Please turn with me, if you would, to Ezekiel chapter 34. We're going to be looking at the entire chapter this morning, but let's begin by just reading verses 11 through 16, and then we'll jump down and read verses 30 and 31. These are some of the sweetest verses in the book of Ezekiel.
Stand with me, if you would, in honor of God's Word, as we read Ezekiel 34, 11 through 16, and then 30 and 31. For thus says the Lord God, Behold, I, I myself, will search for my sheep and will seek them out. As a shepherd seeks out his flock when he is among his sheep that have been scattered, so I will seek out my sheep, and I will rescue them from all places where they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness. And I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries and will bring them into their own land, and I will feed them on the mountains of Israel, by the ravines, and in all the inhabited places of the country. I will feed them with good pasture, and on the mountain heights of Israel shall be their grazing land. There they shall lie down in good grazing land, and on rich pasture they shall feed on the mountains of Israel. I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I myself will make them lie down, declares the Lord God. I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak and the fat, and the strong I will destroy.
I will feed them injustice. Verse 30, and they shall know that I am the Lord their God with them, and that they, the house of Israel, are my people, declares the Lord God. And you are my sheep, human sheep of my pasture, and I am your God, declares the Lord God. Let's pray. You are our shepherd, and we lack nothing. And if there is any doubt in the hearts of any of your children here today about your love for your own, would you make it plain beyond a shadow of a doubt that, like a good shepherd, you are with your sheep and you are for your sheep. May we hear your voice today and follow you. I pray in Jesus' name. Amen.
You can be seated. I remember a day early on in our marriage when Laura had to be gone for a few hours, and so I had child duty. It was just me and our two little ones at home. Meredith was just an infant. Ethan was a toddler, and both of them wanted their mother. Ethan had been sick, so I was trying to give him a bath and put him to bed early, but he wasn't feeling well.
Nothing made him comfortable. Meredith was hungry. Ethan was crying. The dishes were not getting washed. The house was not getting picked up.
The whole situation was just falling apart. I remember flopping down in the rocking chair trying to console the kids, not sure what to do, when I heard the welcome sound of Laura coming through the front door. She surveyed the squalor for about five seconds and then sprang into action. And I still don't know how she did it, but within minutes, it seemed, mouths were fed, medicine was administered, kids were in bed and contentedly asleep in their rooms, and Laura was asking me how my day was, as if she had not just performed the most amazing maternal miracle ever. How was she able to do that? She was able to do that because that's what good mothers do. She knew what needed to be done. She knew how to do it, and she did it. It was natural.
It was intuitive. It was second nature because she's a good mother. Good mothers love their children and know what their children need, and so they do what needs to be done for the good of their children. When her children's world is in disarray, a good mother moves into action and brings order and stability and goodness and peace. Ezekiel 34 describes God in a similar vein as one who brings order out of chaos, peace and stability out of confusion.
Ezekiel describes God as a good shepherd who knows exactly what his sheep need and how to give them what they need, and so as a good shepherd, he springs into action on behalf of his sheep. The exiles in Babylon were in a bad place. They had just received news that their beloved capital, Jerusalem, had fallen, and so whatever hope they had had in their hearts was now just shattered.
Furthermore, they had listened to all the wrong advice and indulged in all the wrong habits. Their lives were ruined. What hope did they have of ever overcoming the mess, the disarray they'd made of their lives? Well, that's where the good shepherd comes in. God cares about his sheep even when the trouble that they're in is trouble of their own making. God knows his sheep even when they've compromised and distorted themselves beyond recognition. God, like a wise shepherd, is able to take the mess and fix it. In fact, he promises to take the mess and fix it.
Why does he do this? Because he loves the sheep more than we'll ever understand. The message of Ezekiel 34 is this. God knows how to order the church when it is in disarray because he loves the sheep. Every verse in this chapter points us to that beautiful, divine love that God has for his people, his children, his sheep. So I'd like us to walk through the chapter this morning looking for demonstrations of that love, and as these demonstrations begin to pile up, I think we'll begin to appreciate the love of God for sinners more deeply than we do now. I want to draw your attention this morning to four ways that God demonstrates his love for the sheep. First, God demonstrates his love by removing threats to his sheep.
