We come this morning to Ezekiel chapter 35. Been making our way through this Old Testament prophetic book, and we'll be looking at all of chapter 35 and much of chapter 36.
These verses belong together in spite of the chapter break that is put right in the middle of them. In these verses, God is drawing a contrast between his enemies and his people. So let's begin by reading Ezekiel 35. We'll just read the first four verses, which is a prophet prophecy against God's enemies, and then we'll skip down and read Ezekiel 36 verses 8 through 11, which is a contrasting prophecy that is for or in favor of God's people. If you would please stand with me in honor of God's word, we'll begin at Ezekiel 35 verse 1.
And then in contrast, let's jump down to chapter 36 beginning at verse 8. I will birth your branches and yield your fruit to my people Israel, for they will soon come home. For behold, I am for you. I will turn to you, and you shall be tilled and sown. And I will multiply people on you, the whole house of Israel, all of it.
The cities shall be inhabited and the waste places rebuilt. They shall multiply on you man and beast, and they shall multiply and be fruitful. And I will cause you to be inhabited, as in your former times, and will do more good to you than ever before. Then you will know that I am the Lord.
Let's pray. Father, you are a just God who sees and judges the wickedness of the wicked, and this reality gives us confidence and hope in the face of persecution. But Lord, your justice cuts both ways. If you are a God who punishes the wicked, then it means that your righteousness must also punish our wickedness. And Lord, we are wicked, left to ourselves and our own devices. We run away from you, and we run towards sin. Lord, if the Bible were only about your justice and wrath against sin, we would all be undone because we've all sinned.
We've all fallen short of your holy standard. So we thank you that on the heels of your law, we discover the gospel, that the judgment of chapter 35 is quickly followed with the promised restoration of chapter 36. Lord, we see that there is mercy to be found for the wicked, and if there's mercy to be found, we desperately need that mercy. May we find that mercy even this morning as we contemplate the unbending reality of your perfect justice. And Lord, in finding that mercy, may we become a people who are filled with such gratitude for your grace that we experience the restoration that you describe in the verses before us today. Lord Jesus, be our hiding place from judgment. Carry us from the terror of being your enemies to the safety of being your redeemed people whom you love. We pray in Jesus' name, amen.
You may be seated. Well, like chapter 34 that we looked at last Sunday, our text today doesn't contain any imperatives to be obeyed. God is simply revealing his character to his people. But even passages of scripture which contain no commands are profitable, Paul says, for instruction in righteousness. So we should ask of every scripture text that we read, what is God wanting me to know or do or be in light of this portion of his word? Last Sunday in chapter 34, we saw that God revealed himself as the good shepherd, and we realized that our response to that revelation as his sheep is that we should trust in the shepherd. So what does God reveal about himself in our text today, and what should our response to that revelation be?
Well, you know, sometimes a good shepherd must discipline his sheep, but even the disciplinary hand of the good shepherd is motivated by love. The first recipients of Ezekiel 35 and 36 were members of God's covenant community. They were Israelites, but they were unfaithful Israelites. They had allowed sin rather than faithfulness to God to become habitual and even acceptable and normative in their lives. They had forgotten the God who had saved them, and they had begun worshiping and serving idols of their own making. So now they found themselves under the chastening hand of God. God had allowed them to be defeated by their enemies and taken into exile in Babylon, but God's purpose in allowing even this was good. It was restorative. It was even gracious, just like a parent who won't let his child destroy himself through foolish, harmful behavior. So here were these exiles tucked away in Babylon somewhere, devastated at what their lives and their homeland had become.
So put yourself in their shoes. I imagine most of us in those circumstances would have felt abandoned by God without hope, without any assurance of God's love. I suspect that theologically we know God's love doesn't wax and wane. He is unchanging.
He's not fickle like we are. If someone crosses us, we hold a grudge, but God doesn't operate that way. Still it's difficult, isn't it, for us to believe that, because we are so fickle and conditional and miserly with the love and the good graces that we dole out on people.
And we assume, well, God must be the same way. But you know, the Bible says explicitly that if God is chastening his child, it is because he loves his child. The reason we doubt God's love when we're being chastened is not because God's love has changed, but because deep down somewhere we must think that God loves us because of some merit in us. When I'm good, he loves me.
When I'm bad, he doesn't love me. But this is to misunderstand the nature of God's love and the nature of our loveliness. What we discover in our text this morning is an amazing display of the unconditionality of God's love for his people.
