The End of an Era

And if you would please turn with me to Ezekiel chapter 24. This chapter marks the end of a major section in the book of Ezekiel, and a huge turning point in the history of the exiles in Babylon. Ezekiel chapter 24, we're gonna work through the whole chapter tonight, but let's begin by just reading verses one and two.

Ezekiel 24 verses one and two. In the ninth year, in the tenth month, on the tenth day of the month, the word of the Lord came to me. Son of man, write down the name of this day, this very day.

The king of Babylon has laid siege to Jerusalem this very day. Let's pray. Father, would you now grant to us the illumination to understand that which we do not know. Give us the faith to believe that which we cannot see, the grace to obey what we do not like. Lord, without your word and your spirit, we are self-deceived, we're headed for destruction.

So preserve your people today, even as you have done countless times in the past. There might always be a people, a church, that sings your praise, even in strange and foreign lands. On this Sunday night in Harrisburg, would you fill us with the joy of Christ and the knowledge of your will, and the hope of heaven. I pray in Jesus' name, amen.

You can be seated. Well, we can tell from the opening verses that we just read here in Ezekiel 24 that something big is about to happen. God is requiring a very accurate recording of the date, because on this day, this very day, it says, Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, has laid siege to Jerusalem.

It's finally happened. Ezekiel has been predicting that something like this would happen, he spent the last five plus years preaching a message that doom was coming, but the exiles were not taking his prophetic word seriously. They were unwilling to accept Ezekiel's claim that judgment was certain to fall upon their beloved homeland.

And so they were dismissive of both the prophet and his message. So to verify Ezekiel's message and his status as a prophet, the Lord had him mark the day in a very meticulous manner. In fact, throughout the book of Ezekiel, the dating of events is based on the beginning of the exile, but here in chapter 24 is an exception. Ezekiel uses a different dating method. He uses the formal method of dating events based on the king's reign.

This was the officially sanctioned method of date keeping, which suggests that this date, the ninth year in the 10th month on the 10th day of the month, was of particular importance. This date, which would have been January the 5th, 587 BC, would mark the beginning of the siege that would ultimately lead to the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple. And the precision with which Ezekiel recorded this date would be proof of the legitimacy of his prophetic office. Verse 26 tells us that one day in the future, a fugitive, a survivor of this siege would arrive in Babylon verifying everything that Ezekiel had said right down to the very date on which it had occurred. Now, in addition to the precise dating of this moment, Ezekiel makes mention here in chapter 24 of many, if not most, of the sins that have already been condemned in the first 23 chapters. All of this highlights the fact that Israel's sin and the ensuing judgment from God is about to reach its culmination.

This was momentous, it was big. The exiles were still in rebellion, according to verse three, they're a rebellious house. They were still dismissive of Ezekiel's crazy predictions, but like it or not, judgment was about to reach its climax. And no one, not even these exiles who were hoping against hope, would be able to deny that the Lord had done this. Now, let's put ourselves in the shoes of the exiles. Events have been set in motion that will inevitably lead to the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, but that final destruction is still several months away.

The exiles are still hanging on to hope, although at this point it's very much a false hope. They had always looked with confidence to their status as God's people, his special people, the apple of his eye, the delight of his heart, and the proof of God's delight in them had always been the visible, glorious temple in Jerusalem, a visible reminder of God's presence with them and his love for them and his faithfulness to them. As long as they had the temple, they had God, or so they thought. And they still had the temple, therefore they inferred they still had God.

And if they still had God, then nothing and no one, not even Nebuchadnezzar himself, could touch them. The only problem was that they had long ago abandoned their love for God. They had abandoned their fidelity to God, their communion with God, their obedience to God. They had forsaken everything that God had intended the temple to be. They had essentially turned this temple into a good luck charm, a place where they could pretend to be right with God, a source of maybe nostalgic religious feeling that had no real grounding in reality. They loved the temple of God, but they did not love the God of the temple. And so in blindness, they convinced themselves that because the temple was well, all was well, but all was not well.

