What does God have to do to convince us that the problem with the world isn t the world it s you?

Transcription

1 1 Ezek 4-5 When God s people are worse than everyone else Or Eating your parents and Cooking with Pooh I know what s wrong with the world I want to start this morning by asking you a question. A question that I want to undergird all of our time together today. But before the question, a few statements. We all know what s wrong with the world: It s the blatant sexuality in shows like Two Broke Girls It s the alternative sexuality in Modern Family It s stores like Spencers and Poolesville Beer Wine and Cheese It s the US becoming a welfare state Abortion, of course this is what s wrong with the world Other things that are wrong with this world, depending on the group: the media (it s liberal lies) young people, (they have no respect) environmentalists (crazy tree hugging, monkey loving freaks) McDonald s (their agenda is to make everyone fat) Criminals (guns don t kill people, criminals do) People who steal our guns (liberal pansies in politics) black people (the jails are predominantly African American) white people (oppressing the black man) foreigners overrunning our country (immigration control is a myth), bigots (how dare you refuse entrance to foreigners) radicals (occupy everything) the Establishment (the man is out to get you) poor people (they are all lazy) corporations (greedy blood thirsty thieves) lazy people (if you just work harder ) selfish people (no one cares about anyone anymore) Fox News (stinking conservative lies), the Internet (porn, it s all porn) and the arbitrary eating of penguins by angry polar bears (kidding, polar bears can t eat penguins because ) Ok, so that s what wrong with the world. Now my question What does God have to do to convince us that the problem with the world isn t the world it s you?

2 2 What if the reason the kingdom hasn t arrived in all of its eschatological glory is because God s people are actually worse than everyone else? Now this isn t the full truth of the matter. I am purposely being a little bit provocative here, but I think it is necessary because we think of ourselves as the few, the correct, the ones who have it figured out. We are the righteous in the midst of scum. But what if What if God is giving us Ezekiel 4-5 this morning to smack us across the face? What if the ridiculous actions of a seemingly insane prophet have something to say to us today? 6 Yet in her wickedness she has rebelled against my laws and decrees more than the nations and countries around her. She has rejected my laws and has not followed my decrees. 7 "Therefore this is what the Sovereign LORD says: You have been more unruly than the nations around you and have not followed my decrees or kept my laws. You have not even conformed to the standards of the nations around you. 8 "Therefore this is what the Sovereign LORD says: I myself am against you, Jerusalem, and I will inflict punishment on you in the sight of the nations. Does our world parallel that of Ezekiel? Is it fair for me to suggest that this is a word for our day as well? Are there other things that need to be taken into account to properly bring this into our day? All good questions, and the answer to each of them is yes. Yes there are parallels, yes this does apply today and yes, there are other things that need to be drawn out of this text and others before we can simply make the application. That is, you can t simply pull a text from the middle of a book about destruction on Jerusalem and say God is coming to destroy America or Christians or anything else. What s the background context? So, let s grab the context as best as we can This statement in the book of Ezekiel about his people not following his rules or really any rules is an explanation of three pretty amazing, shocking, horrifying, pretty much weird dramas put on by the prophet. So we have Ezekiel, a would-be priest except he is an exile in Babylon and so can t be a priest, being called by God with a vision of some multi-faced, multi-eyed, multi-winged, multi wheeled, fiery, hovering scariness. Ezekiel falls on his face before the Holy. Having been called he begins his task of delivering the message God has given him to his fellow exiles people just like him who don t want to hear his message. Mean faces at model cities First action