God's love is demonstrated first by going to the defense of his sheep. Verse 10 verses of Ezekiel 34 are spent addressing a chronic problem in Israel, the problem of godless, self-centered leadership. Verse 1, The word of the Lord came to me, Son of man, Prophesy against the shepherds of Israel. Prophesy and say to them, even to the shepherds, Thus says the Lord God, Ah, shepherds of Israel, who have been feeding yourselves, should not shepherds feed the sheep? Throughout chapter 34, God uses the metaphor of a flock of sheep to represent his people, the covenant community, the church. Shepherds in this metaphor then are the leaders of the community, the ones responsible for protecting and providing for the sheep. In Israel's case, these leaders would have been the prophets and the priests and the kings.
These were the offices of leadership there in the old covenant community, but many of the men who held these offices of leadership in Israel were habitually neglectful of their duty and even used their position of authority as a means of helping themselves rather than helping the people. Verse 3, You shepherds, eat the fat. You clothe yourselves with wool. You slaughter the fat ones, but you do not feed the sheep. The weak you have not strengthened. The sick you have not healed. The injured you have not bound up. The strayed you have not brought back.
The lost you have not sought. And with force and harshness you have ruled them. So the leaders of Israel were not fulfilling the basic responsibilities of a shepherd. And the consequence of this harmfully selfish leadership was that the covenant community was scattered. Israel was conquered and deported to Assyria.
Judah was conquered and deported to Babylon. Verse 5, So they were scattered because there was no shepherd, and they became food for all the wild beasts, all the foreign countries who took advantage of Israel's vulnerability. And so as a good shepherd, the Lord springs into action. Verse 7, Therefore you shepherds, hear the word of the Lord. As I live, declares the Lord God, surely because my sheep have become a prey, and my sheep have become food for all the wild beasts, since there was no shepherd, and because my shepherds have not searched for my sheep, but the shepherds have fed themselves and have not fed my sheep, therefore you shepherds, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God, Behold, I am against the shepherds, and I will require my sheep at their hand and put a stop to their feeding the sheep.
No longer shall the shepherds feed themselves. I will rescue my sheep from their mouths, that they may not be food for them. Whose sheep? God's sheep.
The Lord makes it very clear through sheer repetition that the sheep belong to him. They aren't the shepherds' sheep, those selfish human leaders. They aren't Babylon's sheep.
They aren't Assyria's sheep. They are God's sheep. And because they're God's sheep, God himself is going to intervene by removing the destructive leaders and not allowing them to serve themselves at the expense of the sheep. But not only is God going to deal with the threat of harmful shepherds, leaders, he's also going to deal with harmful sheep. Skip down to verse 17, where God addresses not the shepherds, but the sheep. Verse 17, As for you, my flock, thus says the Lord God, Behold, I judge between sheep and sheep, between rams and male goats. Is it not enough for you to feed on the good pasture that you must tread down with your feet the rest of your pasture, and to drink of clear water that you must muddy the rest of the water with your feet, and must my sheep eat what you have trodden with your feet, and drink what you have muddied with your feet? Therefore, thus says the Lord God to them, Behold, I myself will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep. Because you push with side and shoulder and thrust at all the weak with your horns till you have scattered them abroad, I will rescue my flock.
They shall no longer be a prey, and I will judge between sheep and sheep. So not only was there a threat from harmful leaders taking advantage of their position of power and authority, there was also a threat from within the flock itself. Harmful people within the covenant community who cared more about their own welfare and comfort than about the group individualists who were in it for themselves at the expense of the rest of the church and who were damaging the church through their selfishness. The contemporary parallel to what the old covenant community was experiencing is not difficult to see.
