Blind Eyes and Deaf Ears

Well tonight, we're going to try to make our way through three chapters in Ezekiel 12, 13, and 14. We're going to begin though by just reading the first verse of chapter 12, which happens to be a sentence that occurs over and over and over in these three chapters.

In fact, we could say this single recurring sentence contains the underlying focus of chapters 12 through 14. So let's hear now the Word of the Lord. Would you stand with me in honor of God's Word as we read Ezekiel 12, verse 1. The Word of the Lord came to me. Father, You are God who is not silent. You speak. Your words create worlds and galaxies.

You speak and dead spirits come to life. You speak and judgment falls on the wicked. Your Word is life. Your Word is truth.

Your Word is final. Lord, we have before us an example of a people who would not listen to Your Word. And in reading about them, we see ourselves in so many ways. We often are people who don't listen, don't heed, don't love Your Word. We ask You tonight to forgive us for being stubborn, rebellious children who won't listen. We ask You to take our deaf ears and make them hear. To take our blind eyes and make them see by the power of Your Holy Spirit in us we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

Be seated. I want to begin tonight with an illustration from my own life that frankly I'm embarrassed to tell. But I think it will get us thinking in the right direction about the text before us. A couple of weeks ago, I found myself behind in my Bible reading plan. And I knew the end was coming and I wanted to catch up. So I found myself playing catch up by listening to the Bible on my phone as I drove into work one morning. I had to get to a certain chapter in the Bible to be caught up.

Well, as the app was reading to me, I realized that I was eager for the reading to hurry up and be over with. So that I could finish a podcast that I had started the day before. This podcast had just, for whatever reason, captured my imagination. And I really wanted to be binge listening to that instead of catching up on my Bible reading. I was hearing Scripture, but I wasn't listening because my heart was somewhere else. As I drove to work with the Bible playing in the background, I began to analyze myself as to why I was more eager to listen to a silly podcast and to hear the Word of God.

Now, please don't misunderstand me. I don't think that it's ungodly to listen to podcasts or to read books other than the Bible. The apostle Paul evidently read Cretan poetry. Moses learned from Egyptian educators.

God speaks not only in the Bible, but also in creation. And so we can wholeheartedly affirm with Paul that it is God who gives us richly all things to enjoy, including good literature and art and music and, yes, even the occasional podcast that captures our imagination. But for me, in that moment, when I had opportunity to hear and receive the Word of God, my heart was drawn to lesser things. Why was that? Maybe it was due to apathy that often accompanies familiar things as opposed to the excitement of novelty.

Maybe it was just laziness on my part. It's much easier, isn't it, to ingest entertainment than to digest the soul-searching, conscience-pricking Word of God. What I did not want to admit that day driving to work was that at the root of any form of neglect of God's Word is an idolatrous heart, a heart that cherishes something more than it cherishes God. To find greater delight in the opinions of man than in the decrees of God, to seek out speculative information with greater eagerness than I seek the Word of truth, to crave human knowledge more than divine revelation is to betray the existence of various idols of the heart. Well, our text tonight is all about how we relate to the Word of God. Over and over again in these chapters we see God's Word coming to His people, and over and over again we see God's people running to their idols instead of to the teaching and to the testimony of God. You may say, Eugene, my relationship to God's Word is good. I read my Bible every day. I just finished the journey into the Word two-year Bible reading plan.

I checked all the boxes, so I'm good. Brothers and sisters, there are a thousand different ways to be neglectful of and resistant to the Word of God. Think with me for a moment about your attitude towards Scripture. Is it something that's just there when you feel like consulting it? Is it, for all intents and purposes, irrelevant in your life? Is it something that never quite makes sense?

Maybe it's something that often makes you angry or confused or anxious. On the other hand, is God's Word your joy and delight, something that feeds your soul, something that you could never live without, your meditation day and night, your very life? I suspect that for most of us our relationship with God's Word to some extent is kind of a combination of all of these attitudes. None of us have arrived yet. None of us have achieved perfection, even in something as fundamental as our interaction with God's Word. Well, the exiles in Babylon that we read about tonight have not arrived either. In fact, they had a long way to go to get their response to God's Word where it needed to be. As we walk through these chapters tonight, we're going to notice five types of responses to the Word of God, five incorrect, harmful ways of relating to God's truth. And as we see ourselves perhaps in one or more of these harmful types, I pray that we'll see the danger and run from it.

So let's jump in. In relation to God's Word, the first type of person we see is the rebel, the rebel in verses 1 through 20 of chapter 12. God says to Ezekiel in verse 2 of chapter 12, you dwell in the midst of a rebellious house.