3 3 The first thing Ezekiel must do involves building a little mini-city. We see this in 4:1-3 NIV Ezekiel 4:1 "Now, son of man, take a clay tablet, put it in front of you and draw the city of Jerusalem on it. 2 Then lay siege to it: Erect siege works against it, build a ramp up to it, set up camps against it and put battering rams around it. 3 Then take an iron pan, place it as an iron wall between you and the city and turn your face toward it. It will be under siege, and you shall besiege it. This will be a sign to the house of Israel. (Eze 4:1-3 NIV) Like each of these sign acts, commentators struggle to deal with all the details. The problem is the Hebrew isn t always clear and different versions say different things. I need to stay with the big picture or we will never get through this. Basically, he takes a brick that hasn t been baked yet and draws a city on it. Then he builds little battering rams and catapults and trebuchets and hills for ramps so they can get up to and over the walls. Kids love to build cities in the living room. Then he takes an iron pan/skillet and puts it in between himself and the city and he becomes part of the drama. He is God and God will not only not be any help, he will be the one who is coming against his own people. I picture Ezekiel making mean faces directed at the city, but whatever, that s the big picture. So toy soldiers and mean faces is the first dramatic act. But not too hard for Ezekiel. On to act 2 Napping to make a point Act 2 involves nearly 400 naps. Again, being a prophet doesn t sound all that bad does it. 4 "Then lie on your left side and put the sin of the house of Israel upon yourself. You are to bear their sin for the number of days you lie on your side. 5 I have assigned you the same number of days as the years of their sin. So for 390 days you will bear the sin of the house of Israel. 6 "After you have finished this, lie down again, this time on your right side, and bear the sin of the house of Judah. I have assigned you 40 days, a day for each year. 7 Turn your face toward the siege of Jerusalem and with bared arm prophesy against her. 8 I will tie you up with ropes so that you cannot turn from one side to the other until you have finished the days of your siege. (Eze 4:4-8 NIV) So he moves from his soldiers and frying pan to spending time every day lying on one side. Lest you feel the need to be a literalist here let me tell you what nearly all commentators agree on. It is unlikely that Ezekiel spent the entire 390 days laying on one side and then the other. He got up

4 4 to go to the bathroom. He may have only laid down for a few hours at the busy part of the day. It was a drama for a purpose and the act went on every day. Why these specific numbers. Well, that is quite the conversation. After looking at this for far too long and reading everyone ideas on this, I think that the 390 days/years was not an amount of time forward but backwards. That is, it began when the split of the kingdom began. When Solomon was on the throne and began institutionalizing idolatry. When things began to fall apart. If you go backwards 390 years you end up during that monarchy somewhere. Others suggest different possibilities, the LXX says 190 days, not 390. Then there are 40 more days/years where he lays on the other side. Here is the big picture as I understand it. Ezekiel waits for the right time and when everyone is watching, he lays down. And he stays there, for hours. Then the show is over and he spends time with family or whatever. Then the next day he does it again. He does this for 350 days or so. This along with the siege illustration is clear. God is angry at them for their nearly 4 centuries of disobedience. Then during the last 40 years of the 390, he also turns over on his right side. They may not understand until day 40 was finished but when you know there is 40 days you quickly understand what that means. Because the last time we had a 40 days and years connected was in the book of numbers where God explains that the reason they will have 40 years of wandering in the wilderness corresponds to the 40 days the spies spied out the land. The point of all of this to wipe out a generation of rebels. Forty years is considered a rough number for a generation. It doesn t have to be exact even the wandering in the wilderness was not exactly 40 years. It was 40 if you counted the time spent at Sinai and Kadesh which wasn t part of the punishment. My point is this is a round number to represent the punishment of the people. Keeping it in line with the symbolism of the book and not an exact 40 years is helpful in harmonizing it with Jeremiah who prophesied 70 years of punishment. (of course that wasn t exactly right either as Daniel shows but we can t get into that right now) [others still would say 430 years which is the same amount of time that Israel was in Egypt according to Ex 12:40. Convenient, but not the point I think] Cooking with Pooh! And the punishment was brutal. Act 3 or maybe scene 2 of act 2 is all about the eating of certain foods and how it is to be cooked. It s here that the ease of his mean faces and naps becomes a bit harder It involves wheat and barley, beans and lentils, millet and emmer and it is about 8 ounces of this food (verse 9) 1.4 pints of water (vs 10-11). You can live on it, but just barely. Now again, we don t know if this is all he ate all day. Perhaps during this normal meal time he would eat only this little amount as part of the drama. Either way, the picture is supposed to be of starvation. Like what is going to happen to the people in Jerusalem. Besieged, till the disobedient generation is starving to death. To make it even more clear, Ezekiel is to get his fuel from well, better to just read it. Verse 12

