Ezekiel 14:12-16:41, Hebrews 7:18-28, Psalms 106:1-12, Proverbs 27:4-6
Today is November 6th. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I am Brian. It is wonderful to be here with you today as we continue our journey through this week. And…well…yeah…as we’re getting fully moved into this month, I trust all is well wherever you are, but this I know, we’re around the global campfire now and things are well here. So, no matter what’s swirling around outside, this space that we have to allow God’s word to speak to us and just wash into our lives and into our hearts, no matter what’s swirling on outside of here, inside of here, around our proverbial global campfire, this is a safe place. We can let those things go. They’ll be there. They’ll be there. They’re not going to go away. They’ll probably try to rush in upon us as soon as we leave this space that we’ve created to hear God’s word, but we may leave here more ready for what those things have to say and we may have a lot more strength than when we came in. So, let’s still ourselves and let God’s word speak to us today. We’re reading from the Contemporary English Version this week and continuing our journey through the book of Ezekiel. And today we’ll read chapter 14 verse 12 through 16 verse 41.
Commentary:
Okay. How…how many of you within the sound of my voice have feelings? Right? How many of you have emotions or an emotional life? We all have to raise our hands because emotions, this is something that is highly developed in the human species. And although we’re not the only creatures on this planet that have feelings, we do, and what we do with them is sort of a matter of the story of our lives. I was…I was taught all through my child not to trust my feelings. So, like I was raised to suppress my feelings because they couldn’t be counted on because they could lead me astray. And then I reached a point where I was like, “man, I’m not feeling much of anything, I need to get in touch with my feelings.” So, it was like this back and forth emotional part of our lives. Does…does God have feelings, though? Does God have an emotional life? I mean, on the one hand we’re created in His image so He must, right? Then on the other hand, He’s is God so He wouldn’t have to feel anything. Like if we come to Him and say, “I’ve sinned Father and this is what I’ve done”, then he just forgives us and we don’t think about it, we just move on, He doesn’t have any feelings about it, we’re allowed to release our feelings from it. Like He’s too perfect to feel distress, but that’s not the story we find about God in the Bible. We don’t find this being who checks in from time to time but really doesn’t care, He’s just completely aloof to it all. Even the Bible that we’re reading, like if God didn’t care at all to put down the things that He felt about things, and the right paths to walk, then we wouldn’t be having the Bible. So, if He didn’t feel something toward us we wouldn’t be reading the Bible and since we are reading the Bible it’s pretty hard to find this aloof, dispassionate being who couldn’t care less. At least the way I read the Bible God is very passionate in the Bible. And passion that like…that’s an emotional thing. So, we have been working our way since we’ve gotten into the profits into a lot of warnings and we’ve heard a lot of horrible things that that are potentially out in front of the people who are hearing the prophecies because they won't…because they won’t return to the One that they entered into covenant with. And to understand the heart of God, the way he feels about things, is…is no more vivid than what we read in the book of Ezekiel today in all of the Bible. God was speaking to His people, the Hebrew people, and He told a story about his little baby girl. And she was born, and she didn’t even have her umbilical cord cut. Like, she was unwanted and…and so she had been abandoned in a field to die or…or…or to be eaten by a wild animal. And God said He came by and He saw her kicking in that field in her own blood and, quoting from Ezekiel, “as you lay there, I said live.” And, so, the story goes on and the baby moves out of infancy and…and becomes a lovely beautiful young woman under God’s care. And when she’s old enough, God enters into covenant, a covenant of marriage with her and He bestows all kinds of wonderful things upon her. She has lack for nothing. She’s cared for. She is loved when she should have perished in that field. And now she’s grown up to be as beautiful as a queen. And this is the imagery that God is choosing to use prophetically to speak to his people about what has happened in their relationship. And, so, He says, “like, you grew up. Things were great. We were in love. But you started noticing you were beautiful, and you started noticing people notice that your beautiful and you liked it. And, so, before long…before long she’d committed adultery, she’d stepped out on the relationship. But it wasn’t just this one-time kind of accidental…if there is such a thing…slip up. She began to prostitute herself, she would sleep with anybody and she was taking all the good things that God had given her and she was using those things to commit adultery with the other nations and worship the other gods of the other nations who had become her lovers. And, so, God is