Ezekiel Chapters 19-22
We have four beautiful children, each 2 years apart, which means that our life is full of motion. Constant motion. Like blood through arteries, our days accelerate with every heartbeat, squeezing into capillaries so tiny the blood cells pass through single file like Kindergarteners walking hand in hand to recess. When the motion stops, I tend to panic a little. It gets too quiet. Quiet means they are up to something. Or maybe we’re dying. Or worse – someone is making a mess. But children, unlike the heart, are supposed to grow up and fly the nest and go about their own adventure out there in the big beautiful world God gave them. Which means that the motion naturally, over a pair of decades, begins to fade a little and in the quiet space between heartbeats I hear the whisper of serenity. As I sit to write, we have a kid in another state, another baking macarons in the kitchen, and the other two torn between homework and cackling with their friends on the Xbox. I’m not changing a diaper or reading a bedtime story or even putting a child to bed. I go to sleep nowadays with all our children awake. Three of our four drive themselves. We are in a different season, a liminal space between the rapids and the reach, where the river widens and deepens and slows and you can take off your helmet and take in a breath and cast a line and float for a spell.
We’re not quite out of the rapids. I’m not yet casting that line and kicking my feet up on the gunwale, hat over my eyes and the rod tip between my toes. But I can see that from here. Yes, the rapids will come. Yes, panic will ensue. Because we are parents, parenting will happen. Parenting is a verb. It means mom and dad do something. And that often means late nights and early mornings and paddling really hard to keep the raft pointed down river. But the options are paddle hard or give up and we choose to paddle.
The beauty of a river is that it flows downhill. It has a rhythm. It has a way that we can either paddle with or fight against. The water flowing down it has mass and moving mass has force. A single cubic foot of river water moving at just five miles an hour coming to a sudden stop in 0.1 seconds has almost 142 lbs. of force. Stop it almost instantly at 0.01 seconds and it has almost 1,420 lbs. of force. Water lazing along at the speed of a brisk walk will push you down if you get in the way. And if you try to stop it, it will break your bones. The river does not hurry, but it does not yield.
Ezekiel began his book by a river in Babylon. And the whole reason he was there to begin with was because the people of God had gotten in the river and tried to run against the current. After a lament in chapter 19, some elders come to Ezekiel to see if they can ask God some questions and the Lord tells them, “As I live, I will tell you nothing!”, and then goes on to remind them how He had brought them out of slavery in Egypt and they rebelled against Him. Then God gave them the Law of Moses to tell them exactly how to live, that if they would just do what God said, they would live a beautiful life. And they rebelled against Him. He gave them the sabbath, a commandment to simply rest, and they rebelled against that. Then he skipped a generation and told the children of rebels, “Don’t rebel like your parents! Follow my ways, take my rest, know that I am your God, and live!” But the children of rebels did what rebels do. They got in the river and thought they could walk against the force of the Living God. They did what was right in their own eyes.
Then these elders, stiff necked and arrogant (even in exile!), told Ezekiel that he was just speaking in parables. Confusing them on purpose. So God gave them a parable. One of a sword, scalpel sharp and mirror polished, flashing like lightening, unsheathed and unyielding, melting the heart and breaking the will of every human under the arc of its fury. The sword of God’s wrath, the sword of the king of Babylon, Artisans of Destruction, would slash them to ruin. And it’s easy to feel sorry for them. Like an adult who sees a kid getting in trouble, we remember what that feels like. Getting caught. Feeling the weight of consequence. We feel bad for Israel. Until we read chapter 22. And then, well, then we start to understand.
The litany of sins reads like an accusation of war crimes. Israel has been indicted not only before God the Righteous Judge, but before the whole world. Murder. Idolatry. Injustice. They treated their parents with disregard and oppressed the foreigner. They wronged the vulnerable and the marginalized. They committed apostasy. Well, you might way, sure those things are bad but, I mean, we all do bad things. Keep reading. Adultery. Incest. Rape. Bribery. Extortion. Profiteering. Racketeering. Their sin had transformed them into something hideous, and like dross on silver it would be removed by fire.
I will gather you in My anger and in my wrath, I will lay you there and I will melt you. I will gather you and blow on you with the fire of My wrath, and you will be melted. (22:20-21)
I will melt you.
That should cause our pulse to rise and our eyes to dilate. It should produce fear. The fear of the LORD. The chapter ends with exacting clarity, Priests, Princes, Prophets, and People. No one escapes. The priests don’t even teach the people right from wrong. The princes devour the people like wolves. The prophets speak lies and say they are the words of God. They lie and say God is speaking! The people don’t just oppress the vulnerable, they practice oppression and injustice. They are good at hating their neighbor. God searched the land for a man, one single person who would stand in the gap, build the wall, walk with God. Like God and Abraham bargaining for Sodom, if He can find just one He will relent. But there is no one who does good. Not even one.
Brutal.
The river of God flows in one direction. He is Good. Just. Wise. Merciful. Holy. Infinite. Kind. We either align with Him, or we are crushed by the impossible force of His glory. We think we are immovable objects. We aren’t. The message of Ezekiel, of the whole Bible, is for us to float sabbath rested and sun kissed happy on the River of Life. Float. Not fight. He who fights against the current of God’s glory and grace will be destroyed. We’re all broken. We all sin. But we have a Redeemer. And whoever believes, whoever floats and doesn’t fight against who He is, out of that person’s heart will flow rivers of living water.
So, today, float.
Read your Bible.
Humble your heart.
Walk in joyful obedience. And float.
I promise you it is the better way.
