Ezekiel 33: Danger and Comfort — A ‘Christian Growth’ Message

Transcript

Our Father, we thank you that you speak. We thank you that you have caused your word to be recorded. And we ask that you would help us to be good hearers and good doers, and we pray it in Jesus’ name. Amen.

This morning we’re coming back to the book of Ezekiel, and we’re coming to the part of the book where the people of God have been greatly humbled and they are now ready to be greatly comforted.

You remember the New Testament principle, which is a principle of safety and also a principle of sanity, and it goes like this, humble yourself under God’s mighty hand that he may lift you up in due time.

We are not good at that, we prefer God to cooperate with us and to fit in with our plans and listen to our instructions. And that’s a dangerous position to be in when we dictate to God, it’s not glorifying to God. It’s not reality, it’s not healthy for us. And he has better plans for us and so if we don’t humble ourselves under his mighty hand. He graciously humbles us. In order that we might then be lifted up in due time.

And in the 6th century BC, the people of God had been seriously humbled. Thousands of them had been carried out of the promised land, as you may remember, the city of Jerusalem was being besieged and would be conquered. Ezekiel the prophet was one of those who would be carried off to Babylon and he was the spokesman for God among the exiles, and he had to speak to them repeatedly, this bad piece of news, which is your pride. Your sin have caused this.

And now God is disciplining you and he will eventually bring back a people to the promised land.

And when we come to chapter 33 today, we come to the point of the book where they are ready to listen. I don’t know if you noticed that verse 10, where they say our sins are weighing on us and they are wasting us.

Hope 103.2 is proudly supported by

How can we live?

And the prophet Ezekiel has today a message of comfort.

Now some weeks ago I gave 4 talks in Perth on the book of Ezekiel. And I summarised the book into 4 words. Why did I do this? Because I’m a bumper sticker kind of guy and would like everything reduced into something memorable.

And I summarise the book into four words that all begin with the letter G, and they all have 5 letters. The first talk was on the grace of God that he sends with his people in exile a prophet.

Somebody who will tell them what’s going on, that’s the grace of God, and he shows to Ezekiel something of his greatness and something of his goodness as the grace of God. The second talk was on the grief of God, that he grieves over the unfaithfulness of his people and promises that he will restore them to him.

The 3rd G was the globe of God, that is, God looks over the whole of his globe. He has a global purpose and global plan, and he calls on the nations of the world to wake up and to humbly seek him in order that they too would live.

And the fourth G which we come to now, which is really the end of the book, the last chapters, 33 to 48, is you can expect the glory of God that he is going to do what only he can do, that he’s going to make his people new and he’s going to put them in a new world.

So there we have it, the grace of God, the grief of God, the globe of God, and the glory of God. And we come to this last section from today for a few weeks. And I want to look at chapter 33 under two headings this morning. The first is the comfort of knowing the dangerous God. The comfort of knowing the dangerous God, that’s verses 1 to 20.

And the second is the danger of knowing the comforting God, the danger of knowing the comforting God, verses 21 to 33.

The comfort of knowing the dangerous God

Now we would like of course to be continually comforted, but God knows us too well. He knows that if we’re continuously comforted, we drift into sin, and we also fear the danger of God, and he knows that too, and so he graciously comforts us with peace and hope.

I want to look with you first of all at the comfort of knowing the dangerous God, verses 1 to 20. You see in verses 1 to 6, we know that God is dangerous because he is the God who brings the sword.

The word of the Lord came to me, son of man, speak to your countrymen and say to them, When I bring the sword against the land, and the people choose one of their men and make him their watchman.

And he sees the sword coming against the land and he blows the trumpet to warn the people. If anyone hears the trumpet and doesn’t take warning and the sword comes and takes his life, his blood will be on his own head. Since he heard the sound of the trumpet, but he didn’t take warning, his blood will be on his own head. If he’d taken warning, he would have saved himself.

When I say God is dangerous, I don’t mean that he is unpredictable. I just mean that he is sovereign and he is untamable.

And he is able to bring the sword against people. He’s able to raise up a Babylon and use them like a sword in his hand to bring discipline and even judgement. Now I hope that everybody here this morning knows that in the Old Testament, the people of God were a gathered people. They lived in one geographical area, and therefore God moved nations like chess pieces around the nation of Israel.

But of course once the Old Testament is over, the people of God are not a gathered geographical area. They are a scattered people in all the nations of the world. So God is not bringing, so to speak, a Babylon to discipline his people because that would be inappropriate.

The people of God are scattered through all the nations. God uses other means in order to discipline his people and comfort his people, to look after his people. He does it among the nations and he rules over, of course, every leader and every country and every detail for the purposes of his kingdom.