basically, “like…I can’t…I can’t believe this is happening.” Right? “How could such a thing ever happen? This is unbelievable.” We should be able to be tracking with this story. I mean like, some of us have been walked through stories like this, but whether we’ve actually walked through a story like this or not, we should be tracking with this story. It’s like this story of…of a little baby girl that shouldn’t have lived who grew up to become as beautiful as a queen who left the one who saved her life and loved her and was just promiscuous all over the place. So, it’s like a terribly ungrateful story. And if it just ended there, that would…that would be enough. But let me just read God’s words. These…these are the words He spoke through Jeremiah. “Then you took your sons and daughters, the children you bore me, and you sacrificed them to your God’s. Wasn’t enough to be a prostitute. Do you have to slaughter my kids by sacrificing them to your idols?” Like, in all of your years of adultery and detestable sin, you have not once remembered the days long ago when you lay naked in a field kicking in your own blood. What sorrow awaits you says the sovereign Lord.” So, if at the beginning when I was like, “does God have any feelings?” If you were like, “No. I don’t really think He does.” Well then go read Ezekiel chapter 16 again. It seems as if he very much does. And from the perspective of the story that God told, one that we can really deeply relate to, even though it’s thousands of years old it’s as relevant today as ever. We can see why He sent the profits to tell the people this is going nowhere, this isn’t going to work, we are in covenant. This is not how this relationship is designed to operate. You are going to destroy yourself and I’m watching you do it and I’m getting so…I’m getting so angry at what’s happening here. This is not gonna work.” So, we can say like, “yeah, there’s a lot of promises of judgment in the prophets”, but we have to know that they’re…they’re the outcome of the path the people are on. If the people are gonna continue on that path then God is prophetically, in advance, saying what is going to happen. So, rather than this God with a thunderbolt so angry that He’s scorching the earth, we need to understand that God is upset because His beloved is cheating on Him. And He’s saying, “if you’re gonna go that way this is what it will look like. However, you don’t have to go that way. You can come back to me. You can return to me and I will actually take you back. You don’t deserve it at all, but I will take you back because I love you.? And all of a sudden, we can see that this story is an ongoing story. It’s a story that would send Jesus here to rescue us. So, if we want to…if we really really want what’s going on here, what’s being said here then we need to look at ourselves as the little girl in the story, which…which should make us uncomfortable. And maybe as we end our time here and we kind of all go away from the global campfire out into the world, maybe we should just stay here by ourselves for little bit just around the campfire alone. Maybe there’s a conversation with God that needs to happen because now maybe we’re seeing that He really does love us and what we do does matter to Him and does matter to his heart.
Prayer:
Father…Father forgive us. We don’t know what we’re doing, and this was Your prayer as You were being executed on our behalf. This was Your prayer. And, so, we ask forgiveness. Your words spoken in the book of Ezekiel certainly bring this home and bring this close. It’s just so easy to think of You as the eternal forgiver, that that You will overlook all of our faults, and You will. It’s a love that is so beyond our capacity we can’t even comprehend it, but we confess that we’ve abused Your mercy and grace and kindness so many times we wouldn’t even know where to start to count. And now we’re seeing what that feels like for You from the book of Ezekiel and that changes things because now we’re seeing what we haven’t seen before. Forgive is God. Take us back Lord. We come running back to You asking for forgiveness, not forgiveness so that we can turn around and cheat on You, as it were, again tomorrow, but so that we understand that we have entered into a covenant and it is all that we are in exchange for all that You are and it’s so lopsided in our favor, why would we ever walk away? And yet we confess we have sinned against You in thought, word, and deed by what we have done and by what we have left undone and we are truly sorry and we humbly repent. Come Holy Spirit and lead us into all truth we ask in the name of Jesus. Amen.
Song:
Gungor – Ezekiel
I found you naked
I found you lying there
In blood.
Your mother left you,
Your father threw you out.
Unloved.
I clothed your body
I washed the blood and dirt
From your hair.
I gave you jewelry
I gave you everything
I had.
I gave My heart
My heart, My love
I gave my heart,
My heart, My love
You became like
You were a stunning Bride
The world, they saw you
And how you loved their wives
My Bride
You broke My heart
My heart, My love
You broke My heart
My heart, My love.
You sold your body;
Exposed to all, My love
You slept with Stranger
You gave them everything we had.
Come back, My love
My love, come back.
Come back, My love.
My love, come back.