Ezekiel 7-9
The End Has Come
7 The word of the Lord came to me.
2 And to you, son of man, this is what the Lord God says about the soil of Israel. An end! The end has come upon the four corners of the land. 3 Now that the end is upon you, I will unleash my anger against you. I will judge you according to your ways, and I will place on you the penalty for all your abominations.[a] 4 My eye will not have pity on you, and I will have no compassion, for I will place on you the penalty for your ways, and the punishment for your abominations will be in your midst. Then you will know that I am the Lord!
5 This is what the Lord God says. Disaster! An unparalleled disaster![b] Watch, it is coming! 6 An end has come! The end has come! It has begun against you. Look, it is coming! 7 Doom[c] has come upon you, you inhabitants of the land. The time has come, the day is near. A day of panic, not joy, is on the mountains. 8 Now very soon I will pour out my wrath upon you, and I will exhaust my anger against you. I will judge you according to your ways, and I will place on you the penalty for all your abominations. 9 My eye will not show pity, and I will have no compassion. According to your ways I will place the penalty on you, and the punishment for your abominations will be in your midst. Then you will know that I, the Lord, am the one who strikes you!
10 Look, the day is coming. It is here. Doom has broken out. The rod has budded. Insolence has blossomed. 11 Violence has grown into a rod against wickedness. None of them will remain—none of their noisy crowd,[d] none of their wealth, not a thing of value among them. 12 The time has come; the day has arrived.
The buyer should not rejoice. The seller should not grieve, because wrath is coming upon the whole noisy crowd. 13 So sellers will not return to what they have sold, even if they survive. Yes, the vision concerning the whole noisy crowd will not be reversed, and each man, because of the guilt in his life, will have no strength. 14 They will blow a blast on the ram’s horn and make everything ready, but no one will go to battle, because my wrath is upon the whole noisy crowd. 15 The sword is outside, and plague and famine are inside. Anyone in the countryside will die by the sword, and anyone in the city—plague and famine will devour him. 16 Any who escape will flee to the mountains, mourning like doves from the valley, each of them in his guilt. 17 All hands will hang limp, and water will run down every knee.[e] 18 They will put on sackcloth, and horror will cover them. Every face will be ashamed, and all their heads will be shaved bald.
19 They will throw their silver into the streets, and their gold will be polluted by blood.[f] Their silver and their gold will not be able to rescue them on the day of the Lord’s fury. The silver and gold will not satisfy their appetites[g] or fill their stomachs, because it was the cause of their guilt and their downfall. 20 From the silver and gold of the Lord’s beautiful ornaments, which were their pride, they made their abominations and their disgusting images.
Therefore, for them I will make it a place polluted by blood. 21 I will hand it over to foreigners as loot. I will give it to the most wicked people on earth as plunder, and they will desecrate it. 22 I will turn my face away from my people so that the enemy may desecrate my treasured place, and so that robbers may enter it and desecrate it. 23 Prepare the chain, because the earth is full of judicial murder,[h] and the city is full of violence. 24 I will bring the most wicked of the nations, and they will take possession of their houses. I will put an end to the pride of the mighty, and their so-called sanctuaries[i] will be desecrated.
25 Terror is coming. They will seek peace, but there will be none. 26 Disaster after disaster will come, and one report will follow another. They will seek a vision from the prophet, but sound instruction will vanish from the priest and the ability to give advice from the elders. 27 The king will mourn, the prince will be clothed with horror, and the hands of the people of the land will tremble. On the basis of their own conduct I will deal with them, and by the standard they used to judge others I will judge them. Then they will know that I am the Lord.
Abominations in the Temple
8 In the sixth year, in the sixth month, on the fifth day of the month,[j] I was sitting in my house, and the elders of Judah were sitting in front of me. The hand of the Lord God fell upon me there. 2 I looked, and there I saw a figure that looked like a man.[k] From what appeared to be his waist down, he looked like fire, and from his waist up, he had the appearance of a dazzling light, something like glowing metal.[l] 3 He reached out with what looked like a hand and seized me by a lock of hair. Then the Spirit[m] lifted me up between earth and heaven and brought me to Jerusalem, while I was experiencing visions from God. He brought me to the entrance of the north gate into the inner courtyard of the Temple, where the idolatrous image of jealousy, which provokes jealousy, was located. 4 Then I looked, and there was the Glory of the God of Israel, as it was in the vision that I had seen in the middle of the river valley.
5 He said to me, “Son of man, look toward the north.” So I looked toward the north, and what did I see! There, north of the altar gate, was this idolatrous image of jealousy beside the entrance. 6 He said to me, “Son of man, do you see what they are doing—what great abominations the house of Israel is practicing here, to distance themselves[n] from my sanctuary! But you will see even greater abominations.”
