Ezekiel 18-24: A Case Against and a Compassion for His People — A ‘Christian Growth’ Message

Transcript

Father, we thank you for every privileged opportunity we have to open the scriptures to sit quietly and consider your Word to us. We pray that you would help us to be good hearers and then good doers, and we ask it in Jesus’ name, Amen.

Everybody who’s in a real relationship knows that love means having to say sorry, occasionally. And a real apology and a real acceptance is like two ends of a bridge meeting. One without the other of course is terrible and hopeless. An apology with no acceptance, a person willing to accept, but no apology, terrible.

And if we’re to relate to God. Exactly the same principle applies, there needs to be an apology and there needs to be an acceptance. And today in Ezekiel, I want to just follow two truths with you from a slab of the book.

And the first truth, the first theme that we’re going to follow is that God has a case against his people. And the second truth or theme is that God has compassion for his people. Case against. Compassion for. He has a concern to get people approaching him with an apology.

And he has a willingness to meet them. When they approach him.

Now this sermon is especially important for people in 3 groups this morning.

First of all, those who may be listening today who don’t think much about God at all.

You do not know that God has a case against you, you do not know how you would fix it if there was a case against you, and you do not even know that a relationship with God is the number one issue for you on the planet.

Hope 103.2 is proudly supported by

This sermon this morning is also important for people who are prone to drift theologically. I don’t mean drift mentally, all of us are prone to drift mentally.

But to drift theologically, you may be the sort of person who can easily lose the seriousness of God. And therefore, you tend to get a bit sentimental and wishy-washy in your faith. Or you may be the sort of person who tends to lose the gracious side of God and therefore you get legalistic and harsh towards yourself and towards others.

And this sermon is also especially important for people who are experiencing some kind of crumbling in some part of your life, genuine trouble going on in your life. And you need to be reminded of the situation that we’re in, in this world, so you won’t be shattered when things go wrong.

And you need also to remember the goodness of God who is able to take broken things and rebuild for better things.

Now what we’ve seen in Ezekiel in the book so far is we’ve seen God’s explanation for his people in exile. If you haven’t been here for the last few weeks, I just remind you in one sentence that God has taken his people out of the promised land. Toward the end of the Old Testament story, he’s taken them out of the promised land for 70 years because of their consistent unfaithfulness to God.

And what we’re gonna see this morning from Ezekiel 18 is God’s case to draw his people to their return. See, he sent them to the pigs. Remember how the prodigal son ran away and went to the pigs. And was sitting with the pigs and all the dishonour and the humiliation and the hunger, and the sadness and the memories.

Which woke him up to return, and that’s what God has done, he sent his people to the pigs. And we’re also going to see today his compassion for his people to see them restored.

There’s plenty of treasures in the chapters this morning. This is the last section of Ezekiel 1 to 24, and those of you who’ve got a mental picture of the book of Ezekiel, you may remember, you can divide it into three parts:

1 to 24, God’s word, warning his people. 25 to 32, God’s word warning the nations. Ezekiel 33-48, God’s word to restore. And we’re at the very end of the warning to his people. Let’s think of these two themes.

First of all, God’s case against his people.

Look at chapter 18 verse 2.

The people are blaming God for their exile. Chapter 18 verse 2, what do your people mean by quoting this proverb?

The fathers eat sour grapes. And the children’s teeth are set on edge. In other words, the people have a proverb which says, our ancestors wrecked everything. And we are paying the price.

If you were to put it into a bumper sticker, it would be something like this, they fail – we feel. Yes, God’s people up until now have been unfaithful and we’re paying for it, that’s what they’re saying. And you can see this is a complaint because in 18:29.

The house of Israel says the way of the Lord is not just. Now God’s word to his people is very clear. Look at chapter 18 verse 20. God says you’re responsible. Chapter 18 verse 20. The soul who sins is the one who will die.

The son will not share the guilt of the Father, nor will the father share the guilt of the son. The righteousness of the righteous man will be credited to him, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against him.

And in this chapter, Ezekiel sets out three generations, a father verse 5, a son verse 10, and a grandson verse 14. That would be the normal family that you might hope to see if you looked at a family gathered, you’d see the grandfather, then the son and the grandson, the 3 generations.

And in this picture, Ezekiel says the father chooses to do God’s will, the son chooses against God’s will, and the grandson chooses for God’s will, 4 against 4. And Ezekiel says nobody in the family is going to get the reward of another person.

Each one is going to get their own reward. Now this chapter is not teaching incidentally, salvation by works. This chapter is teaching that people are responsible to turn to God or turn away from God. It’s their responsibility. If the road sign says highway and you choose the road to the highway, you get the highway.