We don't have prophets, priests, and kings per se like Old Testament Israel, but we do have pastors and church leaders, officers, people of influence in the church. And when people use their power and position to take advantage of God's people, God doesn't stand by and let it happen for very long. He intervenes. He runs to the rescue of his sheep. When Christian turns against Christian and begins to manipulate and take advantage of and destroy the peace and purity, the health and the unity of God's flock, God doesn't sit on his throne in heaven wishing it would all just stop. No, he intervenes. He takes action. He himself removes the threat, the threat of harmful leaders, the threat of harmful sheep.
Why? Because he is a good shepherd who loves the sheep. Now, perhaps there is a danger we need to be aware of, and that is the danger of designating a church leader or fellow Christian as harmful, merely on the grounds that I don't like them or I struggle to get along with them. In other words, we may have a tendency in our flesh to designate as harmful anything that crosses me.
We need to make sure that we define harmful the way God defines harmful. And I think the book of Jude is very helpful along this line. Jude alludes actually to the metaphor of Ezekiel 34. Verse 12 of Jude says, refers to shepherds feeding themselves, and in fact, the entire book of Jude is spent addressing self-centered shepherds and sheep in the church. If we were to take note of what Jude says about these harmful entities in the church, we would begin to get a very concrete idea of how God defines what is harmful to his flock.
The kind of destructive shepherds and sheep that God has in mind are characterized according to Jude by this. Ungodliness, sensuality, insubordination to the lordship of Christ, self-reliance, moral perversion, rejection of the authority placed over them while assuming more authority than they've been given. They love material wealth more than truth. They are discontent and complain a lot.
They brag often and publicly about themselves. They show favoritism in order to gain advantage, and the fruit of their ministry, the telltale sign that they are harmful to the church, is that they cause division, fracturing in the church. The church leader or fellow Christian who is characterized by Jude's description is a harmful shepherd, a selfish sheep, and God will remove their ability to threaten the church.
I think there are a couple of practical implications of this that we need to keep in mind. First of all, if God is a God who deals swiftly and severely with people who cause harm to his flock, then we had better not be causing harm. God is not going to tolerate damage to his body, so if you're causing damage to God's body, stop, repent, humble yourself, and begin pursuing the peace which you have been called to pursue. But a second implication, and the more immediate one, given the context of Ezekiel 34, I think, is this. If God doesn't put up with destructive leaders and selfish Christians, and if God promises to deal with them decisively, then, beloved, we can rest in God's awareness of the people and circumstances that threaten us. We can rest in God's ability to deal with those threats.
The wolves and the goats do not have the upper hand. God knows those who are his and those who are not. He is the good shepherd, and so we can trust him to do the shepherding. He loves the sheep. Well, this brings us to a second demonstration of God's love for his flock. God demonstrates his love for the sheep secondly by nurturing his sheep, by nurturing them. God has removed the threat of harmful shepherds, but where does that leave the sheep? Are they shepherdless? Are they going to do all the tasks that the shepherd should have been doing?
Well, look at what the Lord does, and this is just beautiful. Verse 11, For thus says the Lord God, Behold, I, I myself, will search for my sheep and will seek them out. As a shepherd seeks out his flock when he is among his sheep that have been scattered, so I will seek out my sheep.
And now notice all the verbs. This is what God himself is going to do for his abused, neglected sheep. God says, I will rescue them from all places where they've been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness. I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries. I will bring them into their own land. I will feed them on the mountains of Israel, by the ravines and in all the inhabited places of the country. I will feed them with good pasture, and on the mountain heights of Israel shall be their grazing land.
There they shall lie down in good grazing land and on rich pasture they shall feed on the mountains of Israel. I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I myself will make them lie down, declares the Lord God. I will seek the lost.
I will bring back the strayed. I will bind up the injured. I will strengthen the weak, and the fat and the strong I will destroy.
I will feed them in justice. God himself does what those shepherds who have now been relieved of duty should have been doing. He shepherds the flock. He nurtures the sheep, and we see from the repetition of the first person pronoun I that God does this. He's the one doing the nurturing.
