Week 26 – Judgmental Giraffes and the Kingdom of Hope
Ezekiel Chapters 43-48
We have a wooden giraffe with a missing ear who lives on the mantle above our fireplace. I think the ear is in a tub of Christmas decorations in the attic above our garage. If you ever come to visit and sit in our living room, you can see him and say hello, but he won’t say hello back because he is made of wood and does not have a soul. We got him in Kinshasha, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, when we were bringing our son home. He is made in segments because some smart Congolese person figured out that it’s a huge waste to carve a giraffe shape out of a tree so the torso and legs and tail and neck separate and connect with rough hewn dowels into rough hewn holes. It makes it easy to fit him into a suitcase. It also makes it easy to lose one of the pieces. We lost his right front leg for almost a year and I had to stick a pencil in to stabilize him. Yes. We had a hand carved and hand painted wooden giraffe from Africa in our living room with a pencil for a foreleg from January until the day after Thanksgiving. You can laugh or judge me, but this giraffe did that for a year already and I am immune, hardened by his steely gaze.
I lose things. Not all things. I manage to keep up with most of the things under my care. But being a human is messy. There are a lot of moving parts. Just count all the actions required to lose that giraffe leg: Steps to the garage, dropping the ladder, climbing, getting the tub, moving to the living room, taking him down, removing his legs and tail. I mean we’re already at over a dozen. The giraffe has 9 segments. Over a decade that is over 200 movements to take him down, take him apart, store him…and if you are adding up the movements and checking the math just take a deep breath and remember that it will all be ok. Because you can always stick a pencil where the leg was. And even after you find the leg, he’s still missing an ear because we live in a fallen world with fallen people who lose things.
I often think about the people in the Bible as I read it and try to find threads of similarity between our lives. Ezekiel was a man. He, like me, probably had a beard. He was a priest. His job was taking care of people. He was married. I bet he loved his wife. He got tired and sad. He laughed. He talked to God. He probably lost things. Unlike me, he got visions from God, which I have never experienced. He spoke Hebrew. He as forcibly deported from his homeland by a foreign invader and walked nearly 900 miles along the fertile crescent to his home in exile. I am grateful I have not.
In chapters 43 and 44 he writes twice about God’s glory. First, as he sees it coming from the east, with His voice “like the sound of many waters” and I often imagine that sound would be a symphony of water: waves crashing on a rocky coast like the swelling of cellos, the roar of waterfalls the deep hum of basses, the rain lashing against window panes the slashing violins. God’s voice a tidal wave of sound. Ezekiel is overwhelmed by the roar, the auditory weight of glory pressing in on every side and he can only write the simplest possible words: “And I fell on my face.”
When I try to make sense of a book as complex as Ezekiel, a book that peers into the aching chasm of human depravity, that chronicles human suffering, raw as a knee so freshly skinned the mangled dermis has yet to fill with blood from torn capillaries, I get overwhelmed. Ezekiel has visions of a temple with such exacting details an architect could render drawings from it, yet that temple has never been built almost 2,600 years after he wrote about it. The very description of the temple was supposed to make the Israelites ashamed of all they had done. Can you imagine seeing a blueprint so magnificent it made you grieve your sin? A plan for a temple so literally glorious that God would say, “This is the place where I will dwell among the sons of Isreal forever.” That’s what Ezekiel had to process.
And the best he could do was fall on his face. Every time in the Bible when someone is overcome by the infinite weight of God’s cosmic splendor the same thing happens. When the presence of God threatens to incinerate our intellect with the incomprehensible cognitive dissonance between God’s immeasurable majesty and our cataclysmic depravity, God reaches into our crumpled mess of inadequacy and picks us up and draws us to His heart. Ezekiel simply writes, “the Spirit lifted me up” and that is the only way any of us ever gets through anything at all: The Spirit lifts us up.
I think this book is meant to overwhelm us. God is overwhelming! He is not some safe thought experiment where we control the variables. He is God Eternal. God Incomprehensible. No eye has seen, no ear has heard the full unfiltered symphony of His Glory. What human could process the sound? What human eye could receive the supernova brightness in their rods and cones and move that input across their optic nerve to their primary visual cortex without blowing the synapses? We think we can put God in our pocket and take Him out and ask Him questions when we get bored or need someone to blame. God holds the atoms of our body together. Without Him we would explode into ether at the speed of light. We have over 10 quadrillion mitochondria in our bodies creating the energy we need to exist. If we counted those little power plants in just our own bodies, it would take us more than 317 million years. God wants to show us His glory. He wants us to process His unassailable holiness, to hear the roar of His greatness, to feel the peace of His presence and He wants us to respond.
The Bible calls that response worship.
So as we close out our study of this marvelous revelation, let’s end it where we began:
Overwhelmed by glory.
You may be asking yourself how this helps you find the ear you lost from your Congolese giraffe. I suspect it doesn’t. God seems to delight in reminding us how beloved we are by setting His glory against the bright relief of our weakness. Instead of feeling judged as my little giraffe looks down on me, lopsided, its ear somewhere amissing, I find I can rest in the radiant warmth of God’s presence knowing that He is here with me because He wants to be. Even with me. Even someone who loses things. Perhaps, in some gentle way, even because I do.
The God of all glory wants to sit with us in the cool of the evening and listen as we tell Him about our day. He wants to hear our questions as they tumble out in clunky phrases and mismatched syntax. He wants to reveal Himself to us and expand our capacity to comprehend Him. He wants to grow us into the kind of people that can see the unseen world and whisper to a lost and fearful soul, “There is hope in the darkness.”
Light is coming.
There is a plan.
There is a Planner.
There is a better world, a better country that we long for and a God who takes us by the hand to lead us through the dark by the light of His glory and grace into a kingdom we call home. A kingdom where His holiness flows into a river that gives life everywhere it runs. A kingdom where we belong. A kingdom where every lost thing is found and every lost soul sits at last with the Shepherd who sought them in the wilderness and brought them home.