5 5 12 Eat the food as you would a barley cake; bake it in the sight of the people, using human excrement for fuel." (Eze 4:12 NIV) Kyle told me about a story several years ago about fecal matter being found in a Taco bell and it being closed down. Now this (Taco Bell story and Ezekiel story) is the kind of story we keep from our kids. It s for reasons like this that we don t preach Ezekiel. But I am guessing we can all handle this. After all, we have childrens books that are about this. Take a look. Cooking with Pooh! Are you kidding me? Anyway, Ezekiel is supposed to use human waste as fuel and finally he balks. He is a priest. HE is holy. And everyone knows the rules about excrement from Deut (23:12-14). He insists he is to stay holy and what grabs my attention is that God gives in. Excurses on law To me, this is the most interesting fact I have faced so far in the text. Why does he need to say this? Why not just say what the act was? Obviously God was okay with cooking the food with cow manure and the main point is pretty much the same. Why tell this little story about God ignoring his own laws and where Ezekiel tries to change God s mind and succeeds? In case some of you academics want to go deeper into this let me suggest something: I think we have an editor adding some information here that is designed to foreshadow something in later passages. That is, the holy perfect law of God, the law that brings delight and is beautiful and comes from Yahweh himself, is not perfect. God s law was never meant to be perfect, as in static. It was dynamic and changeable and given for a time to make a certain point that we are supposed to progress out of. They weren t and we aren't supposed to see law as final or unalterable. Even the tree of knowledge may not have stayed out of Adam and Eves world for long. They are supposed to mature past the simple laws of the past. They just aren't supposed to be wise on their own. True wisdom comes from conversation with God. God was willing to change his law to make another point. But he accommodated to Ezekiel because it was too much for him. This is going to help us when we get to later laws that seem so contrary to Torah. It s also going to help us when we get to the NT and God says, all those holiness laws about not eating certain things. Yeah, that s over now. I used that to teach you some things, but now we are past that. And what does this mean for later laws??? I so want to flesh this out, but I think it is only hinted at here and I want to stay with the big picture Ezekiel, like the rebellious people of Jerusalem, is starving away under the siege of Babylon/God himself.

6 6 Bald is not beautiful But there is one more sign act that needs to be told in the beginning of chapter 5. His back hurts from laying in one position, he is starving to death slowly and now he has to grab a sword, shave himself and Well, let s look at it "Now, son of man, take a sharp sword and use it as a barber's razor to shave your head and your beard. Then take a set of scales and divide up the hair. 2 When the days of your siege come to an end, burn a third of the hair with fire inside the city. Take a third and strike it with the sword all around the city. And scatter a third to the wind. For I will pursue them with drawn sword. 3 But take a few strands of hair and tuck them away in the folds of your garment. 4 Again, take a few of these and throw them into the fire and burn them up. A fire will spread from there to the whole house of Israel. (Eze 5:1-4 NIV) So he shaves himself with a sword. It s humiliating to begin with (we all know bald is not beautiful ), even more so for a priest who is not permitted to shave his head, but the sword has an added dramatic note. The people seeing this get it. His hair and beard drop to the ground in huge tufts. Then he takes a third of it and drops it into his makeshift city and sets it on fire. He takes a bunch more and begins to hit it repeatedly with the sword. Then he takes a bunch more and throws it in the air for the wind to take it. Then he grabs some the wind hasn t taken or that wasn t cut up and tucks it into a pocket. Ah, they are safe. But then he immediately grabs a bunch of the safe hairs and throws them in the fire too. The explanation is found in verse 12 when God explains how each third of the people will die with pestilence, famine, sword and scattered with armies chasing after them. Even the safe ones (perhaps those there in exile) will be in trouble if they don t repent. Tauntings, kidnappings, and eating dad But it s more than that. Wild beasts will come among them stealing their children, (16) they will be so miserable that everyone who walks by will taunt them (15) and sons will eat their fathers because there is no food (verse 10). Why is God so against his own people? Because they are his people for a reason. He chose them and placed them in middle of many other countries (verse 5) so that they might be a light to them. They might show them what living in wisdom and love and generosity and grace looks like. God gave them a path that would lead to abundance and they not only ignored it, they actually rejected his rules and didn t walk in his statutes (6) more than the other nations. That is, the nations, whom God didn t reveal himself to in such a special way, are actually fulfilling Gods commands more than those who have the law. Isaiah said that Israel had turned into Sodom. They had failed to live up to their privileged status and in fact had sunk below them. (Allen, i. 74)

