Ezekiel 8: the temple in Jerusalem is used to worship a sex goddess

 In Ezekiel 8 we read:

1-4 In the sixth year, in the sixth month and the fifth day, while I was sitting at home meeting with the leaders of Judah, it happened that the hand of my Master, God, gripped me. When I looked, I was astonished. What I saw looked like a man—from the waist down like fire and from the waist up like highly burnished bronze. He reached out what looked like a hand and grabbed me by the hair. The Spirit swept me high in the air and carried me in visions of God to Jerusalem, to the entrance of the north gate of the Temple’s inside court where the image of the sex goddess that makes God so angry had been set up. Right before me was the Glory of the God of Israel, exactly like the vision I had seen out on the plain.


Ezekiel is in Babylon but he is taken by the Spirit to the temple in Jerusalem. There he saw not only the image of the sex goddess but also a lot of other images, paints used to worship false gods. Let us suppose a israelite wanted to worship a false god: why to worship in the temple of the Lord? To prove that the Lord is weak, even to expel false gods from his house. No wonder, the Lord is furious and decided to destroy the temple.