SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 11/20/2014
10:53 AM
My Worship Time Focus: Ezekiel’s
Second Spoken Message PT-1
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Ezekiel
7:1-9
Message of the
verses: Today we begin the last main
section in the second chapter of Warren Wiersbe’s commentary on the book of
Ezekiel, a section that has three sub-sections in it. I will also give some quotes from Steward
Briscoe’s commentary on Ezekiel which is entitled “All Things Weird and
Wonderful.” We will begin with an introduction
to this main section.
The seventh chapter is a difficult chapter to read, for
it tells the story of when the Lord’s patience and long-suffering came to an
end, and thus from our study of Jeremiah and also second Kings and second
Chronicles we see that the Lord was going to destroy the land and many of the
children of Israel. God gave the
children a marriage covenant at Mt. Sinai and they had broken this marriage
covenant with him by worshiping idols which is the first commandment that God
gave them to follow, and this goes against the attribute of God which is that
God is a jealous God and will not stand for His people to worship idols whether
stone, wood idols or idols that put things before the worship of God, things
like money, sex, TV watching, things like that.
I was posting an older SD onto my blog today and the title of it is
called “Idols.” You can see that on the
blog which will help to better understand a bit more about idols. In that SD is a quote from Warren Wiersbe
which says “The greatest judgment God can send to people is to let them have
their own way.” Let us say that a person
has the idol of trying to make a lot of money, and he puts that before his
worship of God, and he does not want to repent of this “idol” and so God allows
him to continue which causes him to have a lot of stress, and he does not have
time to go to the doctor to get help with this stress and so he ends up with a
heart attack and is not able to continue his quest to make a lot of money. This little story fits into this quote from
Warren Wiersbe, and as we look at the nation of Israel we see that it was their
desire to continue to worship idols, not repenting of this sin and so God
allows and even plans to have the Babylonians attack them and to send many of
them to their death, many to be exiles in Babylon, and many to die from the
causes of war.
The End
I
will begin with a couple of quotes from Steward Briscoe that meant a lot to me
when I read them this morning: “After
years of patience and centuries of forbearing, the time had run out. The Lord announced that it would be counterproductive
for Him to give further opportunities for repentance. The time had come when, in the Lord’s view,
He would begin to undermine His justice if He continued to express His
mercy. The time had come for the Lord to
do what He had been promising to do because if He held off any longer, people
would assume He either didn’t mean what He said or couldn’t do what He
promised. For either of these things to
happen would be a disaster of major proportions. Better to pour out judgment on the unrepentant
than to give opportunity to the unrepentant to think that the Omnipotent has
become impotent. Better to run the risk
of God being castigated as a cruel God than have the people think that He must
have died because He hasn’t done anything for so long.”
“Makkeh”
“But do not fail to see that even at the point of the ‘end’
when God says, ‘All right, that’s it,’ He still warns before He act. There is no such thing as the judgment of God
without warning, and there is never judgment without evidence of mercy. If the Book of Ezekiel in these early,
difficult chapters reminds us of nothing else, it speaks forcibly to the fact
of God’s remarkable dealings with the people He has made. Dealings that are designed to draw them to
Himself in life-styles of trust, love, and satisfaction, dealings that promise
forgiveness and mercy even in the administration of justice and judgment.
“In
the middle of the statement the Lord announced Himself by a striking title, ‘Jehovah-makkeh’—the
Lord who strikes (7:9)! John Taylor states ‘To hearers and readers who were
used to the names of God like ‘Jehovah-jireh’ and ‘Jehovah-nissi’ it must have
come home with tremendous force to have Him described as ‘Jehovah-makkeh’. The Lord who had provided and protected was
about to strike.’
“In
our need to for us to know that He is the Lord, we must never be allowed to
forget that Jehovah is ‘makkeh’ as truly as He is ‘jireh’ and ‘nissi.’ To leave out any aspect of His revealed Being
is to paint an unsatisfactory picture.
It’s rather like an artist determining to paint a woodland scene of
light and shadow by arbitrarily deciding to use no black or grey and trying to
portray the full glory of the scene with only pinks and greens.”
I think that these were wise words from Steward Briscoe,
and that is not surprising to me as I have heard him preach, and know that he
was a successful pastor to the church he was pasturing in Wisconsin. I am truly enjoying reading his commentary on
the book of Ezekiel.
I want to say a couple of things before I conclude this
SD, and that is that I will go over the verses from Ezekiel 7:1-9 more in our
next SD and the other thing I want to say is more difficult to understand and
that is there are things we read about in the Word of God that are hard to
understand. There has been an argument
between those who are called “Calvinists” and those who are called “Armenians” for
a very long time. The fact is that both
are taught in the pages of Scripture and to try and understand this will cause
you as John MacArthur says to “crawl under the bed reciting the Greek
dictionary,” in other words we as humans cannot understand some of the things
in the Bible. Look for a moment at this
verse: “"The secret things belong
to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our sons
forever, that we may observe all the words of this law (Deu. 29:29.” God is saying that the things that I have taught
you I want you to obey the, but there are things that I have not made clear to
you, things that are secret. One of the definitions
of this Hebrew word that is translated as “secret” is “to hide carefully,” and
that should help us to understand that there are things that while we are in
this body we will not understand.
The children of Israel were God’s people as we have
stated before that God had a marriage covenant with them that took place at Mt.
Sinai, and yet it was in the “plan” of God for all of this to happen to
them. God is sovereign and there are
things He does that we will never understand this side of heaven, but we still
have to believe them. One of the reasons, in fact probably the main reason that
God through a miracle began the nation of Israel was that the Messiah, the Lord
Jesus Christ would be born through this nation.
Just as Isaac was a miracle baby, so was the Lord Jesus Christ a miracle
baby. Jesus came into the world to
fulfill what the will of the Father was for Him as He stated as a twelve year
old that He came to do His Father’s will and then at the end as He was about to
die He stated “it is finished.” The word
actually means “paid in full,” and that was the will of the Father to have His
Son pay in full for the sins of those who would come to Him by grace through
faith. God, once again we state, is
sovereign and will do what He wants to do in order to fulfill His plans for
mankind, even having to destroy many of His children, the children of Israel.
Spiritual meaning
for my life today: If I, or for that matter, anyone else wants to get to know
the Lord better we do, we have to study His attributes, and another good way to
better know the Lord is to study His names.
I learned a new name of the Lord today, one I had never seen before ‘Jehovah-makkeh,’
the Lord who strikes. Many people in our
country do not even know much about the Lord, something that is new to our
country, and in part it is because the Church in our country is not doing the
job that they are suppose to do. We are
looking more and more like Judah, the Southern Kingdom, sitting down before our
idols and worshiping them instead of worshiping the Lord. We hear of the “health and wealth gospel,”
which is far from the Gospel that is taught in the Bible, we even have many
believers believing the “gap” theory, a theory that says that there was a time gap
between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2, which is another lie being taught by Satan. It is my desire to believe all that the Bible
teaches, especially all that the Bible teaches about who God is so that I can
say with Paul in “Php 3:10 that I may know Him and
the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being
conformed to His death.” I have a long
way to go.
My Steps of Faith for Today: To know Him better and better.
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: “Ruth” (Ruth 1:16).
Today’s Bible
question: “To what city did the devil
bring Jesus for one of his temptations?”
Answer in our next SD.
11/20/2014 12:51 PM
No comments:
Post a Comment