Ezekiel Chapter 11
Life is hard. I should say that life can be hard. It isn’t always. Life is certainly harder for some than for others, but even people who live what most would consider an easy life have to do hard things. We weep, we fail, we disappoint. But if you’re reading this you probably live in the safest, most affluent, most comfortable time in the history of all humanity. You’re probably reading this on an incomprehensibly advanced device that can play any music, answer almost any question you can ask it, and send a live video of a waterskiing squirrel to a person on the other side of the planet. You carry that device in a pocket of pants you probably didn’t have to fashion from wool you sheared. You are probably sitting in a building that is warmed by a furnace run by electricity and liquified natural gas collected from deep within the earth’s crust and piped right to you. If you get cold, you adjust a little box on the wall and you get warmer. Or maybe you tell your magic little pocket miracle to make it warmer, and it actually does it. If you get hungry, you can walk to an appliance that harnesses the second law of thermodynamics with phase changes in gasses to keep your leftovers cold because you have so much food that you need to store it for long periods of time in your warm, safe, comfortable, beautiful home. You and I live better than 99.999% of all of humanity has ever lived.
And yet, life is still hard. Because no matter how free or comfortable or easy the giants we stand upon have made our lives, sin and death and sadness and the human heart are still real problems for us. If I could time warp Ezekiel in a flux capacitor powered DeLorean for a visit to our homes, he would be astonished. He was an Iron Age Judean prophet-priest living through the incomprehensible horror of the Babylonian war machine. I wonder what would most fill him with wonder if he walked into our home in the middle of Oklahoma? Maybe the amount of clothing we possess or the clean cold and hot water running from our taps? Can you imagine how much he would love a hot shower! Some things would be familiar to him. Walls and doors and floors. He would probably love our bed. And pantry. And ice cream! I imagine the electric things would baffle him. How would I explain YouTube? Other things would seem normal. We eat food. We get tired. We sleep. We worship the same God. Which is just so very, very wonderful to think about. We sin. Sin is a real issue in the Scott house. And on that front, Ezekiel would nod and tell me that he had the same problem in his house.
As a type this we are under a Winter Storm Warning. It will get very cold and lots of frozen stuff will fall from the sky. Schools have cancelled. The city has sprayed the roads with salt brine and beet juice. Basically, beet soup. They have sprayed the roads with beet soup. You can’t make this stuff up. Folks will buy all the bread and milk in the stores and drip our faucets and pray the power stays on and even if it doesn’t it will at some point turn back on. Even the ice, entombing the road by sleet and snowpack, cannot escape the sun that will rise every morning and on one of those mornings it will warm the earth enough that the ice will begin to lose its grip. Pale adamantine armor will fracture, crystalline fortresses, besieged by sunfire, will collapse into delicate rime beneath the ever-present glory heat of the noon day sun. The storm will pass. Spring will come. Hope remains.
Instead of rescuing him from his circumstances, God gave Ezekiel hope. As he suffered visions of sin and slaughter, as he watched the Glory of God lift and march steadily eastward from the Temple, his heart collapsed like an oak in an ice storm, unable to bear the weight of judgement, and he cried out, “Alas, Lord GOD! Will You bring the remnant of Israel to a complete end?” You are wiping them out! And the Lord, compassionate and gracious, reminded Ezekiel that yes, judgement was coming. The ice and the snow and the bitter cold of exile were inescapable. But they would not stay exiles. Discipline would end and God would gather them out of Babylon and bring them back to the land He had promised them. God would bring them home.
“When they come there, they will remove all its detestable things and all its abominations from it” (v.18)
The restored remnant would hate the things that sent them into exile. They would hate the sin that ravaged their homes and destroyed their joy. When they returned, they would clean out what they had crafted in fear and shame. They would burn the very images and instruments of their disobedience. And they could do that. They could hate what was evil. They could tear down Asherah poles and melt silver idols into ingots, but they would still have a problem: The heart that built the idols still beats within them. But hope in God is not the dayspring of human effort. It is not “do your best, God takes care of the rest”. True hope is the power of God to transform our broken hearts.
“And I will give them one heart and put a new spirit within them. And I will take the heart of stone out of their bodies and will give them tender hearts”
In the middle of the storm of sin and suffering, God reminds Ezekiel that He is still working. Yes, He wants us to hate sin like He hates it. To be willing to throw out every idol, every habit built in fear, every artifact of rebellion, every object built from a broken blueprint. But that is not enough. It’s not enough for us to simply hate sin. To admit that life is hard and just carry on. Unless our hearts change, we will just rebuild life from the same broken blueprint. We need new hearts to cling to what is good. A new blueprint to build artifacts of faith and hope and love. A blueprint “written not with ink but with the Spirit of the Living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts. Such confidence we have through Christ toward God! Not that we are adequate in our selves…but our adequacy is from God.”
Your life is full of beauty and trouble. Snow days and downed power lines happen on same day. No matter what storm you are enduring, or how hard your life is now, God is adequate. He is enough to give you hope. He is enough to give you faith. He is enough to give you love. And no matter how good your life is, remember dear one that our hearts are the problem. We love the wrong things. And we build our lives around what we love.
But God is here to give us new hearts. Hearts that receive the radiant heat of the steadfast love of God that melts the ice of sin and sadness, hearts that unfold like flowers in spring, hearts that receive the glory that departed east from the Temple and ascended from the Mount of Olives and promised to return one day. Until that day, until the Lord Jesus returns in glory, we are His temple. He has given us Himself, the very Spirit of the Living God, and He has given us a new heart. He’s given it to us for a purpose.
“so that they may walk in My statutes and keep my laws. Then they will be My people, and I will be their God” (v.19)
Love what He loves. Adore Him. Live in hope. In light. In joy. Let’s forgive as He forgives. Lavish people with grace. Let’s walk with Him in the cool of the evening and let Him drive the gloom of doubt away. Life is hard. In response, let’s join with the deafening chorus of the redeemed and sing this song until He returns to finally take us home:
Joyful, joyful, we adore thee,
God of glory, Lord of love;
hearts unfold like flowers before thee,
opening to the sun above.
Melt the clouds of sin and sadness,
drive the gloom of doubt away;
giver of immortal gladness,
fill us with the light of day!