Church, God must sometimes take away that which is nearest and dearest to us in order to expose our idolatries and draw us back to himself. These exiles thought they were right with God when they were about as far away from him as you could get. They thought they were righteous when their hearts were actually full of idolatry.

They thought they were safe and secure when they were dangling over hell by a thread. God had to show them their filth and their vulnerability. And so chapter 24 is all about God showing his people that they are dirtier than they realize, they are more vulnerable than they realize, and he shows them these things so that they will return to him in faithful obedience. Well, this chapter unfolds for us in three scenes. The first scene we find in verses three through 14 drives home the point that God's people are dirtier than they realize. Of course, I'm speaking of moral filth.

They were defiled more than they realize. The scene opens with a deceptive vision opens with a deceptively happy song. Look at verse three. Utter a parable to the rebellious house and say to them, thus says the Lord God, set on the pot, set it on, pour in water also, put in the pieces of meat, all the good pieces, the thigh and the shoulder, fill it with choice bones, take the choicest one of the flock, pile the logs under it, boil it well, seethe also its bones in it. This parable reads like a happy folk song, one that would have perhaps been sung in the kitchen as a meal is being prepared.

Maybe something akin to our Polly put the kettle on, Polly put the kettle on. It's happy, it's quaint, it's upbeat. In fact, some of the details seem to suggest that the context is one of feasting on a holiday. For example, the best dishes are being used. Verse 11 identifies the fancy copper pots, not the ordinary clay ones.

Also, the quality of the meat is superb. Verses four and five indicate it's the good pieces, it's the choicest pieces. As we read this parable, it's almost reminiscent, isn't it, of a Norman Rockwell Christmas scene. Everything is perfect, it's warm, it's happy, it's a festive occasion. There are also religious overtones in this happy parable. The words being used are words often associated with Passover or with a scapegoat. Again, all positive associations with holy feast days that the exiles would have formally enjoyed back home in Israel, days that were to be reminders of God's favor and God's mercy towards them. But then at verse six, things take an ominous turn. In the midst of this happy, nostalgic sense of festivity, verse six says, therefore, thus says the Lord God. Woe to the bloody city, to the pot whose corrosion is in it and whose corrosion has not gone out of it.

Take out of it, piece after piece, without making any choice. For the blood she has shed is in her midst. She put it on the bare rock.

She did not pour it out on the ground to cover it with dust. To rouse my wrath, to take vengeance, I have set on the bare rock the blood she has shed, that it may not be covered. Now I suspect that when we get to verses six through eight, we don't really know what's going on, but it doesn't sound good, does it?

Suddenly it sounds negative. We know something bad's happening, but we're not really sure what it all means. There are a lot of obscure laws and customs embedded in these verses that is probably lost on us, but it would not have been lost on the exiles.

They would have known exactly what God is saying. What's happening is that God has turned this happy, innocent folk song into an analogy in which Israel is represented by the holiday meat that's in the copper pot being cooked. The only problem is that the cook has opened the pot and noticed that the meat inside is rancid.

It's entirely ruined, so much so that it has corroded the inside of the pot. The nature of this corruption has something to do with blood. Notice all the blood references in verses six and following. According to the Mosaic law, Israelites were not supposed to eat blood.

Leviticus 17 is very clear. The life is in the blood. Therefore, the blood is sacred. It was not to be eaten. If someone killed an animal to eat it, they were to first pour out its blood onto the ground and then cover that with dirt. Then they could eat the meat.

But how does God describe Israel in verse seven? Israel is corrupt because Israel, the meat in the pot, is full of blood. She has not poured out the blood and buried it like the law required.

Instead, she's marinating in it. It's grotesque. It's unclean. And all of this, of course, is a picture of the moral state of Israel. Israel, because of all the sins she has committed for generation after generation, has become an unclean thing through and through.