7 7 Verse 7 summarizes 7 "Therefore this is what the Sovereign LORD says: You have been more unruly than the nations around you and have not followed my decrees or kept my laws. You have not even conformed to the standards of the nations around you. 8 "Therefore this is what the Sovereign LORD says: I myself am against you, Jerusalem, (Eze 5:7-8 NIV) This grabs me something fierce. This says that God s people are worse than those who are not God s people. How can that even be? Does that fact grab you like it grabs me? Is it possible that somehow God s people, at PBC for instance, might be failing in ways that non- Christians are succeeding? Or if we stick with the exact situation of Ezekiel, we might be able to say they aren't exactly succeeding but we are failing even worse than them. I asked these questions to start us off and think they are important to remember now: Does our world parallel that of Ezekiel? Of course it does. Is it fair for me to suggest that this is a word for our day as well? Of course it is. Are there other things that need to be taken into account to properly bring this into our day? Isn t there always. Is this passage merely about being sure we are being better than those around us? So what needs to be considered before we beat ourselves up? Are there any things that have happened in the history of redemption that make this a bit more complicated than just yelling at you about how much you fail as God s people. So, anything come to mind? Like about 2,000 years ago, in Galilee, some guy who started claiming to embody the kingdom itself, to be a picture of righteous Israel, and then to suffer on a Roman Cross for following the will of God perfectly. Anyone remember him? So how does God incarnate help us interpret this passage? Because we don t want to merely apply the OT to ourselves We don t want to dare to be like Daniel or David or Delilah (esp not Delilah but she is the only other D I could come up with quickly) We don t want to resolve to be like Rahab or Rehoboam or Rebekah or Rameses We don t want to stand like Samuel Preach like the prophets Love like Leah (I don t know)

8 8 See, these OT passages find their fulfillment in Jesus. So how does Immanuel, God with us, relate here? Let s walk it through in our minds. Jesus came and was baptized. He represented Israel. For 400 years Israel has been unfaithful and the gospels seek to make clear that there is a new Israel who for 33 years was perfectly faithful. He was a perfect light to the nations. He directed everyone to the glory of God. He followed the law perfectly He cared about the hurting, loved the unloveable, was humble and meek and strong and bold. He was an Israel of one, and God was pleased with him. And despite this, he got pinned to a cross. See Israel failed phenomenally and got what naturally happens when you walk the path of foolishness, outside of God s plan. But Jesus succeeded in everything, walking the path of wisdom and it led to same violent destructive death. Why? Because God so loved the world that he... Let me read it to you. You may not be aware of this verse and I want to be sure you know it s actually in the Bible: 16 "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. (Joh 3:16-17 NIV) He loved us. That punishment that came on the people of God who didn t live like the people of God fell on them and it fell on Him. This means that as guilty as we are for not always living well, I can remind you boldly with great joy that we have a savior who took our sin and our failures and our messes on himself and took the punishment for us. So, and I don t know exactly how to do this all the time, it s my job as a preacher to preach the good news, the glorious gospel that removes guilt from your mind but I also must call us to more. The danger is that sermons become talks about being good. They make us feel bad for not being good and we truly decide to make a change. Guilt motivates and I guess that isn t all bad. And so you will go out of here planning to be better in whatever way I encourage you because you truly want to do better. And tomorrow you will. And next week. And the guilt will hold on to some of

