epcblog

Devotional thoughts (Monday through Thursday mornings) from the pastor of Exeter Presbyterian Church in Exeter, NH // Sunday Worship 10:30am // 73 Winter Street

Monday, April 14, 2008

Ezekiel 7

“An end!” We are moving toward an end. The end is in God’s hand, and it always has been in God’s hand. That end will be glorious, so glorious that we live today in the light of that coming day. That end will not be a mere local end. It will be global. In the day of Ezekiel a lesser “end” came for Judah and Israel. Though that was not the big end, it was very big for the people who lived through it. That end came upon the four corners of Israel. The bigger coming day will come upon the four corners of the entire earth. That day will not only be a day of wrath. It will be a day of the fullest salvation for the people of God. It is the beauty of that salvation that gives us courage and strength as we feel the horror of smaller ends that come upon us in the trials that the Lord ordains for his people and his church in the current age.

In the judgment that God announced through Ezekiel, God’s wrath was the obvious emphasis of His message to His people. God would judge His people according to their ways. It is always the case that God will not be mocked. He is unwilling to have the supposed loyalty of His people at the very time when they have obvious abominations in their behavior and worship. What would it say about God if he were satisfied with our protests of loyalty despite our obvious and open rebellion against His commandments? He is the Lord. We should know that He is not satisfied with hypocrisy by the plain story of the history of Israel combined with the words of the prophets. This point is also strongly presented to us in the conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees.

The end of Judah in the days of Ezekiel, or any other expression of the wrath of God, surprises us because God is so patient with us and is so full of mercy. We should not be confused into thinking that the Lord is lax regarding His demands of righteousness. We are helped in understanding this important point by the descriptions of times of uncompromising judgment as recorded in the Scripture. There comes a time when the Lord will not spare any longer. When wickedness first takes root in the church, that beginning may be just a seed. Pride is not a good seed in the life of an individual or in any faith community. When that ugly plant grows and blossoms it leads to violence and doom. Perhaps the history of Israel and Judah help us to see the seriousness of the Lord concerning willful and persistent unrighteousness. Even in the New Testament era the church is warned to repent, last our lamp stand be taken away. The gates of hell will not prevail against the church as a whole, but individual expressions of the church will be removed by the same Lord who ordained the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians.

We live our lives as if everything will always continue on as it has for many years. We buy and sell. We go out to our jobs, and we deal with the common frustrations and opportunities of our routine. We should not imagine that we will somehow escape the temporal troubles that would come upon us when the Lord brings an end to a church or even a nation. We will not be able to simply maintain our existing habits as if nothing were wrong. Our iniquity leads to trouble.

We should also not assume that we will somehow have the resources to push away trouble by our own force when it is Almighty God who brings judgment upon us. This is not just something for the world to consider, for judgment begins in the household of God. We could try to sound the alarm and marshal all our forces to put off all danger and trouble, but if God is bringing trouble upon us, we will not be able to force His hand away by our imagined strength. There is news that by itself is so bad, that every hand would be instantly weak, and every spirit within the most courageous men would immediately grow faint.

This kind of disaster can come upon us with such speed and force that we would be shocked by the events unfolding around us. Nonetheless, there is no need for us to be surprised. We have been warned by God sufficiently concerning His demands of holiness. We have heard His Word. What is our surprise? Did we imagine that we could buy our way out of every trouble? Did we think that our ingenuity would be the solution for every possible disaster?

Where we will surely fail, Christ has convincingly succeeded. His victory over the righteous wrath of God has not come from forcing the Father to back down from His holy demands. His victory for us has come through Christ taking the full weight of God’s righteous requirements upon Himself. He did not push away the wrath of God. He faced it. He did this for us.

Because of this tremendous act of power and love, the end has become for us a day of salvation. Let us not turn away today from the one who has won for us such a complete victory. It is a frightening thing to think of our exclusion from the assembly of those who have their hope and trust in Jesus Christ. Outside of Him, there simply is no hope for sinners, but in Him there is abundant help for us now and always.

posted by Pastor Magee @ 7:00 AM

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