If the road sign says clifftop and you choose the way to the clifftop, you get the clifftop. God will not listen, you see, to the person who blames someone else as things go wrong because he says you’re responsible. Some of you, at Saint Thomas’ may know that I’m not exactly on the cutting edge of technology.

And one of the reasons that I stumble every now and again in my sermons is because there are blotches from my quill, but when I was a groovy youth leader back in the 70s, I was on the cutting edge of technology, and we used to buy or rent every now and again, little film strips. These little film strips were, basically wound onto this very old projector and a cassette dropped into a cassette player, and then this cutting-edge technology with little kids gathered around the wall, we would wind this little film strip forward.

And I always remember one of them was a very clever little film strip, it was called Henry.

And it was about a couple who I think came from somewhere like Birmingham in the UK. And Henry and his wife were waiting to win the pools, and they were refusing regularly, consistently to pay their rent.

And as they went on basically not answering the door to the landlord, their house began to crumble. And they got to the point of starting to blame the landlord for what was going on around them, and finally they got to the point of actually disbelieving in the landlord.

The sort of the great climax of the process was that Henry said, we don’t think that there even is a landlord. And such is the ability, you see, of the human heart to blame.

Now, God puts responsibility according to Ezekiel 18, into our hands. We are not free, we can’t regenerate ourselves, we can’t bring ourselves to new birth and new life, but we’re responsible to seek or to hide. That is our responsibility. And this is God’s case against the exile.

You did it. You’re in the exile. Because you did it. In chapter 19, you see how sad this is, because Ezekiel composes a lament. A lament for the Israelite princes.

They’ve been captured like lion cubs. You see this in verse 4, and you see this in verse 9 of chapter 19. The kings, like cubs, have been captured and taken away to other countries. And the nation has been uprooted like a vine. You see verse 13. It’s a sad situation. The kings have a net thrown over them, and like young cubs, they’re dragged off to another country.

And the whole nation of Israel, like a vine has been uprooted and planted no longer beside the water, but now in the desert of Babylon, it’s a sad thing, it’s a sad thing.

And the reason that this has taken place, verse 3 and 6 is because the kings have been devouring people, which I presume means they’ve been destructive, not constructive, and you’ll see in verse 12, they have stirred God to fury.

Now has this just been a one-off, you know, did the people just do something foolish and now suddenly whisked off to exile in Babylon? Not at all. Ezekiel chapter 20 shows that it’s not a one-off failure, it’s been a constant thing. And Ezekiel chapter 20 is a long chapter that surveys the history of Israel and shows that generation after generation, the people rebelled against God, and God has been patient and patient and patient and patient for his namesake, but they have been consistently rebellious. Chapter 20, verse 6, the people that he brought out of Egypt rebelled.

Chapter 20, verse 13, the people travelling in the desert rebelled. Chapter 20, verse 21, the people who are now in the promised land rebelled, those still in Jerusalem, and chapter 20, verse 30, the people who are now in exile rebelled, they’ve all been rebellious.

And we therefore discover in Ezekiel chapter 21 that God has a weapon that he’s going to bring against the city. And the weapon, if you look at chapter 21 verse 9, is a sword. This is what the Lord says, chapter 21 verse 9, a sword, a sword, sharpened and polished, and of course the sword is Babylon.

And God is so powerful, not only can he raise up Babylon to act like his sword, but if you look at verse 21, he can actually cause Babylon to choose the job.

This is how sovereign God is, chapter 21 verse 21. The king of Babylon will stop at the fork in the road. The junction of the two roads to seek an omen. He will cast lots with arrows, he’ll consult his idols, he’ll examine the liver, one of their methods of making a decision. In his right hand will come the lot for Jerusalem.

Where he is to set up battering rams, to give the command to slaughter, to sound the battle cry. So God has the sword called Babylon, and God has the sovereignty to steer Babylon, to do the job of disciplining his people for generations of unfaithfulness.

I don’t know if you remember how long it was between David’s sin and David’s confession, you remember David the king who committed adultery and murder, and then this long period where he was hard and resistant, and he says later, unhappy.

And then he came to confess, and God used a prophet to bring him to confession, a prophet called Nathan, and Nathan came in with a brilliant story, which got under David’s guard and caused him to confess and suddenly be free before God of his sin.

Now God is using a prophet to get his people again to confess. The prophet is Ezekiel, Ezekiel is using every communication weapon he can possibly think of. He’s using preaching, he’s using drama, he’s using stories, he’s using illustrations, he’s using poems, he’s using laments, he cannot get the people to come up with a confession.

The hardest thing in the universe. Is the human heart. You and I have the ability to so harden our hearts. It’s scary. Of course, the softest thing in the universe is God’s heart. Untainted by sin.

But ours infected by sin is able to steel itself incredibly. And that’s what Ezekiel is facing as he deals with God’s people.