But he displays that unconditionality in a most unexpected way. He reveals his great love for his children by contrasting that love with his awesome wrath against his enemies. Our text begins with God calling Ezekiel to prophesy against Mount Seir in verse 2. So the question is, what is Mount Seir?
Mount Seir is a mountain, or actually a range of mountains, to the southeast of Judah. It was another way of referring to the land of the Edomites. And the Edomites were the descendants of Esau.
You remember Esau? He was the twin brother of Jacob, the son of Isaac. From the very point of their conception, Esau and Jacob were feuding brothers. Genesis 25 says that even in the womb, these two men struggled with each other, so much so that Rebekah, their mother, prayed about her son's conflict in the womb. She asked God, why is this happening to me? And scripture says, the Lord said to her, two nations are in your womb, and two peoples from within you shall be divided. The one shall be stronger than the other, the older shall serve the younger. This conflict between Jacob and Esau continued after their birth.
You know the story. One day Esau was exhausted after a hard day's work. Jacob had made some stew, so Esau asked for some of it, but Jacob shrewdly took advantage of Esau's hunger and said he'd give Esau food only if Esau would give Jacob his birthright, the blessing, the inheritance of the firstborn. And so Esau sold his birthright to Jacob, fair and square. But deep down, scripture says, Esau despised what had transpired.
Well, in time, the day came for Jacob, their father, to give his dying blessing to his firstborn son, so he summoned Esau, but Jacob, posing as Esau, went to Jacob and through deception received the blessing of the firstborn. Well, this feud grew to the point that Jacob had to flee the Promised Land to avoid being murdered by his brother. And in time, they would make peace somewhat, but the damage was done. Their descendants, the Israelites and the Edomites, would grow to resent and hate each other, spurning one another so fiercely that the Edomites became the quintessential enemy of Israel. Their land and their culture and their name would become synonymous with anyone and anything that stood in opposition to God's covenant people. In other words, Edom would become the archetype, the symbol of all things that oppose God.
The prophet Isaiah speaks of Edom in this way. Isaiah 34 is describing a universal judgment against all of God's enemies, the last judgment. And Isaiah says, the Lord is enraged against all the nations and furious against all their hosts.
He has devoted them to destruction. Their slain shall be cast out and the stench of their corpses shall rise. The mountains shall flow with their blood. All the hosts of heaven shall rot away and the skies roll up like a scroll.
All their hosts shall fall as leaves fall from the vine, like leaves falling from the fig tree. For my sword, God says, has drunk its fill in the heavens. And then listen to this, Isaiah says, behold, it descends for judgment upon Edom, upon the people I have devoted to destruction. So God is describing the final judgment that he's going to bring against all the nations and the representative nation of all the nations.
The one that is called out by name as the representative of all God's enemies is Edom, Mount Seir. Isaiah goes on, for the Lord has a day of vengeance, a year of recompense for the cause of Zion, and the streams of Edom shall be turned into pitch and her soil into sulfur. Her land shall become burning pitch. Night and day it shall not be quenched.
Its smoke shall go up forever. From generation to generation it shall lie waste. None shall pass through it forever and ever. So Isaiah 34 describes the final judgment in very absolute universal terms, and it is Edom that becomes the recurring nickname, if you will, of the reprobate, the lost, the damned. When we come to the New Testament, this symbolic use of Edom as representative of all those who are opposed to God continues, Romans 9. The Apostle Paul is describing the distinction between those whom God accepts and those whom God rejects. And what Old Testament narrative does he use to illustrate the point? He refers to these rivaling brothers of Jacob and Esau.
Jacob have I loved, Esau have I hated. In other words, the redeemed have I loved, the reprobate have I rejected. And so in light of this recurring paradigm that keeps coming up through the Bible, we realize that something far more significant than just a mere squabble in Palestine is in view. Ezekiel 35 isn't simply about a couple of ancient warring nations.
It's about a cosmic battle that has raged all the way back to the Garden of Eden and will continue raging until the second coming of Jesus Christ. The Mount Seir of Ezekiel 35 is a sort of theological shorthand that refers to all those who are against God and whom God himself is against. Now look with me at Ezekiel 35 3. Ezekiel says in verse 3, Thus says the Lord God, Behold, I, Yahweh, am against you, Mount Seir. So why is God against them?
