SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 11/16/2014
8:31 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
4th Action Sermon PT-2 “The
Destiny of the People”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Ezekiel
5:5-17
Message of the
verses: “5 "Thus says the Lord
GOD, ’This is Jerusalem; I have set her at the center of the nations, with
lands around her. 6 ’But she has
rebelled against My ordinances more wickedly than the nations and against My
statutes more than the lands which surround her; for they have rejected My
ordinances and have not walked in My statutes.’ 7 “Therefore, thus says the
Lord GOD, ’Because you have more turmoil than the nations which surround you
and have not walked in My statutes, nor observed My ordinances, nor observed
the ordinances of the nations which surround you,’ 8 therefore, thus says the
Lord GOD, ’Behold, I, even I, am against you, and I will execute judgments
among you in the sight of the nations. 9 ’And because of all your abominations,
I will do among you what I have not done, and the like of which I will never do
again. 10 ’Therefore, fathers will eat their sons among you, and sons will eat
their fathers; for I will execute judgments on you and scatter all your remnant
to every wind. 11 ’So as I live,’ declares the Lord GOD, ’surely, because you
have defiled My sanctuary with all your detestable idols and with all your
abominations, therefore I will also withdraw, and My eye will have no pity and
I will not spare. 12 ’One third of you
will die by plague or be consumed by famine among you, one third will fall by
the sword around you, and one third I will scatter to every wind, and I will
unsheathe a sword behind them. 13 ’Thus
My anger will be spent and I will satisfy My wrath on them, and I will be appeased;
then they will know that I, the LORD, have spoken in My zeal when I have spent
My wrath upon them. 14 ’Moreover, I will make you a desolation and a reproach
among the nations which surround you, in the sight of all who pass by. 15 ’So
it will be a reproach, a reviling, a warning and an object of horror to the
nations who surround you when I execute judgments against you in anger, wrath
and raging rebukes. I, the LORD, have spoken. 16 ’When I send against them the
deadly arrows of famine which were for the destruction of those whom I will
send to destroy you, then I will also intensify the famine upon you and break
the staff of bread. 17 ’Moreover, I will send on you famine and wild beasts,
and they will bereave you of children; plague and bloodshed also will pass
through you, and I will bring the sword on you. I, the LORD, have
spoken.’"”
The first thing I want to do is quote a sentence from
Steward Briscoe’s commentary on Ezekiel, which is at the very end of his
commentary on chapter five, as this will give us the flavor of what we are
about to look at as we try and finish what is seen in Ezekiel chapter
five: “Could one say that God prefers to be unrepresented
rather than misrepresented?”
These are very sobering words to think about and what we are going to be
looking at in the remaining verses of chapter five show us that God was being misrepresented
by Jews in Jerusalem and this is one of the reasons that He was about to
destroy the city of Jerusalem along with the Temple that was in that city. Now as we look at the history of different
countries and kingdoms around the world we can see that on many occasions when
God was misrepresented that that kingdom fell, and so my prayer is for our
country that the Church in our country will not misrepresent the Lord so that
it will not be necessary for Him to destroy us as He did the Southern kingdom
of Israel.
Steward Briscoe writes “The Lord told Ezekiel that his
actions conveyed the appalling fact that a third of the people of Jerusalem
would perish in the city, a third would be destroyed outside the city, and the
final third, with the exception of a few people, would be scattered to the four
winds (5:12).”
We know that the people of Israel (all Israel) were a privileged
people and the Apostle Paul speaks to this in the book of Romans: 4 “who are
Israelites, to whom belongs the adoption as sons, and the glory and the
covenants and the giving of the Law and the temple service and the promises, 5
whose are the fathers, and from whom is the Christ according to the flesh, who
is over all, God blessed forever. Amen (Romans 9:4-5).” Paul is lamenting over
the fact that the Jewish people had all of these special blessings from the
Lord and yet they did not obey what He had told them to do and thus in a few
short years after Paul wrote these words the city of Jerusalem would be
destroyed for a second time, and basically for the same reasons, and one of
those reasons is that they were not representing the Lord in the way that they
should have been, and if they had been doing this they would have recognized
that their Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ had come to them from heaven to pay
for their sins. I guess that the sad
part of history is that it repeats itself as we see in the case of the people
of Jerusalem. Briscoe writes “Privileged
people, however are the ones who bear the responsibilities. The incontrovertible fact of Jerusalem’s
inexcusable failure and rebellion necessitated an equally incontrovertible
action of God in judgment. The people of
God who sin publicly and thereby delude and confuse the public, must expect drastic
and public actions from the God they have so grossly misrepresented.”