You've heard the old saying, if you want a job done right, do it yourself. Well, that's especially true if you're God. He is perfect. He is all knowing. He is all powerful.
He is all wise. And so in verse 11, he says, I myself will do the shepherding. He loves the sheep so much that he ensures that they are properly nurtured by nurturing them himself. And related to this nurture from God himself is the third way that God demonstrates his love for the church. He shows his love, thirdly, by appointing a good shepherd for his sheep. And this is where Christ shines the most clearly in our text today. Look with me at verse 23. God says, and I will set up over them, over his flock, over the church, one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them. He shall feed them and be their shepherd. And I, the Lord, will be their God, and my servant David shall be prince among them.
I am the Lord I have spoken. Now at the time that Ezekiel wrote this, King David was long dead, so when God says that the one shepherd is David, something figurative is going on. He doesn't mean the literal person of King David.
As it turns out, this is a frequent way of referring to the Messiah, the Christ, the anointed one, the one whom God promised would come one day and save his people. The connection between King David and the Messiah begins in 2 Samuel 7, where God establishes a covenant with David and promises, among other things, that David will have a descendant on the throne, a descendant who will reign forever. This theme of a son of David who will come and save God's people is then woven throughout the Psalms and the prophets, and when we come to the New Testament, we discover numerous instances in which those Old Testament verses, verses that apply to the anticipated promised son of David, are applied directly to Jesus Christ.
It's all shouting the undeniable reality that Jesus Christ is the promised son of David. Jesus Christ is the shepherd king who will sit on David's throne forever. And so when Ezekiel records in verse 23 that the Lord will establish one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them and be their shepherd, he's referring unmistakably to Christ.
Now there's a glorious deduction we can make from all this. If God makes it clear in verses 11 through 16 that he himself, God, is going to shepherd his people, and if it's clear in verses 23 and 24 that Jesus is the shepherd of God's people, then the logical implication is that Jesus is God. Jesus is the good shepherd of Ezekiel 34. In fact, it's difficult, isn't it, to read Ezekiel 34 without thinking of Christ's own words about himself in John 10, where he assumes the title good shepherd. In John 10, Jesus says, I am the good shepherd. He says it explicitly. He says in John 10 11 that he's the good shepherd, but then he goes on to tell us what makes him the good shepherd.
Listen to this. The good shepherd, contrary to those harmful shepherds in Ezekiel 34 and in the book of Jude, the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The good shepherd knows his own and his own know him.
God loves his people, and that love is demonstrated most clearly in the fact that Jesus Christ, who was God in the flesh, came to us as one of us and died for us. A good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. So Jesus Christ laid down his life for his sheep.
It's yet another demonstration of the great love that God has for his church. He is a good shepherd. And in light of this incredible promise from God to his people, the promise of establishing his only begotten son as the good shepherd of the sheep, what should our response be? How should sheep respond to a gracious self-sacrificing shepherd who is good? Well, they ought to be grateful for his care. But more than that, they should trust in his care. They should obey his instruction.
He's working for their own good. They should listen to his voice and do as he says and rest in his will. You see, church, if God is for us, as Paul said in Romans 8, then who can be against us?
He who did not spare his own son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? We have Christ as our shepherd. What danger could possibly threaten us?
None. Nothing is stronger than our good shepherd. And so we have no reason for alarm or fear or panic. We only have reason to make sure that we're staying with the shepherd, that we're listening to his voice, doing as he commands, trusting his wisdom, following his lead. If God loves us enough to give us his own son to be our shepherd, then we ought to listen to him. This brings us then to the last demonstration of God's love here in Ezekiel 34. It's found in verses 25 through 31, and here we see God entering into covenant with his sheep. In verse 25, God says, I will make with my sheep a covenant of peace, a covenant of peace.