7 Next, he brought me to the entrance to the courtyard, and I looked and saw that there was a hole in the wall. 8 He said to me, “Son of man, dig through the wall.” So I dug through the wall, and there I saw a doorway. 9 He said to me, “Go in and observe the vile abominations that they are committing here.” 10 When I entered, I looked around, and what did I see! Every form of creeping creature and every kind of detestable animal and all the filthy idols of the house of Israel were engraved on the wall, all around. 11 Seventy men of the elders of the house of Israel—with Ja’azaniah[o] son of Shaphan standing in the middle—were standing in front of the images, each with his censer in his hand, and the fragrance of the cloud of incense was ascending. 12 He said to me, “Do you see, son of man, what the elders of the house of Israel are doing in the darkness, each in his chamber for carved images? Listen! They are saying, ‘The Lord does not see us. The Lord has forsaken the land.’”
13 Then he said to me, “You will see even greater abominations which they are practicing.”
14 Next, he brought me to the entrance of the gateway of the House of the Lord that is on the north side, and right there I saw women sitting and wailing for Tammuz.[p] 15 He said to me, “Do you see, son of man? You will see even greater abominations than these.”
16 Finally, he brought me to the inner courtyard of the House of the Lord, and there at the entrance to the temple of the Lord, between the vestibule and the altar, were twenty-five men, showing their backsides to the temple of the Lord with their faces toward the east, and they were bowing down to the sun in the east. 17 Then he said to me, “Have you seen this, son of man? Is it too trivial for the house of Judah to commit the abominations they are committing here? Do they also have to fill the land with violence, so that they provoke me more and more? They are even sticking the branch up my nose![q] 18 But I also will act in wrath. My eye will not show pity, and I will have no compassion. They will call out to my ears with a loud cry, but I will not hear them.”
Those Without the Mark Are Put to Death
9 Then he called out with a loud voice in my hearing, “Bring the supervisors of the city here, each one of them with his weapon of destruction in his hand.” 2 Then I noticed six men coming from the direction of the upper gate that faces north, each with his weapon, a war club, in his hand. There was also one man in the middle, dressed in linen, with a scribe’s kit at his waist. They entered and stood beside the bronze altar.
3 Now the Glory of the God of Israel ascended from above the cherub, over whom it had been standing, and moved to the threshold of the temple building. He called out to the man who was dressed in linen, who had the scribe’s kit at his waist. 4 The Lord said to him, “Go through the city, through Jerusalem, and put a cross mark[r] on the foreheads of those who moan and lament over the abominations being committed in her.” 5 To the others he said in my hearing, “Follow him through the city and strike the people down. Do not let your eye show pity, and do not have compassion. 6 Old men and young men, virgins, little children, and women—you are to keep killing until you wipe them out completely. But do not go near anyone who has been marked with the cross. You are to begin at my sanctuary.”
So they began with the old men who were in front of the temple. 7 Then he said to them, “Defile the temple and fill the courts with the slain. Go!” So they went and struck them down throughout the city.
8 While they were striking them down, I was left alone and I fell facedown and cried out, “Oh, Lord God! Are you going to destroy everyone who is left in Israel, as you pour out your wrath upon Jerusalem?” 9 He said to me, “The guilt of the house of Israel and Judah is very, very great. The land is filled with bloodshed, and the city is full of injustice, because they say, ‘The Lord has forsaken the land’ and ‘The Lord does not see.’ 10 But I am determined that my eye will show no pity, and I will have no compassion. I will bring down their conduct on their own heads.” 11 Just then, I saw the man dressed in linen, who had the scribe’s kit at his waist. He was reporting, “I have done just as you commanded me.”
Footnotes:
- Ezekiel 7:3 Literally I will place on you all your abominations. In Hebrew it is common to omit mention of the penalty when stating that the Lord will make a person’s guilt cling to him. This idiom occurs throughout this chapter.
- Ezekiel 7:5 Variant disaster after disaster
- Ezekiel 7:7 Or a flood. The meaning of this word is uncertain, here and also in verse 10.
- Ezekiel 7:11 Or their whole horde
- Ezekiel 7:17 Terror will cause them to wet themselves.
- Ezekiel 7:19 The Hebrew word refers to menstrual uncleanness. Blood made a person ceremonially unclean.
- Ezekiel 7:19 Or souls
- Ezekiel 7:23 Like the case in which Jezebel framed Naboth and had him executed
- Ezekiel 7:24 The Hebrew uses a derogatory form of the word sanctuaries, with the connotation their so-called sanctuaries.
- Ezekiel 8:1 During the autumn of 592 bc
- Ezekiel 8:2 The translation like a man follows the Greek text. The Hebrew reads like fire. The two words look very similar in Hebrew.
