A collection of Facebook posts:
1
Ezekiel 19. Ezekiel laments the princes of Israel. They are lion cubs taken to Egypt and Babylon. Their mother Israel is a lioness. But she has been destroyed like a vine that is plucked up and cast to the ground. Do we weep for a broken church? How the strength of our leadership has failed? Or do we find pride in our little conventicle of holiness and despise fallen Jerusalem? Let us hope for resurrection!
2
Ezekiel 20: 1-44: God gives the history of Israel, telling how he again and again took a disobedient Israel punished her, covenanted with her again and how she left him again and again. God will now bring her into a new wilderness, even as he did at Sinai and renew his covenant with her so that she shall know he is the Lord.
It is hard to imagine that the church is so different. As I study church history the church turns again and again from the Lord and goes after idols. And one of the greatest idols is that we can reform her and bring her back together by our wisdom. God is Sovereign. He destroyed Israel, he brought her to the wilderness cleansed her, and united her again into one people. We serve the same God today. So to quote verse 39 and 40: As for you, O house of Israel (as for you, oh you Pentecostals, Reformed, Anglicans, Lutherans, Baptists, Roman Catholics, Orthodox) thus says the Lord God: Go serve every one of you his idols, now and hereafter, if you will not listen to me: by my holy name you shall no longer profane with you gifts and your idols. For on my holy mountain, the mountain heights of Israel, declares the Lord God, there all the house of Israel (the church), all of them, shall serve me in the land (In Christ, the world). There I will accept them, and there I will require your contributions and the choicest of your gifts, with all your sacred offerings.
The just will live by faith!
3
Ezekiel 20: 45-49. Ezekiel prophecies toward the South. He is in exile, so South is Judah. God will start a fire that will devour every green tree and dry tree, (the people who inhabit Judah) and that will not be quenched, scorching those who look on from the north and the south. The land of Judah will fundamentally be turned into a hell.
The idea is quite clear. Yet Ezekiel complains that the people respond to this message, “He is a maker of parables.” He is a story-teller not a serious man. This is the response of the wicked to the warnings of the righteous. They claim that they do not understand and in a real sense they do not for they have shut off their eyes and their minds to the truth.
4
Ezekiel 21. God reveals a sword against the people of Judah. Both the rightoeus and the wicked will come under its slaughter. “A sword, a sword is sharpened and also polished, sharpened for slaughter, polished to flash like lightning!” For, explains God, “you have despised everything of wood.”
The passage goes on to explain that this sword is given to Nebuchadnezzar who will come against the land of Israel and through this king God says, “a ruin, ruin, ruin I will make it.”
He goes on to declare the judgment on Ammon a neighboring country as well. They will share in the judgement of Judah, but sadly they are misled by false prophecy.
God disciplines Canada through his rod of wood, today. Will we turn to the Lord before he comes against us with a sword? Or must we groan with breaking heart and bitter grief, as righteous and wicked are caught up in the judgment of God?
5
Ezekiel 22: 1-22 Ezekiel brings another indictment against Judah. He goes through a litany of her sins, especially her bloodshed, but also her sexual perversion and her perversion of justice. So the Lord will take her and melt her as silver in a furnace.
Interestingly, the furnace image is used. It is often used in the scriptures as a picture of refinement. Perhaps there is hope for these bloody, perverted people.
vs. 23-31. We are told that the prophets whitewash her sins. The men that are called to reveal the way of the Lord and call her back enable her in her sins.
Then God says something very interesting: “And I sought for a man among them who should build up the wall and stand in the breach before me for the land, that I should not destroy them, but I found none.”
Yes, Canada is full of blood. Canada, too, deserves to melt in God’s furnace for her hands full of the blood of abortions, the sexual abuse of children through grooming, and the injustices that increase within our socialist system. Yes, the prophets of Canada seek to whitewash their sin, but perhaps there are some who will plead for Canada yet and stand in the breach before God.
For we do have more than Ezekiel had, we have the person of Christ, who stood in the breach before God, whose people were so thankful for his service that they killed him. And yet, through that death, he was all the more effective in standing in that breach. If we come before God in Christ, we can still have hope for the sake of our nation.
6
Ezekiel 23: God tells another story, this time of two whores, Oholah and Oholibah. Each sister, outdoes the other in her whoring. We are told that they are Jerusalem and Samaria. They are both turned on by their lover. Oholah by Assyria and Oholibah by the Chaldeans. When our loves are disordered, we are often destroyed by the object of our those disordered loves. Rightly ordered love. Love that puts God first does not destroy but glorifies.