He goes on to write “To think like this is to ignore the
principles of God’s dealings with His ancient people and also to overlook the
specific teachings of our Lord Jesus and the saga of Church history.” Let us look at Revelations 2:5 where Jesus
says to the church of Ephesus “’Therefore remember from where you have fallen,
and repent and do the deeds you did at first; or else I am coming to you and
will remove your lampstand out of its place-unless you repent.” You can go to where Ephesus is today, in
modern day Turkey, and not find anything that represented that early church,
however when we began our study of the book of Thessalonians we saw that the
city is still there and I would suppose that there are Bible believing churches
in that city today.
In verses five and six we see the reasons, (and we have
been looking at some of them), as to why the Lord was going to destroy the city
of Jerusalem: “5 "Thus says the
Lord GOD, ’This is Jerusalem; I have set her at the center of the nations, with
lands around her. 6 ’But she has
rebelled against My ordinances more wickedly than the nations and against My
statutes more than the lands which surround her; for they have rejected My
ordinances and have not walked in My statutes.’” We have mentioned many reasons why the Lord
destroyed the city of Jerusalem and why He did it two times and I would like to
add one more. The people of Israel were
a special people in the eyes of God and it was His desire that they spread what
He had taught them to the nations around them, but instead of doing this they
ended up living like the sinful people around them. We know that there will
come a day in the future when all Israel will be saved and this will happen at
the end of the Tribulation period and those people will go into the Millennial
Kingdom and be a light to the Gentiles like God had planned for them to be all
along.
In verses 7-11 we see that because the people of Israel
(Southern Kingdom) had openly sinned then God would punish them in the
open. This kind of reminds me of when
David sinned privately with Bathsheba that God told him that this would happen to
his wives and concubines publicly and it happened just at the Lord said it
would when Absalom did as God said would happen.
Dr. Wiersbe writes “In verses 12-17, the Lord explains
again the awfulness of the judgment coming to the people left in the city and
the land. Pestilence and famine will take on-third of them; another one-third
will be killed by the Babylonian army, the remainder will be scattered. Why? Because God was ‘spending His wrath’ and
‘accomplishing His fury’ upon His sinful people.” There were some terrible things that happened
to the people of Jerusalem during the siege that the Babylonians put on the
people of that city, and as we read in Jeremiah this did not need to happen
because all they had to do was follow what Jeremiah told them to do and that
was surrender to the Babylonians, but because of pride and because of the
messages that the false prophets were giving them they did not do this and thus
all these terrible things happened to them.
Spiritual meaning
for my life today: We are now living
in the Church age and we have more light than the people of Israel had during
the time we are studying about. Paul
writes that the things written in the OT are there for us to learn from, but do
we learn from them, or do we become proud because of what Christ has done for
us on the cross and not do the things that the Lord has commanded us to
do. It is my desire to tell as many
people as I can about the Gospel of Jesus Christ so that they can be saved from
their sins, for this is what the Lord told His Church to do: “18
And Jesus came up and spoke to them, saying, "All authority has
been given to Me in heaven and on earth. 19
"Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them
in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I commanded
you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age’ (Matthew
28:18-20).”
My Steps of Faith for Today: Trust the Lord to guide me in fulfilling the
great commission today and every day.
Memory verse for the
week: 2 Peter 1:1.
1 Simon Peter, a
bond-servant and apostle of Jesus Christ, to those who have received a faith of
the same kind as ours, by the righteousness of our God and Savior, Jesus
Christ:
Answer to yesterday’s Bible
question: “The angel of the Lord”
(Matthew 28:6).
Today’s Bible
question: “In what city did Jesus raise
a widow’s son from the dead?”
Answer in our next SD.
11/16/2014 9:27 AM
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