Now the same God who brings the sword in the Old Testament, verse 2, makes the watchman verse 7, and Ezekiel has been set up by God as God’s watchman.

And his job as you know, is to blow the trumpets and to tell the people of God about the danger of God in order that they might find the mercy of God. Now there are two dangers of course with the watchman principle. One is the danger of not listening to the watchman. So, sword is coming over the hill.

Watchman is on the wall, blows the trumpet, nobody listens.

Whose fault is that? It’s the people who don’t listen.

The other danger of course is the danger of not warning. The sword is coming over the hill. Watchman on the walls does not blow the trumpets.

People suffer. Whose fault is that? It’s the watchman’s fault.

And Ezekiel is given the Watchman role back in chapter 3, and here again in chapter 33, and he’s given it in chapter 33 because he’s got a new song to play on his trumpets.

In chapter 3, he was a watchman and his message was a message of judgement in order that the people would repent, and now he pretty well has a message of salvation in order that God’s people would put their faith in God.

And you can see that this is very comforting because in verse 10, as I mentioned before, the people are feeling guilty, they’re feeling helpless, they’re feeling trapped, they say. Our offences and our sins weigh us down, we are wasting away because of them. How can we live? Famous book title of Francis Schaeffer. How can we live?

Well, the answer comes back from God.

Thankful that they are at last feeling their sins, I want you, verse 11, to live. Do not stay with your sins, turn and live. And you’ll see in verses 12 to 16, even more good news. First of all, don’t think that your good deeds done in the past will save you if you stay on the road away from God. That’s a big wake up, isn’t it? Do not think that because you’ve done good things in the past, you can now swing away from God and walk away from him.

But the really good news is, do not think that the wickedness that you’ve done in the past, versus 14 to 15, will kill you if you turn on the road back to God. So don’t despair about the past or the things you’ve done. If you swing your feet into the road of God. You will live.

And the key question you see is which road do you walk?

And he doesn’t want us to just tell us which road we walk cause that’s easy. He says in verse 15, he wants us to show it. Give back what you took in pledge. Return what you’ve stolen. Do no evil. In other words, repent, walk, don’t just talk.

Now, a couple of weeks ago, we took some friends on the Sydney harbour. We found ourselves on the last of the Sydney Ferries travelling around the harbour. They, friends from the UK, we decided that we would take them for one of these 2.5 hour tours of the harbour. We’d never done it before, we’ve never done it since, and we bought 4 tickets for the ferry, 2.5 hour trip.

And despite asking four officials down at the quay, this is my warning to you, which ferry we should get onto, we were put on the wrong ferry. So we found ourselves on a very short ferry, going to a place that we didn’t want to go to and missing a 2.5-hour tour of the harbour.

So I went round and in the nicest possible tantrum type of way, spoke to the people in the cabin and said, we have 2 friends from England, this is our one opportunity to show them. We were told by 4 people to get on this boat. It’s obviously the wrong boat; we want to get off this boat. And they did something which they had apparently never done before. They pulled in at Garden Island and they put us off the ferry, it was very embarrassing, and then they brought the next ferry into Garden Island and picked us up and we ended up having our 2.5-hour trip.

And it was a very frustrating and annoying thing, and the only thing that comforted me was that there was a sermon illustration in there somewhere. And so I’m telling you today because I want you to know if it’s not too corny, that it is possible in the provision of God to get off what you’re on, which is going to go nowhere, and to get on what you need to be on, which is able to take you where you want to go, where you ought to be going.

In other words, God says, do not whinge about where you are. It’s not as though you’re stuck. There is the provision of a road back to God. And that’s what this, Ezekiel 33 good news passage is about. He provides the road to life.

And it’s no good verse 17 saying this is not fair, God is not fair, because God says you are able to make a choice.

This is the gospel.

Now I don’t need to tell you that to make a choice is really a God-given privilege. We are not free people, although I notice people continually talk about how we have free will.

But there are huge limitations to our free will, we are not able to choose when we’re born, we’re not able to choose when we’ll die, we’re not able to choose how to come alive spiritually, we are not able to find our way to Christ. These are gifts of God, and here is God giving to his people in the Old Testament the gift of being able to choose to turn back to him.

Even the repentance is a gift from God because we are not humanly able to save ourselves and repent. Repentance is a gift from God. The Bible says he grants to people repentance, but this is the human side of repentance where God says this is what you are to do. I’ve given you this gift of being able to repent.

And what you are to do is this, you are to agree about the sin, confess it to God, drop it, forsake it, walk away from it, put your feet in a brand-new path of obedience, come back home, be forgiven, be reconciled. That’s what repentance is. And of course, the fulfilment of this great privilege of being welcomed and forgiven finds its fulfilment in the Lord Jesus himself. We might say that the good news of chapter 33:16, can you see what 33:16 says?