The analogy then is very scathing, isn't it? Israel thought of herself as the choicest of meats when in reality she was unfit for consumption altogether because of her absolute moral corruption. Israel's sin has reached full maturity and the hammer of God's judgment is ready to fall. Look at verse nine. Therefore, thus says the Lord God, woe to the bloody city, and that's Jerusalem, I also will make the pile, the cooking fire, great. Heap on the logs, kindle the fire, boil the meat well, mix in the spices, and let the bones be burned up. And the verbal form of that word bones in verse 10 always refers to human bones in Ezekiel. It's not goat, it's not bull, it's not dove, it's human bones. Verse 11, then set it empty upon the coals that it may become hot and its copper may burn, that its uncleanness may be melted in it, its corrosion consumed. She has wearied herself with toil.

Its abundant corrosion does not go out of it into the fire with its corrosion. On account of your unclean lewdness, because I would have cleansed you and you were not cleansed from your uncleanness, you shall not be cleansed anymore till I have satisfied my fury upon you. So God suddenly has assumed the role of the cook at this polite, festive meal. However, all decorum and propriety have been abandoned because the cook, Yahweh, is now throwing everything, meal and dishes alike, into the fire to be consumed without mercy. This brings us to what one commentator describes as the most emphatic affirmation of divine resolve in the entire book of Ezekiel.

Verse 14, I am the Lord. I have spoken. It shall come to pass.

I will do it. I will not go back. I will not spare.

I will not relent. According to your ways and your deeds, you will be judged, declares the Lord God. It's the death sentence for Israel and nothing and no one can stop it.

You do see the irony in all of us, don't you? Israel thought of itself as privileged and safe because after all, they were God's chosen people. They had all the trappings of true religion. They were the orthodox.

They were the conservative. They were the members in good standing in Yahweh's church. And yet they, ironically, are the objects of God's wrath in verse 14 because they were the ones who refused to be cleansed in verse 13. They thought they were squeaky clean but they were corrupt beyond repair.

They were dirtier than they realized. You see, brothers and sisters, it's quite possible to be in the right church and profess the right creed and be fully confident in the promises of God while at the same time lacking any saving connection to the God you claim to serve. How did Paul put it? He said they have a zeal for God but not according to knowledge. Let me put this as plainly as I can. Making empty claims of status before God while walking in disobedience to his law and disregard to his person is a dangerous place to be.

Now, don't get me wrong. There are many things that God gives us and intends us to use for our spiritual benefit. Attending a good church, holding to a biblical confession of faith, maintaining godly friends and a godly spouse, reading the Bible, spending time in prayer, observing the sacraments, engaging the lost evangelistically, seeking to uphold integrity in my dealings with others, striving to have a good work ethic at work and at school and so on. All of these things are good things, Christian things, and can be spiritually beneficial pursuits. But church, any of these things, perhaps surprisingly, can also be used in idolatrous ways.

I can do any of these things not out of love for God but out of love for me. Just like Israel was doing by loving the temple but not the God of the temple. When we do that, we put ourselves in the dangerous position of convincing ourselves that we're doing the right thing when we're actually just defending our idols. Better to worship the devil outright than to worship Molech under pretense of worshiping Yahweh.

Now we need to also understand that we can fall off the bicycle in the other direction too. We can reject the good things God gives us simply out of fear of misusing them. We don't wanna do that either. Israel had come to abuse the spiritual privilege of the temple but that wouldn't stop God decades later from commanding the returning remnant to rebuild the temple and enjoy its benefits. We don't reject God's good graces simply on the grounds that many Christians misuse those graces. Reading your Bible every day isn't bad. Reading your Bible every day as a means of earning merit with God is bad. The solution isn't to stop reading your Bible then. It's to stop thinking that your spiritual discipline earns you clout with God. So don't confuse your idolatry with the object of your idolatry. But the fact remains we are masters, are we not, at disguising the idols we have manufactured and we, like Israel, often hide our idols behind good things.