And the rebellion is demonstrated by the fact that they have eyes to see but see not and they have ears to hear but hear not. What follows then are several sign acts like we've seen Ezekiel perform before in which the prophet acts out various scenes of judgment that are certain to come upon Israel. First, Ezekiel was to pack a bag, an exile's bag it says in verse 3.

Then he was to dig a hole through the wall of his house and crawl through it by cover of night. After that, Ezekiel was to cover his face so that he could not see. And all of this was to be, verse 6, a sign for the house of Israel.

Well, Ezekiel acted out everything just like God had told him to do. And Israel's response was verse 9, what are you doing? They have eyes to see the sign act but they don't see what it means. They have ears to hear but they don't hear the message.

Why? Because they are, as God keeps referring to them, a rebellious house. So Ezekiel has to spell it out for them. He says in verse 10, this oracle concerns the prince or the king of Jerusalem and all the house of Israel who were in Jerusalem. Ezekiel's sign act was a visual demonstration of what would happen to king Zedekiah and the Jews who remained with him in Jerusalem. They would be captured by Nebuchadnezzar and taken to Babylon, verse 13. However, even though Zedekiah would spend the rest of his days in Babylon and die there, he would never actually see Babylon. If we go over to 2 Kings 25, we read the gruesome details of Zedekiah's capture and exile. We discover that as the Babylonian army breached the wall around Jerusalem, Zedekiah and his men were able to escape the city by night, but they were eventually captured by the Babylonians and Zedekiah was forced to watch the execution of his sons just before his enemies gouged out his eyes, put him in shackles, and carried him off to Babylon where he would spend the rest of his life in blindness and die in exile. In a sense, Zedekiah's physical blindness was a metaphor of the spiritual blindness that permeated the covenant community.

So here's what we know. We know that Ezekiel's audience, which is in these chapters the exiles in Babylon who are awaiting news from the siege happening at Jerusalem, his audience are rebelling against God in some way. We know that their rebellion is manifesting itself in a failure to see and hear. In other words, a failure to listen to and perceive what God is saying to them. The reason they can't hear God's Word then is because they won't hear God's Word.

Their deafness was not an unfortunate handicap that was imposed upon them. No, it was a willful resistance to the Word of God. It was rebellion, Scripture says. They didn't see because they didn't want to see. They could not hear with understanding because they did not want to hear with understanding. Now if God's response to their willful deafness was to reveal the fate of Zedekiah, then we can surmise that what they wanted to hear was the opposite of Ezekiel's prediction. They wanted to hear that Zedekiah would successfully resist Nebuchadnezzar, that the Babylonian army would give up on its siege of Jerusalem, that they would soon be released from their captivity and would return once again to their comfy homes in Jerusalem in no time. Instead, what God revealed was that Zedekiah would be defeated, Jerusalem would fall, and the exile would last for a lifetime. You see, the exiles were holding out for a quick fix when God had decreed a lengthy chastening. They wanted to feel good again really soon, but God had, verse 18, quaking an anxiety in mind for them instead. They were looking for a royal prince to deliver them, that God had ordered for that prince to be captured, to be blinded, to be exiled, and to die in a foreign land. Their rebellion then involved false hope in a false savior, and God would have none of it. Now picture with me these exiles watching Ezekiel acting out God's judgment on Zedekiah, confused, not understanding what in the world this prophet was up to as he dug his way out of his own home, how silly that must have looked to them.

I mean, what were they, children? And yet this unimpressive child's play was God speaking to them. How much more sophisticated and adult it would have been to just pick up a newspaper to read the latest headlines from the war front, Zedekiah lives to see another day.

The wall at Jerusalem is still standing. By comparison, God's word through this strange prophet would have seemed trivial and irrelevant and inconsequential, but church, when we despise the means of God, we miss the message of God, we dishonor him. Brothers and sisters, we act like the exiles whenever we put our hope in something other than God's means, God's commands, and God's purposes. And God says this false hope is rebellion.

Hoping for a short, easy chastening isn't optimism, it's rebellion. Looking for political princes to solve spiritual problems isn't noble citizenship, it's rebellion. Are you looking to earthly princes to bring you peace when you ought to be looking to the prince of peace? Are you resisting the word of God in order to make the world your God?

If so, Scripture says you are blind and deaf, a rebel who cannot hear God because he will not hear God. False hope in a false savior is rebellion against the only true savior, and it will incur the displeasure of God. So what should the rebel do? He should repent of his misplaced confidence in the world's means and message and submit himself heart, mind, body, and soul to God's means and God's message.