Well he gives us several reasons. Verse 5, Because you cherished perpetual enmity and gave over the people of Israel to the power of the sword at the time of their calamity, at the time of their final punishment. Edom hated Israel and actually cherished that hatred and sought to keep that hatred alive to make it perpetual, God says. And for this God was against them.
Verse 10, Because you said, These two nations, Israel and Judah, these two countries shall be mine and we will take possession of them, although the Lord was there. So the Edomites wanted for themselves what God had given to Israel. And for this God was against them.
Verse 12, I, Yahweh, have heard all the reviling that you uttered against the mountains of Israel, saying, They are laid desolate, they are given us to devour. So Edom scandalized Israel with their words. They spread rumors and gossip and spewed hatred against the people of God. And for this God was against them.
Verse 15, As you rejoiced over the inheritance of the house of Israel because it was desolate, so I will deal with you. Edom became giddy with delight when Babylon sacked Jerusalem, and for this God was against them. You see, the Edomites at every turn were against God's people. They hated them. They spoke evil of them. They aided and abetted their enemies.
They coveted their land. They laughed when Israel was disciplined by the Lord. They opposed God's people, and for this God was against them because to oppose God's people is to oppose God himself. In fact, God makes this very point in verse 13. He says to Edom, You magnified yourselves against me with your mouth and multiplied your words against me. In their revilings against Israel, Edom was reviling God.
To hurt the shepherd's sheep is to hurt the shepherd and to incur the wrath of the shepherd, so God was against Mount Seir. And to make the theological parallel to hurt the elect of God, the church, is to incur the wrath of God. God will defend his church to the death. God did defend his church to the death. He will subdue any and every enemy that reviles and persecutes and scandalizes and demeans his bride. Not even the gates of hell, Jesus says, will prevail against his people.
So what is God going to do to Mount Seir? Isaiah 34 has already given us a taste of what God's judgment of the reprobate looks like. Ezekiel elaborates on it as well. Ezekiel 35, verse 4. Edom wanted to see Israel laid waste. God says, I will lay your cities waste, Edom, and you shall become a desolation, and you shall know that I am the Lord. Verse 6, Edom was guilty of bloodlust against Israel. God says, therefore, as I live, declares the Lord God, I will prepare you for blood, and blood shall pursue you because you did not hate bloodshed.
Therefore, blood shall pursue you. Verse 9, Edom cherished perpetual enmity against Israel. God says, I will make you a perpetual desolation, and your cities shall not be inhabited.
Then you will know that I am the Lord. Verse 10, Edom coveted Israel's land and wanted it for herself. God says, because you said these two nations, these two countries shall be mine, and we will take possession of them, although the Lord was there. Therefore, as I live, declares the Lord God, I will deal with you according to the anger and envy that you showed because of your hatred against them, and I will make myself known among them when I judge you, and you shall know that I am the Lord. Verse 12, Edom reviled Israel with words. God says to them, I have heard all the revileings that you uttered against the mountains of Israel. Verse 14, thus says the Lord God, while the whole earth rejoices, I will make you desolate. And then finally in verse 15, Edom rejoiced over Israel's downfall. God says to them, as you rejoiced over the inheritance of the house of Israel because it was desolate, so I will deal with you. You shall be desolate, Mount Seir, and all Edom, all of it, then they will know that I am the Lord. So at every point, Edom's crime, Edom's punishment fits the crime.
The sins they committed against God's people come back on their own heads because like a good shepherd, God protects his own. Well, this brings us to chapter 36. Ezekiel, under God's command, has prophesied to the mountains of Edom. Now he prophesies, chapter 36, verse 1, to the mountains of Israel.
So what are the mountains of Israel? Well, just like in chapter 35, Mount Seir had an immediate historical meaning as well as a larger theological sort of symbolic meaning, so the mountains of Israel have both a historic and theological significance. Historically, of course, we know that part of God's promise to Abraham back in Genesis 12 was that he would possess the Promised Land, and we're familiar with the story of how God led Abraham to the Promised Land, how he grew Abraham's descendants in number, how those descendants became slaves in Egypt, and how God delivered them from Egyptian slavery and eventually brought them back into the Promised Land, settled them there, grew them into a great nation. But Israel rebelled against God, the God who had made all this happen, and so God removed them from the Promised Land to remind them that what they had and what they were enjoying was all by His grace.
