Ezekiel 23:42
And a voice of a multitude being at ease was with her: and with the men of the common sort were brought Sabeans from the wilderness, which put bracelets upon their hands, and beautiful crowns upon their heads. And a voice of a multitude being at ease was with her: and with the men of the common sort were brought Sabeans from the wilderness, which put bracelets upon their hands, and beautiful crowns upon their heads.
The corrupt woman in the verse is a symbol of a corrupt church. The verse belongs to a portrayal of Samaria and Jerusalem as adulterous women who turned from God and desired the Assyrians and Babylonians, showing Israel's unfaithfulness through attachment to foreign powers and ways. Its spiritual fornication represents apostasy, meaning turning from God's law and worship to an unlawful alliance with idolatrous or false religious groups, and the image does not refer to a church's use of civil laws for temporal affairs. In unpleasant, unflattering terms the verse exposes Israel's forsaking of God to seek help in Egypt, which was rebellion, and the same guilt belongs to professed Christian churches that seek union with the civil power, for God has furnished a plenitude of blessings in Jesus Christ and demands all from His church and will not divide His glory with another.
The verse portrays the church as lukewarm and mingling with worldly people, whose bracelets upon the hands and beautiful crowns upon the heads are adornments coming from that worldly association. It depicts God's people in the judgment period as wearing bracelets and crowns, alongside other forms of worldly adornment. The verse is searching moral instruction that presents the awful sins of Judah and Israel under the figure of a lewd woman and predicts the last days, and because of that figure the passage is best read in private, though some passages in its chapter are properly read anywhere.