A covenant is a relationship between two parties that is built upon promises, promises of blessing when certain obligations are met, promises of curses when those obligations are not met. And God here in verse 25 makes a covenant with his people and promises to undo all the bad effects that these negligent shepherds of Israel had brought about. He says, I will banish wild beasts from the land so that my people may dwell securely in the wilderness and sleep in the woods, and I will make them in the places all around my hill a blessing, and I will send down the showers in their season. There shall be showers of blessing, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit, and the earth shall yield its increase, and they shall be secure in the land, and they shall know that I am the Lord. When I break the bars of their yoke and deliver them from the hand of those who enslaved them, they shall no more be a prey to the nations, nor shall the beasts of the land devour them.
They shall dwell securely, and none shall make them afraid, and I will provide for them renowned plantations so that they shall no more be consumed with hunger in the land and no longer suffer the reproach of the nations. It's a beautiful covenant of peace, and we'll learn some more about this covenant of peace when we come to chapter 37, but what I want you to notice now is that God makes himself the sole agent responsible for bringing about these promised blessings. He's not relying on false prophets or self-centered priests or godless kings. He himself is the prophet, priest, and king. He draws up the terms and conditions of the covenant and then makes himself the fulfiller of those conditions. His own son is the mediator, the rule keeper, the shepherd. Where the church fails, God succeeds. Where we have made a mess of things, God takes charge and puts all things where they belong.
God knows how to order the church when it is in disarray because he loves the church. He loves his sheep. And this beautiful restoration of the relationship between shepherd and sheep is summed up in verse 30. God says, And they shall know that I am the Lord their God with them, and that they, the house of Israel, are my people, declares the Lord. And then in the last verse of the chapter, God speaks in the second person. He's not speaking about Israel.
Now he's speaking to Israel. He's speaking to us, and he says, You are my sheep, human sheep of my pasture, and I am your God, declares the Lord. There are no commands in this chapter for us to obey. We don't reach the end of Ezekiel 34 with a to-do list of imperatives from God. Instead, the focus is entirely on God's ability and desire to take care of his sheep.
And so we might ask ourselves, what is the intended effect of this chapter then? Why has God gone out of his way to explain how much he loves his church? The intended effect is this, that we would know him who loves us and is with us and in knowing him to trust him and follow him. As parents, we want our children to know that we love them and to believe that we have their best interests in mind, not because of some ulterior motive that we have. We want them to know that we love them simply because we love them. That is the motive behind the care and concern and protection and provision we give to our children.
As human parents, we do that imperfectly. But God is perfect in his shepherding of his people because he loves with the perfect love. The application then of a chapter that is all about how much God loves his sheep is for the sheep to love and obey and rest in and worship the shepherd for who he truly is. When the church is in disarray, we can take comfort in the fact that God loves us. And his love is not some ethereal thing that makes no practical difference in our lives.
His love fixes what's broken. It explains what is a mystery to us. It eliminates enemies. It restores order where there is chaos.
It provides leadership where there is lack of direction. God's love provides nourishment where there is hunger. God's love provides company and friendship where there is loneliness, righteousness where there is sin, a savior where there is condemnation and guilt, his eternal presence where there was eternal separation from his presence. And our response to the revelation of this divine love ought to be peace and trust and obedience and submission and delight and love for the shepherd. These realities don't give us license to sin.
They give us motivation to run from sin. It is no accident that chapter 34 comes right on the heels of a strong call to repent of sin. The promises of chapter 34 are for those who have heeded the call of repentance in chapter 33.
And there are a lot more promises yet to come, promises of restoration in the remaining chapters of Ezekiel, but the exiles needed to hear at the very moment when things were in greatest disarray that God would come to their rescue. God always comes to the rescue of his people. And so we do well in our own moments of disarray and discouragement to pause and take in the glorious weight of the fact that God himself is the one who shepherds his people.
He will not fail. He knows what we need. He knows what needs to be done for the good of his church, and he has promised to act. So trust the shepherd.
Listen to his voice and follow him. Let's pray. Lord, may we feel the overwhelming peace that comes from being a part of your flock. And when we flirt with sin and stray from the fold, would you bring us back? Because there is salvation in no other name than Jesus Christ, our Lord, our Savior, our good shepherd. Amen.