And if they rebelled against Him and acted like all the pagan nations around them, He would just as easily take the land away from them. Of course, God doesn't take back His promises. He keeps what He promises, and so even though Israel would be temporarily removed from the land, God would bring them back and reestablish them in it again because their possession of the land was all by God's grace. And we know from our vantage point in redemptive history that this was all necessary in order to pave the way for Abraham's ultimate descendant, right, the promised offspring of Abraham, the prophet who would be greater than Moses, the son of David who would sit on David's throne forever and ever, the Messiah, Jesus Christ. This brings us to the theological significance of the Promised Land. You know, one of the interesting characteristics that you begin to notice as you study the history of redemption, the unfolding of God's plan of redemption in the Bible, is that redemptive themes start small, almost seemingly insignificant, but then they grow and grow and just keep on growing to the point that what seems small and hardly worthy of mention becomes bigger and grander than you would have ever imagined.
A man becomes a family, a family becomes a nation, and a nation becomes the world, and the world becomes the entire cosmos. God promises to give Abraham descendants like the stars in the sky, and then before the last chapter is written, God is actually giving the offspring of Abraham the stars. As John says in Revelation 11, 15, the kingdom of the cosmos has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever. God's redemptive work is more glorious and far-reaching than perhaps we can imagine. And so when Ezekiel tells this ragtag band of exiles that God is going to restore them to the land, there is an immediate historical fulfillment of that promise. Within just a few decades, they would return to Jerusalem and begin rebuilding the ruins.
And under the supervision of men like Nehemiah and Ezra, it would become an inhabitable city again with a functioning temple and commerce and citizens, but there is far more being promised than merely the success of Nehemiah's construction projects or Ezra's religious reforms. Just like Abraham is the father of all the faithful, the church, so the promised land is a picture of all the blessings of God's kingdom. In fact, we'll see in just a moment that God's promise to restore the land here in Ezekiel 36 borrows a lot of language from the creation account in Genesis, as if to suggest that the sort of restoration God has in store is not merely local and Jewish but universal and for all creation. If Mount Seir represents all those whom God is against, the mountains of Israel represents all those whom God is for. So exactly what is God going to do to the mountains of Israel? In the first seven verses of chapter 36, God essentially reiterates to Israel what he's just said to Edom, that Edom is condemned and that Edom will be punished, but then in verse 8, the tone changes and God begins to describe the glorious restoration that he has in store for Israel. Verse 8, But you, O mountains of Israel, shall shoot forth your branches and yield your fruit to my people, for they will soon come home.
Now, again, put yourself in the shoes of the exiles. They've just found out their homeland has been destroyed. The news of Jerusalem's fall only reached them two chapters back.
They've just hit rock bottom. There's no Jerusalem to go back to. And it's at that moment that they hear this promise from the Lord, you will soon come home. And then right on the heels of that wonderful promise of hope and encouragement is an even greater promise from God. In fact, verse 9 of chapter 36 contains the most beautiful gospel-saturated statement of our entire text today. God says in verse 9, For behold, I am for you. God says to his people, I am for you. He's against Edom.
He's against all the nations who have opposed and ridiculed and taken advantage of his covenant people, but he is for his people. I remember as a boy playing pickup games of football or kickball during recess at school, and before the game could start, you had to pick teams, right? You know the procedure. Two captains would take turns drafting players for their team. Well, there was a boy at our school. It seemed like his name was Mike. We'll call him Mike. Mike had been in the sixth grade for two or three years.
He was the only kid in our class who had hit his growth spurt and started shaving. And so he was a good eight inches taller than everybody else. He was way more coordinated than all the other kids. If your captain picked Mike, you were almost guaranteed a victory.
You would win the game. He was that much better than everyone else. Now, increase that to infinity, and you begin to get a picture of what these downtrodden exiles were being promised. God was for them.
God would be fighting for Team Israel, which meant that Team Israel was guaranteed the victory. So what exactly was God promising to do for his people? Well, he promises a lot in the chapters ahead. A lot of restoration is about to commence, but the focal point of that restoration here in chapter 36, at least in the first 15 verses of chapter 36, is on the restoration of the land. The promised land is going to be revived and replenished and re-inhabited by God's people, by the Jewish exiles who are currently being chastened in Babylon. Let's get a taste of what this restoration of the land is going to look like by reading verses 10 and 11. Verse 10 of chapter 36 says, And I will multiply people on you, the whole house of Israel, all of it. The cities shall be inhabited, and the waste places rebuilt. And I will multiply on you man and beast. They shall multiply and be fruitful.