Why? Because apart from God's preserving grace, we are morally dirtier than we realize and we need the cleansing that only God can give. This brings us to the second scene presented here in chapter 24. And in this second scene we are confronted with the reality that God's people are more vulnerable than they realize.

More vulnerable than they realize. The scene begins with a poignant dramatization in verses 15 through 18. It says, the word of the Lord came to me, son of man, behold I am about to take the delight of your eyes away from you at a stroke. Yet you shall not mourn or weep, nor shall your tears run down. Sigh, but not aloud. Make no mourning for the dead.

Bind on your turban and put your shoes on your feet. Do not cover your lips nor eat the bread of men. So I spoke to the people in the morning and at evening my wife died.

And on the next morning I did as I was commanded. Ezekiel as a man is a bit of an enigma to us, isn't he? He does strange things, he tells strange stories.

He's just not very relatable from our vantage point. But here in these verses we're given a brief glimpse into the personal life of this man Ezekiel. And what we find is instantly relatable and human. We learn that he has a wife whom he dearly loves. God calls her the delight of Ezekiel's eyes.

But then we discover that tragedy is about to hit his family as his wife suddenly dies. The heart wrenching part of the story is that God forbids Ezekiel to mourn in any sort of public way. His quiet, suppressed grief is to be yet another sign act for Israel.

How was it to be a sign act? Verses 19 through 24 tell us. Verse 19, and the people said to me, will you not tell us what these things mean for us?

That you're acting thus. So they observe his suppressed grief over the sudden death of his wife. They knew it wasn't normal so they realize that Ezekiel's behavior is once again a sign. It's a sermon, a message for them. Verse 20, then I said to them, the word of the Lord came to me. Say to the house of Israel, thus says the Lord God, behold I will profane my sanctuary, the pride of your power, the delight of your eyes.

So do you see the connection he makes there? The delight of Ezekiel's eyes was his wife, the delight of the exile's eyes was the temple. And just as Ezekiel's wife was suddenly taken from him, so the temple would suddenly be taken from Israel. Verse 21 continues, and the yearning of your soul and your sons and your daughters whom you left behind shall fall by the sword and you shall do as I have done. You shall not cover your lips nor eat the bread of men.

Your turbans shall be on your head, your shoes on your feet. You shall not mourn or weep. You shall rot away in your iniquities and groan to one another. Thus shall Ezekiel be to you a sign according to all that he has done, you shall do.

When this comes, then you will know that I am the Lord God. I'm not gonna pretend this is not a very difficult passage of scripture, it most certainly is. We read this and we think, my goodness, what a hard providence for Ezekiel. Israel's suffering, I understand, they were sacrificing their children at the altar of Molech. They deserved whatever hard providence God wanted to give them, but for Ezekiel to have to incarnate, personify their suffering by modeling suppressed grief in front of them, that's excruciatingly difficult to grasp, isn't it?

And I think before we can even get to the question of why this had to happen, we have to get a few things straight. The first thing we have to settle in our minds is that Ezekiel, like every one of us, was a sinner. Ezekiel's wife was also a sinner. And God told the human race at the very start, if you sin, you will die. The wages of sin is and has always been death.

It's what we deserve. Now we don't know the nature of Ezekiel's sin pattern or his wife's, presumably they weren't as rebellious as many of the other exiles, but maybe they were. God has used some pretty sinful people to be his spokespeople over the centuries. But my point is, none of us deserve any grace from God. Anything short of hell is merciful on God's part. I'm not sure that when it comes right down to it, we fully believe this because our frequent objections to providence often betray, I think, a certain sense of unspoken entitlement that we have. Now I'm not saying it's easy, but I am saying it's right for us to have the same confession that Job exhibited in the face of his incredible tragedy when he said, naked I come from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return. The Lord gave, the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. Or later when he said, shall we receive good from God and shall we not receive evil? Not only should we resign ourselves to the reality that God is right in all that he does and has every right to do as he pleases, but we should also recognize that as children of God, we have the added promise that providence is always working for our good. That's the Romans 8.28 promise, isn't it? And so our confession is not some fatalistic acknowledgement that God can do whatever he wants. He can, but our confession also includes an acknowledgement that whatever God does is actually for the good of his children.