9 9 you for weeks and motivate you for weeks but the problem with being motivated by guilt is it eventually becomes impossible and you give up, at least until I hit you again in a few months and then you resolve to be more like Rebekah or whoever and we keep doing this. But true motivation comes from the gospel. It comes from the fact that Jesus loves you and gave everything for you and tells you that in living a life like his, you can have peace and joy and love and flourishing abundance. You can move heaven into the now. So, let me ask you this, on the other side of the cross, motivated by the glory of the gospel, do we look more like Jesus or more like the world, or maybe even not as good as the world? I have to say, I can t even imagine how someone living with the Spirit inside of them could not even live up to the standards of the world, but we do it. At least sometimes. Sometimes we ignore the Spirit completely. Sometimes we don t even hear him anymore because we are so seared and so convinced we are right about everything we can t take the time to listen to others. Not even Christians who disagree with us. In fact, as soon as they suggest something that differs from what we have always thought or that all Christians believe, we shut down and we won t listen to what they say anymore. How may we be worse than the world? In what ways are we not even living up to the nations (let s say the world, the flesh, those who don t follow Christ) around us? o When they show love for those suffering with AIDS, even people who have AIDS because of their drug using or homosexual lifestyle, are we shamed? o When they dig wells to give people water, are we not shamed? o When we use the name of God or quote random Bible verses to prove that we are right. It s amazing how God looks and believes so much like we do about politics, ethics, who the bad guys are etc. o Do we even see other people that are suffering? Well, they are overseas, they are not like us. Why can t we see people like Jesus does. But we need to spend more time serving people near by. Great, why aren't you? o What about all those people who take recycling seriously or actually try to reverse climate change. Bunch of liberal tree huggers. They talk about sacred Mother Earth and stuff. And they shame some of us who just don t care because we think it s all gonna burn anyway. I was listening to a great DVD entitled Lord save us from your followers a few weeks ago. On it, Ron Luce says that whoever is the loudest get their policies enacted. I think he is probably right and I am not necessarily saying that we shouldn t be loud and make our view point known, but what if Christians are the problem? What if they are promoting some things that Jesus would be amazed at? What if we haven t even stopped to consider if the baggage we are carrying around is filled with dead man s bones? We have connected our policies with what Jesus said and never even considered I Peter 4:17 "The time has come for judgment to begin with the household of God"

10 10 And we keep yelling at everyone else, seeking to bring secular society under God s judgment (not a bad thing in and of itself) and we never stop to look at ourselves. Ezekiel says, we must look at ourselves. We think we are walking next to Jesus, but really it s a whole Weekend at Bernies thing. We are just propping him up and making his mouth move and crack his whip. Gerhard Lohfink, in Jesus and Community, makes a strong case that it has always been God s intention to work through a visible, tangible concrete community that lives as a contrast society in the world for the sake of the world. Tim Keller concurs when he says, Christians are truly residents of the city, yet not seeking power over or the approval of the dominant culture. Rather, they show the world an alternative way of living and of being a human community. Here we are Christians, loved by God, set apart to point others to Christ. That s not a false statement. God really does love you, but he also brings judgment on his own house. Are there areas that we can change? A good prayer in the midst of playing music somewhere in service Grant, Almighty God, since we are so dull and heavy, that we may awake in time at thy threats, and submit ourselves to thy power, that we may not experience by our destruction how formidable it is, but profit under thy rod when thou correctest us like a father, and may we so become wise, that through the whole course of our life we may proceed in the continual pursuit and meditation of true repentance; and having put off the vices and filth of the flesh, we may be reformed into true purity, until at length we arrive at the enjoyment of celestial glory, which is laid up for us in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen. John Calvin, at the end of a lecture on Ezekiel 5