I encourage you to read the chapter, it demonstrates the utter self-destruction that comes through sexual perversion.
7
Ezekiel 24: 1-14. God, through Ezekiel compares Jerusalem to a pot full of corrosion. Ezekiel is to boil a lamb in the pot, but the pot is Jerusalem. It is full of corrosion, full of the blood of evil deed. The pot will be set on the fire without anything in it and it will be burn and destroyed by the fire.
Jerusalem is a vessel of the Lord that is called to present good things, good sacrifices. But her evil deeds make all that she does like an unclean pot. She makes things that should come before God clean, unclean. She is useless to God.
2 Timothy picks up this kind of imagery. Calling upon the church as vessels of God to find cleanness through the blood of Christ, so that they being clean, may bring clean things before the Lord. So, let us too, taking warning from Ezekiel seek to come before God cleansed by the blood of Christ, carrying within us the sweet smelling sacrifice of Spirit-wrought good works before the Lord.
8
Sometimes the stubborn unbelief of the people of God silences the leaders of God. They cannot even weep for the sake of that stubborn unbelief. They can only watch in horror. God must act. He must punish. Only then can the prophet be heard again.
Ezekiel 24:15-27. Ezekiel is again to be an object lesson for the sake of Judah. His wife is about to die, and he is not to mourn for her, meaning that he will not put on the customary clothes that one might put on in order to mourn the passing of someone who is close to you. Neither is he to lift up his voice in audible groaning and weeping. This was done out of a demonstration of love and duty toward those who were taken away.
Ezekiel will be like the people. They will not have an opportunity to mourn for the temple that is to be destroyed. They will not have an opportunity to mourn for their children who will die by the sword. There sin has shut them off from the natural need to weep for what is lost.
Ezekiel is to refrain from mourning until a refugee comes and announces what has happened. Then he will be allowed to speak again and the people of God will know that the Lord is God.
9
Ezekiel 25: God is not merely a God of Israel, God is a God of the world. So Ezekiel brings the word of the Lord to the nations around Israel. God speaks against the nations in this passage because of what they have done in relation to his beloved Judah. Ammon exulted himself against God’s sanctuary. Moab and Seir said Judah is just like the other nations, Edom acted revengefully against the house of Judah, and so did the Philistines. Therefore, they participate in the judgement against Jerusalem.
God clearly still loves his people even as he judges them. That can only be for the sake of his promise. That is why he keeps for himself a remnant.
Therefore, though the church seems broken and full of sin, we can know that God still desires to keep the church for the sake of his son. And even as the enemies of God attack a sinful church so God will revenge himself upon the church’s enemies.
10
Ezekiel 26: In one of the more fascinating prophecies against the nations, Ezekiel turns to Tyre. Tyre has boasted: “Aha, the gate of the peoples is broken; it has swung open to me. I shall be replenished, now that she is laid waste.” This suggests a rivalry between Tyre and Jerusalem. Hiram, king of Tyre was a sponsor of King David and King Solomon back in the day, even sponsoring the temple that was in Jerusalem. Some even suggest Hiram may have converted. Tyre was made great side by side with Jerusalem. Now Tyre celebrates Jerusalem’s downfall. God is full of wrath for her ingratitude toward him.
The close connections between Tyre and Jerusalem and between Tyre and the temple of God explain why God has so much to say about Tyre through Ezekiel. Tyre will be laid waste even as Jerusalem and God also laments over her as he laments over Jerusalem.
11
Ezekiel 27: God commands Ezekiel to raise a lament for Tyre. Again, the lament seems important because of the closeness between Tyre and Jerusalem. Tyre seems to be a type of what Jerusalem could be, a great merchant city. Or we could say, that Tyre traded in physical goods, while Jerusalem traded in spiritual goods. The Babylon of Revelation 17-19, for example, is also a great merchant, and the most likely reference to this Babylon is, in fact, Jerusalem. In that way, Tyre’s trade is an eschatological picture of Jerusalem. Therefore God weeps over the good that Tyre represented even though she had become evil by viewing Jerusalem as a competitor rather than a partner.