And so we can say in full confidence with Joseph what wicked people mean for evil, God means for good. Whate'er my God ordains is right, his holy will abideth. I will be still whate'er he does and follow where he guideth. He is my God. Though dark my road, he holds me that I shall not fall. And so to him I leave it all.

And so to him I leave it all. Now having said all that, I think there is value in considering what God's good purpose is might have been in requiring what he required of Ezekiel. Specifically, why was he not allowed to publicly mourn the death of his wife? What message could that possibly have conveyed to the exiles in light of the temple's imminent destruction?

The text does not explicitly answer this question, although that hasn't stopped commentators from giving dozens of various speculative answers. Some say God's prohibition to express grief was to portray the indifference of Israel or their moral callousness or their hard-heartedness, their stiff-neckedness. The problem with these answers though as I see it is that these explanations fail to take into account Israel's idolatrous attachment to the temple. It wasn't that they didn't care about the temple enough, it was that they cared about it too much and for all the wrong reasons. Remember the temple, just like Ezekiel's wife, was the delight of their eyes, the yearning of their souls. So no, I don't think their lack of emotion was some indication of callousness or religious apathy.

I wanna share with you a couple of explanations that I found helpful and then I'll just let you go and study it further on your own, see what you can discover. The first explanation comes from Ian Duguid, who suggests that the prohibition to grieve has to do with the exiles' inability to utilize the normal social customs of the day to comfort them in their sorrow. Think about it with me for a moment. We have certain customs in our culture that are normal at funerals, right? We embalm bodies, for example, to make them look as attractive as possible. We gather for meals and tell stories of what the deceased person meant to us.

We observe graveside services and surround the grieving family with flowers and kind words and comforting music and so on. And if our circumstances were such that we had to forego these customs, it would just add to our grief, would it not? Duguid is saying it's not that the exiles weren't allowed to grieve, it's that they weren't able to grieve in their customary manner. They had to grieve in a Babylonian context because, among other things, they had lost the privilege of grieving in Jerusalem.

That might be part of the explanation of what's going on here. Another explanation, this is from Daniel Block in his commentary on Ezekiel, seeks to explain the restrained sorrow in light of the verses and circumstances that follow, specifically verses 25 through 27. Verse 25 says that on the day when Jerusalem finally falls to Babylon and the temple is destroyed, a fugitive will come to you to report to you the news. On that day, your mouth, Ezekiel's mouth, will be opened. You shall speak and be no longer mute. Now perhaps you'll remember from back in chapter three that Ezekiel's mouth was silenced.

He was only allowed to say exactly what God had allowed him to say, and what God had allowed him to say for five years now were almost exclusively words of judgment. All of that was about to change. Ezekiel's tongue is going to be loosed, and the content of his message will radically shift away from judgment against Israel and towards judgment against the nations and restoration for Israel. This was to be a significant turning point for Israel. Certainly there would be sorrow over the loss of Jerusalem, the temple, but that sorrow would quickly be turned to joy as the process of restoration would begin almost immediately.

Block's explanation for the lack of outward grieving is very positive. He says this, the exiles would refrain from mourning not because they would be paralyzed by grief or calloused by sin, but because they would recognize the dawn of a new age. The messenger's announcement of the fall of the city will in effect be welcome news. Jerusalem will have paid her debts.

The judgment will have passed. God had given Israel its land and its temple as a place for communing with him. They had turned these blessings into idols.

Good things being used in bad ways become bad things. The temple had become an object of false security and of cultural pride. It needed to be destroyed because that temple, beautiful and necessary though it was, was not as sacred in God's eyes as the people who used the temple. Temples can come and go. God's people are what matters to him.

