Ezekiel 23:17
And the Babylonians came to her into the bed of love, and they defiled her with their whoredom, and she was polluted with them, and her mind was alienated from them. And the Babylonians came to her into the bed of love, and they defiled her with their whoredom, and she was polluted with them, and her mind was alienated from them.
Ezekiel 23 sets forth the awful sins of Israel and Judah, Samaria and Jerusalem, under the figure of a lewd woman, using sexual unfaithfulness to portray spiritual unfaithfulness and apostasy. The Babylonians coming to her into the bed of love pictures Judah's unfaithful attachment and alliance to Babylon and its ways, her desiring of foreign powers after turning from her covenant with God. She had adopted Babylonian laws and religious practices so as to become one with Babylon in life, and that defiling relationship represents an unlawful bond with idolatrous and false religious groups.
In symbolic prophecy a woman means a church, an assemblage of people called out and united for a spiritual purpose, good or evil, so the corrupt and harlot woman stands for a fallen, corrupt church. The harlotry means the backsliding of Israel and Judah, joined with Babylon and her daughters, ensnaring souls and corrupting the nations of the earth. The word translated mind is the Hebrew nephesh, elsewhere translated soul in many Old Testament passages and also rendered mind in the surrounding verses, showing it can refer to a person's mind and feelings. Here it describes her feelings turning away and becoming alienated from the Babylonians.
The prophecy belongs to 593 B.C. and shows the king of Babylon coming against Jerusalem, the removal of the diadem from Israel's wicked ruler, and the overturning of the kingdom until the rightful ruler comes, connected with the Babylonian destruction and scattering of Israel. Israel's captivity and dwelling in Babylon were a visible judgment confirming her spiritual unfaithfulness and God's departure from her and showing that she had forsaken God. Spiritual fornication is forsaking God and rebelling against him, departing from his law and testimony and from worshiping him, seeking help from other powers and leaving God to follow the world and cast off his precepts.
The same lesson applies to churches seeking union with civil power: they turn from the blessings God provides in Christ and give to another power a place that belongs to God alone. The unlawful bond does not mean a church's use of civil laws to manage temporal affairs. The passage belongs to material best read in private, although some passages in its setting are properly read anywhere.