will Bring You Into the Wilderness
I will bring you into the wilderness of the peoples, and there I will enter into judgment with you face to face.
What does Ezekiel 20:35 mean?
Sometimes life strips a person of everything familiar and leaves him alone in a kind of desert, cut off from the crowd and the roles that used to hide him. This is not only punishment.
From the Psychoanalysis reading below.
Ezekiel 20:35 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Psychoanalysis
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Psychoanalysis
Sometimes life strips a person of everything familiar and leaves him alone in a kind of desert, cut off from the crowd and the roles that used to hide him. This is not only punishment. It is the one place where a real meeting can happen.
Standing there with nothing to hide behind, he finally comes face to face with what he has been carrying inside and refusing to look at. The wilderness is where a person meets himself honestly, because only when the familiar props are gone does he stop performing and see what he truly is.
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Psychoanalysis lens
Live Ezekiel 20:35 today
- Take one stretch today with nothing in your ears and nothing in your hands, the commute, the walk from the car, ten minutes before bed. Let whatever has been waiting come up without reaching for a distraction.
- With one person, drop the role you usually play with them, the funny one, the capable one, the one who never needs anything. Say one true thing that does not fit the part.
- When a plan falls through and the usual props are gone, resist filling the gap instantly. The empty hour is often where you find out what you actually wanted.
Who are you when no one is watching and there is nothing to do?
The same truth in other traditions
Stoicism · Seneca
Seneca says we are never so exposed as when the crowd is gone, and that solitude shows a person what the applause was covering. Being alone is not the punishment, it is the mirror.
Buddhism
The Buddha went to the forest, and what met him there was not peace first but every fear he had been outrunning. The quiet place is where what you carry finally catches up with you.
Taoism · Zhuangzi
Zhuangzi has little patience for the man who only knows himself through other people's opinions. Strip the titles and the audience and you find out what is actually there.
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