He will not ignore their spiritual condition in order to preserve symbols and shadows. And so even though Israel will experience a great loss, what they will gain will in time far outweigh the loss. How wrong and ungrateful then it would have been for Israel to stop and grieve over the loss of their idolatrous attachment to the temple.

Now please don't misunderstand what I'm saying. Grief is not wrong. God intends us to grieve when loved ones die. God intends us to grieve when blessings are lost. But God does not intend us to grieve the loss of a besetting sin or of an idol of the heart.

When God graciously removes those ruinous things from our lives, we ought to give him thanks for it, not grief for it. I'm also not suggesting that Ezekiel's wife was an idol to Ezekiel that needed to be killed. No, Ezekiel's grief was divinely suppressed, not because of some wrongdoing on Ezekiel's part or on the part of his wife, but rather as a sign, as a sermon for Israel. Had Israel not observed Ezekiel restraining his grief even as he endured the loss of his heart's desire, they would have been in no posture to rightly endure the loss of their own heart's desire. They would have responded with grief untold at the news of Jerusalem's fall, missing the whole point that in that fall, God was delivering them from destructive idolatry. Had they not been given pause by Ezekiel's emotional restraint, they would have been saddened by the loss of their own sin rather than gladdened by the gracious chastening of the Lord. The tragic reality in all this, however, is that this sermon that Ezekiel is living out in front of Israel cost him a beautiful, fulfilling marriage, and yet God had him preach that sermon anyway.

Just let that sink in for a moment. Before we get hung up on the unfairness of it all, let's just pause ourselves and think about what this means. Church, it means that proclaiming God's truth and living out that truth is very likely going to cost us a great deal. The Christian life is not a call to ease. It's a call to die, and not just a call to die to your own desires and comforts, but a call to die for other people's sin.

Paul said, let this mind be in you, Christian, which was also in Christ Jesus, that though he was in the form of God, did not consider equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, becoming obedient to the point of death. That's the very sort of self-sacrificing, others-focused kind of life that we're called to live. We also need to observe that this sacrificial kind of life that we're called to live, and that Ezekiel was called to live, is nothing that God himself has not also done for us, and done on an even grander and costlier scale.

God willingly gave up the delight of his soul, his only begotten son, in order that our misplaced affections, our idolatries, our transgressions would be forgiven, and that we would not be sent to hell, to the hell that we deserve. Ezekiel's experience here is a beautifully poignant foreshadowing of the love that God the Father has for sinners, a love that even endured death because of the joy that it would lead to. Well, this brings us then to a third and final scene, a scene which suggests that God's people are more loved than they realize. Verse 27 says, on that day your mouth will be opened, your mouth will be opened.

The tide is about to turn for the exiles. Ezekiel's mouth is about to be opened, not to pour out more words of judgment, but to pour out words of blessing, and grace, and hope, and promise. This symbolic opening of the prophet's mouth will mark the beginning of God's restoration of the remnant back to the promised land. They will return and rebuild the temple. They will worship Yahweh once again on his holy hill. And so grace and mercy are just on the horizon. But even that rebuilt temple would not fully picture the grace and glory that awaited God's children. This cycle of blessing, and rebellion, and judgment would have to repeat itself again before the fullness of time would come when Jesus Christ would walk the earth and declare that he himself is the temple, and the priest, and the sacrifice, and everything that those old temporary types and shadows were pointing us to. So as we bring this to a close tonight, the message of Ezekiel 24 is simply this. God must sometimes take away what we love the most in order to give us what we ought to love the most. It's a hard lesson to learn, fraught with frowning providences, but the outcome is always good. Losing our idols in order to fully know the Lord is always worth every tear.

Let's pray. Father, your love for us astounds us. It's a love that drove you to sacrifice your only son that we might live. Help us to appreciate that love, and imitate that love, and be transformed by that love. Lord, we trust you with our very souls because you are righteous and you are good, and it's in Jesus' name we pray, amen.