12
Ezekiel 28: 1-19. If Ezekiel 26 and 27 have had tantalizing connections to Israel, the condemnation of the Prince of Tyre and the lament over the king of Tyre have even more so. The description of the Prince of Tyre, “wiser than Daniel” and the words of lamentation over the King of Tyre “you were in the garden of God; every precious stone was your covering,” have caused many to speculate that God is not just talking about the king of Tyre. Some suggest that God is talking about Satan and that is a possibility with references to wisdom (the serpent was wiser than all the other creatures) and his call as a guardian cherub. It could be a reference to Adam. He too was in the garden and called to be a guardian. It could be a reference to the High Priest, especially the descriptions of the stones that are the King of Tyre’s coverings are the same that are on the High Priest’s Ephod.
I prefer the last. We’ve already mentioned the connection between Hiram of Tyre and Solomon of Jerusalem. Hiram is the sponsor of the temple. The cedar of the temple comes from Lebanon. The King of Tyre and the High Priest of Jerusalem are being conflated as one. God’s judgement on Tyre is like the judgement that will also be on Jerusalem. Tyre in a sense becomes Jerusalem so that the Jerusalem that is in Judea may be rebuilt.
I am guessing and like many others I find this a difficult passage. May God grant his church growth in knowledge so that she may dig into the ancient scriptures and pull out treasures old and new for the sake of his glory.
13
Ezekiel 25-28 presents fascinating potential typologies of Israel, that might help explain what is going on in Romans 11.
Ezekiel 28:20-26. Now God calls Ezekiel to set his face against Sidon. Sidon too will fall. This is the last of the nations around Israel that will be judged for their envy of Israel. God is not only remaking Israel through the judgment that is coming from Babylon, he is re-making the world.
This is shown in how the judgment against Sidon transitions into a promise for Israel. Through his judgments, God is freeing Israel from those who pricked her in the past.
God adds here that the same Israel he has scattered through the nations, he will gather again.
If I am correct that God is conflating Tyre with Israel and the king of Tyre with the High Priest in the temple earlier in chapters 26 and 27, then the false Israel, the whoring Israel, is now destroyed and completely flattened as Tyre is, while the remnant, the true Israel that is scattered through the nations by the judgment of God will be brought back to the land and restored.
The same happened through Christ. The Jerusalem below became Babylon and was destroyed by God. But all Israel was saved, the true Israel, Jewish, but now with Gentile believers grafted into the vine, became the true Israel.
14
Ezekiel 29. We turn from Israel to Egypt. Interestingly, the two long prophesies are against Tyre and Egypt. A very short promise to Israel stands inbetween. She is receiving a similar judgment to the nations, but she is the people of God. She is destroyed like Egypt and like Tyre, but she is the people of God.
Egypt is punished because of their false promises to Israel and their pride “Because you said ‘the Nile is mine, and I made it.” Egypt will be given to Nebedchudnezzar as a payment for his inability to take Tyre. Egypt will be saved, but Egypt will be very small. It will never again be able to be the reliance of the house of Israel. Israel will never again be able to go back to her former masters.
Egypt is contrasted with Israel at the end of the passage. Egypt will be small, but there is a horn (power and strength) for the house of Israel.
15
Ezekiel 30. The Ancient nations produced amazing things despite their all too common rejection of God and the people of Israel. For this reason God does not delight in their destruction. Rather, he commands laments over the nations; First a lament over Tyre and now a lament over Egypt. Her glory and wealth are given to Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon. The Egyptians, like the Israelites will be scattered throughout the nations.
16
Ezekiel 31: God compares Pharaoh and Egypt to Assyria. Assyria was a beautiful tree that rivaled the beauty of the trees of the garden of God, but God made it fall and the land mourned over it. The point is, God brought destruction on the great tree of Assyria, will Egypt avoid the coming judgment?
God is almighty and righteous, he raises the poor up and brings the proud down low? What makes you think that you will escape?
Yet, the just will live by faith.
17
Ezekiel 32: God commands a lament over Egypt. Pharaoh imagines that he is a lion of the land, but he is a serpent of the sea. This fits the imagery of scripture, the nations around Israel are the sea and their leaders are the great beasts of the sea. He will be dragged out of the sea and dealt with. Again, God repeats that Babylon will come against Egypt and destroy it. It is the second part here that is particularly fascinating starting in verse 17. Here Pharaoh is brought to the pit and there he is joined by the other uncircumcised nations. All the world is being brought to the tohu and wabohu that characterized the world at Creation. God is making a new world. And when Pharaoh sees this, he will be comforted.