That's the rebel. Next we encounter the cynic in verses 21 through 28 of chapter 12, verse 21. And the word of the Lord came to me. Son of man, what is this proverb that you all have about the land of Israel saying, the days grow long and every vision comes to nothing? This was evidently such a proliferation of false prophecy among the Jews at this time that they had become skeptical of all prophecy, even legitimate prophecy. They had heard thus saith the Lord so much with nothing to show for it that they became cynical towards any claim of prophecy. And God had had enough of this. And so he says in verse 24, there shall be no more any false vision or flattering divination.

I will speak and it will be performed. But Israel's cynicism was not so easily overcome. In verse 27, they retort, the vision that Ezekiel sees is for many days from now and he prophesies of times far off. In other words, they were essentially dismissing the prophetic word on grounds that it wouldn't come to fruition any time soon.

It was irrelevant. Let's just go about our business. Nothing's going to change. Jerusalem won't fall. Zedekiah won't be captured.

We'll be home soon. Don't everybody get all worked up about this. Ezekiel's prophecy may be true, but it'll be too far off for us to worry about. It was cynicism. It was doubt, unbelief with regard to God's word. Over in 2 Peter 3, we see a New Testament parallel to this sort of cynical attitude towards the promises of God. 2 Peter 3, 3 says, scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own sinful desires. They will say, where's the promise of his coming?

For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation. Modern day cynics rationalize, if the Lord were coming, he would have come by now, so he must not be coming. Peter says they overlook the fact that God's timetable is not the same as ours, nor is his character the same as ours. What appears to us to be delay is really just evidence of God's patience towards his children, not wishing that any of his elects should perish. His delay is attributed to his desire to give his children time to repent, lest they be judged. We play the cynic when we treat God's word and the certainty of his coming judgment with disinterest, with indifference.

When we justify our sin by telling ourselves I've got plenty of time to repent, how often have we excused worldliness or tolerated selfishness or pursued pride by thinking to ourselves God won't mind, he's gracious, he'll be forgiving, and he'll forget our sin in no time. It's cynical unbelief, and it's no different from the cynicism of Ezekiel's audience, as they refuse to believe that God would actually do what he said he would do. The answer to such cynicism is this. God will do whatever God desires when God wants to do it, and if we blindly cast aspersions on his promises, we will be proven wrong. We will be the ones who experience a rude awakening. We will live to regret that we ever doubted God's word.

Why? Because God's word never returns void. It always accomplishes exactly what he sends it out to do. We need to take God at his word and live as if everything he says is sure and certain and relevant and true. Well, the next two types that we see are examples not so much of how we receive God's word but of incorrectly proclaiming God's word. First, there is the counterfeit in the first 16 verses of chapter 13, the counterfeit. Verse 1 of 13 says, The word of the Lord came to me.

Son of man, prophesy against the prophets of Israel who are prophesying and say to those who prophesy from their own hearts, Hear the word of the Lord. These counterfeits were claiming to be prophesying for the Lord when in actuality they were prophesying from their own hearts. Their message was not from God.

It was from themselves. Verse 3 describes them as foolish prophets who follow their own spirit. In other words, they do their own thing and have seen nothing, it says. They've not heard from the Lord.

They've not been granted any divine revelation or heavenly vision. They are entirely self-appointed, selfishly motivated fools pretending to speak for God. The false message of these counterfeit prophets was one of peace.

God was coming to break things while they were trying to put them back together. God was coming to judge Israel, but they were proclaiming a message of peace, verse 16, when there was no peace. They were charlatans masquerading as preachers, but proclaiming the exact opposite of what God's Word proclaimed. Now, in our day, the nature of this sort of counterfeiting of God's Word is a bit different than it was in Ezekiel's day because the office of the prophet has changed.

And we've talked about this before. Prior to the completion of the canon of Scripture, God would inspire specific men to proclaim and write down His inerrant Word, but now that we have that written record in its completed form, we don't need inspired prophets who speak for God. What we have instead is a book that can be read and studied and meditated upon, as well as the Holy Spirit to illuminate and enlighten the reading and studying of Scripture. And so the modern parallel to these counterfeit prophets in Ezekiel's time is the person who claims to be rightly interpreting Scripture when they're actually twisting it to make it say what they want rather than what God is saying.

One commentator explained it this way. He said the contrast in our day between true prophet and false prophet is so much who has really received the Word of God, but rather who is rightly handling the Word of God. This certainly applies, obviously, to preachers who play fast and loose with the words of Scripture, but it also has application to anyone who teaches or explains or applies the Bible to others. Mothers training their children to be godly.

Husbands, fathers leading their families in worship in the home. Discussing Scripture over coffee. In any of these scenarios, there is a danger of mishandling the Word of God. Of saying, Thus saith the Lord, when the Lord has said nothing of the sort. Of proclaiming peace when there is no peace.

