Ezekiel 23:4
And the names of them were Aholah the elder, and Aholibah her sister: and they were mine, and they bare sons and daughters. Thus were their names; Samaria is Aholah, and Jerusalem Aholibah. And the names of them were Aholah the elder, and Aholibah her sister: and they were mine, and they bare sons and daughters. Thus were their names; Samaria is Aholah, and Jerusalem Aholibah.
The two names are symbolic, the elder Aholah being Samaria standing for Israel and her sister Aholibah being Jerusalem standing for Judah. The chapter in which they appear points out the fearful sins of Israel and Judah and concerns their apostasy under those names. They were God's own by marriage covenant sealed by solemn vow and by blood. They are set forth as adulterous women to be judged after the manner of adulteresses and women that shed blood. The figure of a lewd woman is the symbol of a corrupt or apostate church in backsliding, here the Jewish church. Opposite to it stands a pure woman for a true church, while a corrupt woman stands for a corrupt church.
The verse stands in Ezekiel 16 to 32 as part of God's rebuke of sin in its awful wickedness, where He earnestly pleads with His children to turn to Him. There He exposes the fearful and awful sins and apostasy of Israel and Judah. The presentation of the awful sins of Judah and Israel under the figures of lewd women gives searching moral instruction. That instruction is best read in private, although some passages in it are properly read anywhere.
The fornication in the chapter is spiritual unfaithfulness and apostasy. It is a people married to Christ departing from their husband to become friend and follower of the world. It is turning from God's law and worship to idolatrous or false religious groups, taking strangers instead of her husband and building an eminent place in the head of every way. That building is casting off the precepts of God, which is casting off God, so that their life becomes one with Babylon and the house of Judah becomes like unto all the heathen. Historically that unfaithfulness included forsaking God and seeking help from Egypt, which is rebellion. It included doting on the Assyrians and Babylonians, receiving the Babylonians into the bed of love, listening to Babylon and following Satan's voice to become his bride with sister Babylon. That adulterous union produces Babylon's wine, a drunken lascivious life lived under statutes that are not good and judgments by which they should not live.
The same lesson applies to churches that seek union with civil power instead of relying on the blessings God provides through Jesus Christ. The fornication does not mean a church's use of civil laws for temporal matters. As a warning given before the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem, the chapter speaks of Babylon's attack on Jerusalem. It joins to that the removal of the profane prince's diadem, marking the overturning of the kingdom until the rightful ruler comes.