In chapter 22, he lists the crimes to prove the ungodliness, and he uses illustrations to try and make them see how dangerous the situation. He talks about them in chapter 22 as being dross, just about to be skimmed off from the fire. He talks about them as being a place without rain, dirty, filthy, dusty, desperate.

And in chapter 23, he uses another very earthy chapter, another very earthy picture of God’s people, the North and the South, like two insatiable lovers who chase every possible affair they can. Now friends, please don’t think that what we are reading about here is another group with hearts unlike our own.

There is a sense in which their hearts are unlike ours because they are without God’s spirit.

But what we are seeing in these chapters is the human heart left to itself. Please don’t think we’re reading chapters now about people who live at King’s Cross, who are the crime kings and the porn kings and nothing like us. What we’re reading about here is the human heart, my heart and your heart, capable of saying, I will go anywhere but Christ. We’ve got that ability.

And therefore, of course, when we think like that and we live like that, we become restless as well as rebellious. It’s a tragic situation, as well as a sinister situation and C.H. Spurgeon once said – that the person who is avoiding Christ is like that dove that’s been released from the ark, you remember Noah’s Ark, before there’s actually a place to settle. And all the bird can do is flap around and eventually come back. There’s nothing really substantial to settle on.

And if you’ve ever seen a bird trapped in a room and people trying to corner the bird in order to free the bird, this is what God is doing. He’s trying to corner his people in order to free his people so that they will take responsibility for their sin, not blame anybody else, see that it’s a very deep problem, a fatal problem, and come back to him for the fix, for the solution.

Exactly what Jesus did in Mark chapter 7 when he said to the Pharisees on one occasion, forget about all your ritual, forget about your washing hands and your little rules and all that sort of thing. You’ll never fix the heart with all that ritual and religion. The only way to have a heart fixed is to bow down before Jesus Christ and get a new heart.

And have your heart changed, softened and made new.

Well, God has a case against his people. And in chapter 24 of Ezekiel, it reaches the communication reaches the maximum cost. First, in chapter 24, the people are told that they are not the choice meat in the pot. Remember back in Ezekiel 11:3, they thought that they were the choice meat in the safe pot of Jerusalem, and now God says, I’ve got a shocking thing to tell you. You’re not the choice meat in the pot, you’re the chunks who will be cut up. And cooked, you are the chunks of meat. You’re not the choice people.

And then the ultimate cost to Ezekiel in chapter 24 verse 16, he is to lose his wife. And he is not to grieve, incredible. Just as God’s people, chapter 24, verse 25, would lose their temple and be too shocked to grieve.

So you see what’s going on here. This is the thread which is running through the chapters of God’s case against his people. But thank God there is another thread which runs through, and it is the compassion that God has for his people. And it’s summarised in that first chapter that we read, Chapter 18 verse 31, which says, why will you die? I take no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the Lord, so turn and live. That’s our second thing this morning, briefly, God’s compassion for his people.

On Thursday, which is my day off, I went to the Manly Corso, and I was talking to an old man on a bench.

And he owns the fish shop where I’d bought my fish and chips, and he’d come out for a breather and he was sitting on one end of the bench as far away from me as possible. And I said to him what’s your nationality? He said, I’m Serbian.

I said to him, are you Serbian Orthodox? He said, yes I am. I said to him, do you believe that Jesus is the saviour? He said, you save yourself.

I said why did Jesus come? he said to me, nobody knows. I said to him, he tells us in scripture why he came. He said, who wrote that stuff? I said the eyewitnesses wrote the stuff. He said, so you say, we save ourselves. I said to him, can you save yourself? I pause at this moment so that you’ll just reflect on what a brilliant conversation this was.

I’ve humbly recorded this in the best possible light that I possibly can for myself, but the conversation went something like this, and I said to him, can you actually save yourself? And he said, we are dust and we go to dust.

I said to him is Jesus Christ now dust, and he said, you think what you like. I said to him, it seems to me from Jesus it’s either heaven or hell, and he said, so you say. Now I really like this man, I really like this man. He got extremely animated as we talked.

And I couldn’t get anywhere with him, absolutely nowhere. I could do nothing at the end of the conversation except shake his hand and say that I really appreciate his fish and chips and then we separated. But you see, God is not weak like me.

God can turn a person at any second of any day. So that they repent and believe. Nevertheless, we are told in scripture that he says to people, you must take responsibility. Turn and live.

And he also tells us in scripture that he has compassion for the person who does not turn and live. Well, the power of God is what we’re going to see as well as the compassion in this last couple of minutes this morning.

His power is unquestioned. But human responsibility is also very clear.

And God without any helplessness whatsoever, takes no pleasure in the death of a sinner. He says in chapter 18 verse 23, he is pleased when they turn, and they live.