- Ezekiel 8:2 Or electrum, a natural alloy of silver and gold, or amber
- Ezekiel 8:3 Or the wind. This may be an experience like Elijah’s experience with the whirlwind.
- Ezekiel 8:6 Or me. The Hebrew has no object pronoun.
- Ezekiel 8:11 The stop mark ′ shows that Ja-az should be pronounced as two syllables.
- Ezekiel 8:14 Tammuz was a Babylonian god, who was believed to die at the beginning of the dry season, who then had to be brought back to life by mourning rituals, in order to bring back the rains.
- Ezekiel 8:17 It is not clear what this offensive practice is. The translation follows the alternate Hebrew reading, known as a correction of the scribes. The standard Hebrew text reads putting the branch to their nose, a reference to smelling flowers to cover the stench of what they were doing. But the context requires that this be the ultimate insult to the Lord, so the more offensive reading is likely correct.
- Ezekiel 9:4 The cross mark placed on the people was the Hebrew letter tav, which is the source of the English letter t lowercase (†). The significance of the similarity between the tav and the cross was not apparent, however, at this point, five hundred years before Calvary.
The Holy Bible, Evangelical Heritage Version®, EHV®, © 2019 Wartburg Project, Inc. All rights reserved.
Hebrews 5
Our High Priest Is Like Melchizedek
5 To be sure, every high priest is chosen from the people and is appointed to represent the people in the things pertaining to God, so that he may offer gifts, as well as sacrifices, for sins. 2 He is able to deal gently with those who are ignorant and going astray, since he himself is also weak in many ways. 3 And for this reason he is obligated to offer sacrifices for his own sins, just as he does for the people.
4 No one takes this honor on himself, but he is called by God, just as Aaron was. 5 In the same way, Christ did not take the glory of becoming a high priest on himself, but God said to him:
You are my Son.
Today I have begotten you.[a]
6 He also said the same thing in another place:
You are a priest forever, like Melchizedek.[b]
7 In the days of his flesh,[c] he offered prayers and pleas with loud cries and tears to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence. 8 Although he was the Son, he learned obedience from the things he suffered. 9 After he was brought to his goal, he became the source of eternal salvation for everyone who obeys him, 10 because he was designated by God as a high priest, like Melchizedek.
Milk or Solid Food
11 We have much to say about this, and it is difficult to explain, because you have become too lazy to listen. 12 In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the beginning principles of God’s word all over again. You have become people who need milk, not solid food. 13 For everyone who lives on milk is not acquainted with the word of righteousness, because he is still an infant. 14 But solid food is for mature people, who have their senses trained by practice to distinguish between good and evil.
Footnotes:
- Hebrews 5:5 Psalm 2:7
- Hebrews 5:6 Psalm 110:4
- Hebrews 5:7 This refers to Christ’s state of humiliation.
The Holy Bible, Evangelical Heritage Version®, EHV®, © 2019 Wartburg Project, Inc. All rights reserved.
Psalm 105:1-15
Psalm 105
The Lord Remembers His Covenant
Opening Praise
1 Give thanks to the Lord.
Proclaim[a] his name.
Make his deeds known among the peoples.
2 Sing to him, make music to him.
Meditate on all his wonders.
3 Take pride in his holy name.
Let the heart of those who seek the Lord rejoice.
4 Search for the Lord and his strength.
Seek his face always.
5 Remember the wonders which he has done,
his signs, and the judgments from his mouth,
6 you descendants of Abraham his servant,
you sons of Jacob, his chosen ones.
7 He is the Lord our God.
His judgments are in all the earth.
The Promise of the Covenant
8 He remembers his covenant forever,
the word he commanded for a thousand generations,
9 the covenant which he made with Abraham,
and his oath to Isaac.
10 Yes, he confirmed it to Jacob as a statute,
to Israel as an everlasting covenant.
11 He said, “To you I will give the land of Canaan,
the territory you will possess.”
The Lord Is Faithful in Canaan:
His Protection of the Patriarchs
12 While they were few in number,
just a little group and aliens in the land,
13 they moved around from nation to nation,
from one kingdom to another people.
14 He did not allow anyone to oppress them,
and he rebuked kings because of them:
15 “Do not touch my anointed ones,
and do not harm my prophets.”
Footnotes:
- Psalm 105:1 Or call on
The Holy Bible, Evangelical Heritage Version®, EHV®, © 2019 Wartburg Project, Inc. All rights reserved.
Proverbs 26:28
28 A lying tongue hates those it crushes,
and a smooth mouth causes ruin.
The Holy Bible, Evangelical Heritage Version®, EHV®, © 2019 Wartburg Project, Inc. All rights reserved.