None of the sins he’s committed will be remembered against him. He’s done what’s just and right, he will surely live. The fulfilment of that verse comes in something like John 3:16, that God so loved the world that He gave His Son, that whoever believes will not perish but have eternal life. And so the Lord Jesus who walked the road that should have been walked, and deserved the fellowship that should have been enjoyed, takes on himself at the cross, the sins of our foolish path.

And he himself pays for them in order that we might be able to be forgiven and therefore the believer is able to speak quite rationally and realistically about peace with God, because the answer to peace with God is not found by looking in the mirror but it’s found by looking in the pages of the New Testament and seeing that Jesus Christ has died to forgive and bring peace with God. And all of this wonderful or this gospel in shadow in Ezekiel finds it’s light and it’s fulfilment with the Lord Jesus. So that’s the comfort you see of dealing with the dangerous God.

He is dangerous.

He’s dangerous to fight against. But once you’ve put the madness away that you’re going to fight him or resist him.

Notice how he turns you back to himself, away from your sin, which is, there’s no hope in the sin, is there? Away from lies about God that he’s unjust or he’s unfair or he’s unloving, or any of those sort of distortions, and he turns you back to his goodness and to his loving kindness, and to the truth about himself and that his desire is that you will live and verse 16, if you’re penitent, you will live.

So he’s the danger and he’s the comfort.

And, on a personal scale, if you find yourself lying awake at night, and there is an issue which is absolutely plaguing you with its grief or it’s fear, or it’s sadness, the answer of course is not to focus in your mind on that impossible problem, that immeasurable problem because it’s beyond you, and the answer is not to look inside yourself for powers which you do not have to solve the problem.

And the answer is not to look at some distorted caricature of God, which is going to make you more anxious and upset than ever. The answer is to look at the full face of God, recorded for us in the scriptures, the full spectrum, so you look at his power, and you look at his wisdom, and you look at his loving kindness, and you see his ability and his concern.

That you would be helped. His desire for your welfare. What Jesus called life to the full. That is the comfort, which is found in facing the full spectrum of God. Dangerous, yes. Comforting, yes. Great, yes. Good, yes.

The danger of knowing the comforting God

The second thing in chapter 33 is the danger of knowing the comforting God, and in the second half of the chapter, Ezekiel is dealing with another section of people, and these are the people who are quite calm about God, they’re quite careless about God. Ezekiel has to comfort one group, but he also has to rattle another group. There’s always more than one pastoral front for the preacher or for you who’s a Christian.

And every congregation has people who need to be comforted or rattled. The problem, of course, is that when the preacher preaches and tries to say something that’s comforting and rattling, the people who need to be comforted listen to the rattle, and the people who need to be rattled, listen to the comfort and so you’re not listening properly. You see, you’ve got to listen to the proper section of the sermon. And Ezekiel in the second half of chapter 33 comes to this section, which is for those who need to be rattled.

And you’ll see if you look at verse 21, what happens. The news has come through that Jerusalem has fallen, the city has fallen. Ezekiel had been saying for 6.5 years that it would fall, and look at verse 22.

Very unusual.

The evening before the man arrived and the hand of the Lord was upon me, he opened my mouth. Before the man came, and so my mouth was opened, and I was no longer silent. Well what what’s all this about? Ezekiel’s been talking for years. What do we mean his mouth was open? Well, the answer is his mouth was open to say something of hope.

OK, the old Jerusalem city was about to be crumbled, and he’s going to start to speak about the hope, which is ultimately going to be a whole brand-new Jerusalem city. So his mouth is open to say something for a brand-new day.

Now the hope that Ezekiel was to spell out, needed to be spelled out very carefully because there were two kinds of people, very casual, very relaxed. Who needed to be rattled. The first were the people back in Jerusalem.

The people in old Jerusalem who were still saying, look, we’re in the city, God’s made his promises to us. We are the inheritors. We are going to get the inheritance any second. It’s guaranteed to us, it must come quickly. That’s what they were saying.

And um the people in Babylon we discover in a minute, were listening to Ezekiel, but the whole of his message was just water off a duck’s back. They just thought that he was filling in time, he was just basically wasting space. Talking like a tuneful singer. Making no impact whatsoever.

So Ezekiel has to show the danger of a god who the people have found comfort in. Because God is bigger than just false comfort. And he speaks to the group in Jerusalem in chapter 33 verse 24, who are saying we’re the people of God, it’s God’s job to give us everything right now. There’s always people who are saying that it’s God’s job to give us everything right now.