Or proclaiming condemnation when there is no condemnation. Christian God's Word can stand on its own two feet. It does not need your help. It does not need your creative input. It does not need your spin. It is sufficient and infallible and authoritative just as it is.

So handle it with precision and care. In verses 17 through 23 of chapter 13, we encounter next the syncretist. The syncretist. Verse 18. Thus says the Lord God, Woe to women who sew magic bands upon all wrists and make veils for the heads of persons of every stature in the hunt for souls. Will you hunt down souls belonging to My people and keep your own souls alive?

You have profaned Me among My people for handfuls of barley and for pieces of bread, putting to death souls who should not die and keeping alive souls who should not live by your lying to My people who listen to lies. Not only were there counterfeit prophets who claimed inspiration from God, there were women who claimed to speak for God through occultic means. And that's what we're reading about in these magic bands on the wrists and veils on the heads. Magic occultic means.

They were syncretizing. They were mixing in pagan practices with their alleged prophesying. They were relying on demonic means to supposedly declare God's purposes. It was deceptive. It was full of lies.

It was to be condemned. But notice in verse 19, chapter 13, that God not only condemns these syncretists, He also condemns those who listen to them. You occultic women are lying to My people who themselves are prone to listening to lies.

Shame on you for speaking lies, but shame on them for listening to lies. Also notice that while the counterfeit prophets back in verse 16 were proclaiming that peace was imminent when it wasn't, the occultic prophecies here in verse 19 were pronouncing condemnation against those who weren't condemned. It says, putting to death souls who should not die. It says in verse 19, the former are preaching a false peace. The latter are preaching a false judgment. The former are preaching the power of positive thinking. The latter are manipulating through negative thinking. The former are preaching health, wealth, and prosperity. The latter are preaching hell, fire, and brimstone. Both are wrong.

Both are out of order because neither are grounded in the Word of God but in the imaginations of self-appointed prophets. You know, there is something tantalizing about secret knowledge, secret information, isn't there? We like to be in the know. We relish the position of being the person who finds out first, who gets to spill the beans, who informs everyone else.

And I suppose it's rooted in pride. We want to be the one who educates everyone else. We want to be the one to divulge the secret. We want to have already known and not be surprised by what others might reveal because we want to feel smart. We want to feel knowledgeable.

We want to feel necessary and important. And if we're not careful, this tendency in our hearts will lead us to investigate what ought not be investigated by means that ought not to be employed and then spread that information not because it's true but because it's salacious. Oh, Christian, be careful of hunting souls simply to feed your need to be needed. God has not called us to be the teller of secrets or the distillers of hidden esoteric knowledge.

He hasn't called us to share an opinion on every juicy bit of Internet gossip that our algorithm turns up. He has called us to preach Christ and Him crucified. That is the power of God unto salvation. Preach Christ. Listen to Christ.

And be done with the world's methods and the world's lies. The last type of person we find in these chapters is the hypocrite in chapter 14. We read at verse 1 of chapter 14. Then certain of the elders of Israel came to me and sat before me, and the word of the Lord came to me, Son of man, these men have taken their idols into their hearts and set the stumbling block of their iniquity before their faces. Skipping down to verse 7. For anyone of the house of Israel or of the strangers who sojourn in Israel who separates himself from me, taking his idols into his heart and putting the stumbling block of his iniquity before his face, and yet comes to a prophet to consult me through him, I the Lord will answer him myself, and I will set my face against that man.

I will make him a sign and a byword and cut him off from the midst of my people, and you shall know that I am the Lord. Here were people, elders, leaders of the covenant community who had given themselves over to idolatry of the heart, and yet they presented themselves to Ezekiel as if they were submitting to his authority to the authority of God's prophet when in actuality they were pretending. They had no intention of submitting to God's prophet.

They had no intention of abandoning their idols. They wanted the credibility of externally doing the right thing, of going to the prophet publicly so that everyone could see how committed and faithful they were, but inside in the privacy of their hearts and minds was infidelity and double-mindedness. They were hypocrites. These are people who go to church every Sunday and read their Bible every day and talk about how much they read their Bible every day, but their hearts are consumed with affections that are contrary to God's Word. They've fooled other people.

They may have even fooled themselves into thinking that everything's good, but it's not good. Their idolatry has simply gone underground into their hearts, God says in verse 3. And, church, that really is the crux of the issue for all five types of responses to God's Word that we've seen in this text, isn't it? At the end of the day, whether you're the rebel or the cynic or the counterfeit or the syncretist or the hypocrite, a failure to submit yourself wholly and fully to the Word of God is rooted in idolatry of the heart. If we have eyes that can't see God, it's not because He doesn't exist. It's because we are looking to something other than Him for protection and help. If we have ears that can't hear His truth, it's not because He hasn't spoken.

