Ezekiel 6
One day the earth as we see it now will have to make may for a new creation. Old things will be as if forgotten, and new things will be our everyday existence. God speaks in another place about creation being rolled up like a garment. There is a sense in which the old earth will be destroyed under the weight of all that has happened upon it, as if the creation itself had become so thoroughly defiled by all our sin.
In the days of Ezekiel, God had the prophet face toward the mountains of
Through the Lord’s judgment upon the mountains, upon the high places, the altars, the cities, and the people, God is accomplishing a very important purpose. When the slain fall in the midst of the people it is a testimony to something. Through these difficult days, the people will know that He is the Lord. He is the great I AM. He does not need anyone to defend Him. He has defended His own Name and His own great glory. For centuries He showed great forbearance. Now He displays His incomparable holiness and justice.
Everyone will not be destroyed. Some will be thrust out into other nations. In the places where they have been scattered they will remember the Lord, and they will despise themselves because of their sins. God had said that he would send His people into exile. In that day, the people would know that their God, the God of Israel, was the Lord. God is not only known through the good that He does. We sometimes ignore the many blessings that we receive, and forget that the Lord is the source of every good gift. It is a fact that we may more readily remember God when He disciplines us according to His promises.
Grief has physical manifestations. When people talk about a heartache, they speak the truth. There is a cry that is experienced by the grieving soul that is a deeper mourning than people without such grief have ever experienced. Children stamp their feet in disappointment when they do not get their way. Here, God tells Ezekiel, mature adults among His people will clap their hands and stamp their feet, not in the joy of a festival dance, but in the horrible grief of divine chastisement. Sword, famine, and pestilence, the familiar trilogy of prophetic disaster, will come upon the Lord’s people, as He had promised through the prophets long ago.
The reason for this is not mysterious. Their false worship, their idols, and their special spiritual places of their own creation were all deeply offensive to the true God. This was not a new message. God had raised up His people to be a display of Himself. They were to show forth His holiness and His mercy. God had designed His worship and Law for this purpose. His people simply would not do what He had commanded. They had other spiritual practices in mind, and even other gods that they insisted on worshiping.
God was not finished with His people, though so many of them would lose their lives. To the rest, He would show Himself through His wrath, and that would end up being a mercy for all who would receive the truth that the God who disciplined them was truly the Lord God Almighty, and not some lifeless idol. The key question would be whether His people could get the right and obvious message from the devastating events all around them.
Do we get the right message from the events of judgment that fill the history of salvation? Are we able to see that the Lord is God when we consider the flood, the trouble in the wilderness, or the exile of
The cross is the greatest fulfillment of divine judgment that has ever been known by man. It is far more than any trouble that the Old Testament people of God ever faced, far more even then the destruction of the older world in the flood. On the cross, hell came upon one man. Like the mountains of
One day the present heaven and earth will have to give way to a new creation. The fire of God’s judgment is coming. Christ has faced that fiery ordeal for us, and has emerged victorious so that we may live forever in a land of permanent holiness.
posted by Pastor Magee @ 7:00 AM
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