Now this appeal of Ezekiel to the people of God to turn and live, of course, is an appeal to the people of God, but it has a wider impact. God calls on the world to turn and live. And he continues to be compassionate to those who do not turn, without being derailed by his feelings, without being shocked by the decision people make, without falling into compromise, without changing his plan in the slightest. He laments the decline in people’s fortunes. And that’s why in chapter 19, there is the lament, this is a lament.

I take no pleasure in the death of anyone. I am pleased when a person turns, and I lament chapter 19, those who do not turn.

And he still plans in chapter 19 that there will come a lion who will take the throne, and there will come a vine who will provide the ruler’s sceptre, and that of course, that lion, that vine is the Lord Jesus. And then if you look at God’s plan in Ezekiel chapter 20 verse 41, you’ll see that he has a plan for good. Verse 41 of chapter 20.

It says: I will accept you as fragrant incense when I bring you out from the nations. And gather you from the countries where you have been scattered, and I will show myself wholly among you. In the sight of the nations, and then you’ll know that I am the Lord when I bring you into the land of Israel, the land I had sworn with uplifted hand to give to your fathers.

The long rebellion and the hard purging of being in exile is going to lead eventually to great compassion and great rescue.

Well, in chapter 21, he describes the sword that he will use, but look at chapter 21, verse 6. He says to Ezekiel, groan, groan before them with broken heart and bitter grief because of what is coming.

In chapter 22, he lists the sins and he describes their hopelessness, but he says very famously in chapter 22, verse 30, I looked for a man among them who would build up the wall and stand before me in the gap on behalf of the land so I would not have to destroy it. But I found none.

See, he’s looking for someone who might be the solution.

Because he takes no pleasure in the death of anyone, he’s pleased when a person turns, he laments the loss of the lost. He groans for those who will perish. He looks for the answer the solution.

And in chapter 23, he describes the two halves of the kingdom like two ruthless adulterous people wrecking a marriage. And yet he says in chapter 23, verse 35, you have forgotten me. You have forgotten me.

And in chapter 23, verse 25, he speaks of his jealous anger, jealous because he hates the breakup, he hates the intruders, he hates the rejection, he hates the cost. And could there be anything more significant when we get to chapter 24 than the death of Ezekiel’s wife, who is the delight of his eyes, who is of course a signpost to the day that God himself would lose his own son, my servant, in whom I delight.

But the death of Jesus, of course, would have the sting in it. A sting of judgement.

And the death of Jesus would have salvation in it, in a way that Ezekiel’s wife could only look forward. You think how the apostle Paul puts it in 1 Thessalonians 4. He says we don’t want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep. That is believers who lie down at the end of their days and then rise up to be with Christ, but he says we believe Jesus died and rose again, that is, he took the judgement, he took the sting for all the sins of his people.

So there is the hope and there’s the encouragement. It is Jesus, who the Lord finds to stand in the gap and bear the wrath in order that the believer might be spared.

So I want to just this morning draw your attention to those two themes. God bringing his case against his people to draw out their confession, and then God revealing his compassion all through those chapters because there is a willingness to welcome and there is a means to do the welcome. Namely, the sacrifice of the Lord Jesus.

I mentioned at the beginning the bridge, the idea of us sort of bringing some apology and God bringing some forgiveness together. Actually that’s a very bad picture because as the believer gets up and says to himself or herself, I’m going to return and go to my father and say to him, Father, I’ve sinned against you and I’m no longer worthy to be called your child, the believer gets up and begins to go and discovers that a whole bridge has been built.

That the death of the Lord Jesus has come from heaven to earth, from the perfection of God to the need of us and covers the complete distance, so we have nothing to do but step onto it and enjoy it and rejoice in it.

This is Ezekiel’s Old Testament call to God’s people to return to him with their hearts and a real apology, and find that there is the hope of return and acceptance.

I finished by mentioning this to you this morning, and it applies to everybody who can hear me speak, and that is this. To change the analogy, God will be a storm or a shelter to everybody.

He will either be a storm from whom you will never escape.

Or he will be a shelter from whom you will never perish.

And now focused on the Lord Jesus, storm or shelter. This is a decision that you must make, will Christ be your storm or your shelter? It’s a decision which never changes, it is a choice which never changes. Everybody must choose Christ. As their storm or their shelter.

And Ezekiel just previews this in the chapters that we’ve looked at.

Let’s pray

Our gracious God, we thank you for sending your Son into the world. Thank you for his death on the cross and his gift and your offer to us of new and eternal life.

We thank you that you are gracious, merciful and faithful.

And we pray that you would cause people to hear your word. And we pray that you would cause those of us who have heard your word – to walk faithfully with you in the world, to your glory.

And we ask it in Jesus’ name, Amen.

Subscribe to the ‘Christian Growth’ Podcast

Feature image: CanvaPro