It's because we are listening to something else for instruction and meaning and satisfaction. If we can't see and hear God, it's because we have become preoccupied with the idols that we harbor in our hearts. Psalm 115 makes a very similar point to these chapters in Ezekiel. Psalm 115 says that God is in the heavens.

He does all that He pleases. But idols, by contrast, on the other hand, are merely the impotent work of human hands. They have mouths but do not speak, eyes but do not see, ears but do not hear, noses but do not smell, hands but do not feel, feet but do not walk. And listen to this, Psalm 115 8. Those who make them become like them.

So do all who trust in them. Idols make us blind to God's presence. Idols make us deaf to God's Word and powerless in the face of our foes.

I don't know what your idols are. I don't even always perceive my own idols. Sometimes they're obvious, violations of God's law. But oftentimes they're very subtle, hidden things, hidden from view. Idols like to masquerade as important things, noble things, necessary things. But just below the surface, they cause us to doubt God. They erode our desire to obey God. They twist our affection so that we begin loving things, good things, more than we love God.

And suddenly our mind begins to think differently and our heart loses its innocence and our souls begin to rot and the blindness and the deafness start to creep in. To the degree that you were cherishing idols in your heart, you are not seeing and hearing God. That's a dangerous spot to be in because being blind to God's help, God's truth, God's beauty has the awful effect of entrenching us even more into idolatry. The more we refuse to see God, the less we are able to see God. And the less able we are to see God, the more susceptible we become to a thousand different substitutes, substitutes that for a while perhaps we think are wonderful but in the end prove to be pathetic, destructive to our souls.

What is the solution then? What should those Jewish exiles have done in response to Ezekiel's sign act? What should we do when we recognize that we have been the rebel, the cynic, the fake by rejecting omnipotent love and running instead to impotent substitutes? Well, Psalm 115, after exposing the ludicrousness of idolatry, tells us how to come back to God. It says, O Israel, trust in the Lord. He is our help and our shield. You who fear the Lord, trust in the Lord. He is our help and our shield. Christian, the journey back to God is short and quick.

The return trip is instantaneous. I think one of the biggest lies that our idolatrous hearts tell us is that repentance is not worth it. It'll take too long.

It'll be too hard. Repentance for those exiles in Babylon would mean they'd have to admit that they would never return to Jerusalem. They were being called upon to forsake their false hope in a brief chastening. I mean, after all, what's wrong with wanting to go back to the promised land, back to the temple, back to be with God's people? Well, if God said it would not happen, then it's rebellious of us to want it to happen. If God said you need a lifetime of chastening in Babylon for your own spiritual good, then it would be stubborn faithlessness on our part to refuse to accept the chastening and to continue insisting that deliverance was imminent. But if they would simply admit to their rebellion and confess their idolatry and return to the God who had faithfully set them apart and redeemed them, who had protected them for generation after generation, who had rebuked them for their foolish sin and exiled them in a foreign pagan land, who had left his own temple to come and be with them in their plight, if they would return to that God, they would have found instant peace.

And security. Instant joy in the chastening. That's how it works. God chastens those whom He loves. And as long as we're kicking and screaming, we're the miserable ones. But the moment we yield and heed and listen and taste and see the goodness of God, all the benefits of being His child come rushing back into our hearts and lives.

Our text ends with yet another beautiful glimpse of the gospel. In Ezekiel 14, 10, God says to the exiles, they shall bear their punishment. Like it or not, you're gonna spend your life in Babylon.

But to what end? Look at verse 11. That the house of Israel may no more go astray from me nor defile themselves anymore with all their transgressions, but that they may be my people, and I may be their God, declares the Lord God.

This wasn't the end for the exiles. Repentance is never the end for God's people. It's the beginning of restoration. It's the beginning of the way back to God.

It's how we get our sight and hearing back. Are you listening to God? Are you looking for God?

Or are you stubbornly holding on to your deaf and dumb idols? Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you. Father, how carelessly and willingly we head down paths that destroy our souls, how blind we are to the dangers of sin, how deaf we are to your words of caution and correction. Thank you that in grace you pursue us relentlessly. Now, may that same grace open our blind eyes to see how trustworthy you are. May it open our ears to hear the gospel afresh tonight. And on that last day, may our cynical hypocrisy and rebellion against you be put to death once and for all with the power that enables our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, even to subject all things to Himself. And it is in that powerful name that we pray. Amen.