And there's that creation language. And I will cause you to be inhabited, as in your former times. And then listen to this. And I will do more good to you than ever before. I'll do more good to you than ever before. And God goes on promising one thing after another without qualification, without conditions, without limit. These are extensive, permanent, forever kinds of promises. In other words, what these downtrodden exiles are getting ready to receive is just a little taste, an appetizer of what God has planned for all his people at the consummation of all things, when his son returns to claim his bride. Another prophet, the prophet Jeremiah, describes the same scenario this way. He says, I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. So God has wonderful things in store for his people because he is for them.
And this brings us to a final question and perhaps the most crucial question of the message today. Why is God for the mountains of Israel? We saw why he was against Mount Seir and the Edomites. It was because they were opposed to God. Why then is God for his covenant people?
Is it because they, unlike the Edomites, were in favor of God? Is it because his people had demonstrated such consistent faithfulness and loyalty to God? God tells us the motive behind his grace to Israel, verse 22. Therefore say to the house of Israel, thus says the Lord God, it is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations to which you came. And I will vindicate the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations in which you have profaned among them. And the nations will know that I am the Lord, declares the Lord God, when through you, I vindicate my holiness before their eyes. Beloved, God is good to his people, not because his people are good, but simply because it is his good pleasure to show us his favor. To paraphrase the Apostle Paul, the mountains of Israel have I loved, but the mountains of Edom have I hated, not because of works done by sinful men, but because of God who calls.
And so in both his judging of sin and in his saving of sinners, God's sovereign prerogative prevails. There's a New Testament parallel to Ezekiel 35 and 36. It's Hebrews 12. Hebrews 12 is directed to suffering Christians who are under the chastening hand of God, just like those exiles in Ezekiel. And it reassures them that divine chastening is a good thing. Yes, it's hard, but it's good in that it produces the fruit of righteousness.
It's good in that it is visible proof of God's love for his children. And right in the middle of this chapter on the benefits of being chastened by God, the writer of Hebrews begins to list some of the obstacles we encounter when we're under chastening, obstacles that prevent us from seeing God's good purposes in chastening us. And interestingly, one of those obstacles is the unholiness of Esau, who sold his birthright for a single meal. Hebrews 12, 17 says, For you know that afterward, when he, Esau, desired to inherit the blessing, he was rejected.
Why? Because he found no chance to repent. The defining character trait of Esau, the defining characteristic of an Edomite, of one who stands in opposition to God, is that they desire the blessing, but not the blesser. They want God's favor on their own terms, without repentance, without faith in Christ.
And Christians, left to ourselves, we are all Edomites. But both Hebrews 12 and Ezekiel 35 and 36 are calling us, we chastened, undeserving children of God, to look not at ourselves for assurances of God's love and favor, but to look to a God who will show mercy to whom he will show mercy, and to Christ, who is both the originator and completer of our faith. You see, God loves his children simply because it is his pleasure to love them, not because they're better than unbelievers. And the profound implication of this truth is that if God loves me, it's not because I'm lovable, but because he is love. And if he loves me because of who he is and not because of who I am, then his love for me is constant. It doesn't change.
My standing before him is secure. Brothers and sisters, this means that God's chastening of you does not threaten the love he has for you. If the exiles in Babylon had spent their 70 years in exile believing that God owed them something, or that somehow they could earn their way back to the promised land, they would have only grown more and more discouraged.
And embittered with God with every passing year. No, the response God was desiring from them and producing in them was a response first of repentance and humility. Lord, we have sinned against a gracious God.
Forgive us. But then a response also of gratitude and worship for a God who, despite their unfaithfulness, would still have them as his own and bring them home. And that's the response God desires from all of his children.
Gratitude, worship, and love. If you're being chastened by God, don't grow weary. Instead, recognize that God's discipline is evidence of his love for you. It's evidence that he, by his sovereign grace, has moved you from the mountains of Edom to the pleasant mountains of Israel, where he will perfect you and keep you and fill you with all joy forever and ever and ever.
Let's pray. Gracious God, you are for us, and it astounds us. May the realization of your grace to us this morning spur us on to endure your chastening and to love you and worship you more sincerely than we do. And, Lord, if any of us realize this morning that we're outside of that grace, that we're still in Mount Seir, may the sheer offer of that grace to sinners like us spur us on to seek refuge in the righteousness of Christ, who alone can save. And it is in that name that we pray. Amen.