The Lord says, verse 25, verse 26, hang on. Enjoying the land meant, remember, obeying the law. You have not been obeying the law, you’re keeping idols, you kill, you commit adultery. So you have disqualified yourself from the land and I’m emptying it before I bring people back, that’s it, I’m emptying it before I bring people back.

So see what Ezekiel is doing here, he’s got the fearful group who need to be comforted, and he’s got the careless group who need a rocket. And he is saying to this group back in Jerusalem somehow. Do not fall into false comforts. God is at work to discipline you. Now there is a group in every church, as you know, who are called nominal.

They may not even know that they’re nominal, but there is a group that are called nominal in every church. It means they have the name of God or the name of Christ, they don’t yet have the life of God or the life of Christ. Their Christianity is sort of a tag and it comes off and comes back on. It’s not a conversion which is continual.

And that’s serious, but there is something even more serious here with the people Ezekiel’s dealing with in Jerusalem, and that is they’ve got the tag, but they’ve got the opposite lifestyle. They’re actually living in an ungodly way.

And again you see God is interested not just in what people say, but in the path that they walk. Remember Jesus in the Gospels, why do you call me Lord, Lord, not do what I say. Or the guy who builds his house on the rock is a guy who hears and does, the person who builds on the sand is a person who hears and doesn’t do. Now the tragedy in Ezekiel, people in Jerusalem is that they’re grabbing some scriptures which suit them, and they’re ignoring the scriptures which don’t suit them.

And God is going to fulfil all his scriptures. Now which of us friends as we read this, has not played the selective game when it suits us. There is a part built into us, isn’t there, which is to pick and choose from God’s word. What hope do we have as people who have been selective? The answer, of course, is we must take refuge in the one who was never selective but who was fully obedient.

And died on the cross for us, and then we must by the new life which he enables us to live, we must seek to live out everything which we know to be his will. What does the preacher do? What does the servant of God do? What does the Christian do? In trying to be successful to change the thinking of this group that is selective.

Ezekiel is, you know, tried everything. Everything that you could possibly try to do, Ezekiel did.

But remember the mark of the faithful watchman at the beginning of the chapter is not that he makes people listen to the warning. But that he speaks the warning. Now of course he might um seek to speak the warning more courageously. But in the end, he’s not able to make people take seriously the warning. He just speaks the warning.

What about the Babylonian group, the group that is with Ezekiel in exile, they really appreciate him, perhaps the fall of Jerusalem has made Ezekiel now much more popular, much more credible. But you’ll see if you look at 33 verse 32, the Lord says to them, Ezekiel, you are nothing more than one who sings love songs with a beautiful voice and plays an instrument well, they hear your words, but do not put them into practise. You’re a singer, you see, you’re a musician.

We hear the tunes. We like the tune, we don’t like the tune, it’s good tunes, a bad tune.

The word of God has become music.

Now it would take a long time for us to really deal with the whole problem of entertainment coming into the church. Uh you’ll notice that it’s not a new problem, that it was there in the Babylonian church 2600 years ago.

But some years ago there was a very influential book written by Neil Postman called Amusing Ourselves to Death. As far as I know, Neil Postman is not a Christian.

And Neil Postman pointed out, not that television is providing us with constant entertainment, that’s pretty obvious, but what he pointed out is that television is presenting everything that it wants to present as entertainment, and therefore we are measuring everything today in terms of its entertainment value.

Now when you come to church and when I come to church, we need to take our brain in hand. In order that we might be edified. In case we’re not entertained. Because if you come to church for the word of God, it’s perfectly possible that it will not entertain you. And if you miss what will edify you because it didn’t entertain you.

You’ve made a tragic mistake. And therefore we really do have to take ourselves in hand, don’t we, we have to prepare ourselves in order to be edified. Not entertained.

The trouble with most of us is that we, we don’t really want to hear and do something. We don’t come saying, tell me what to do, tell me what to believe, tell me what to trust. We are easily falling into the category of those who want to hear and appreciate something, hear and enjoy something.

And therefore the preacher who moves us. The preacher who, who affects the emotions, the preacher who dazzles. That is going to be the preacher who succeeds. Well, what should a preacher do in the face of this kind of infection.

The answer again is at the beginning of Ezekiel chapter 33 verse 3, which is that the preacher should go on speaking what God says. He should do it as lovingly and as helpfully and as faithfully and as plainly and as boldly and as interestingly as he can.

But in the end, as Chris Wright says in his commentary on Ezekiel, he must judge the success of his ministry neither by the numbers listening, nor by their enthusiasm for his words, nor by their lack of enthusiasm for his words, but by the practical response of changed lives.

Now doesn’t that put a lot of our church in perspective? The question you see is what happens when the truth is said, and I then go away with it. That’s the test. The two men who built their houses on the rock, you remember one on the rock, one on the sand?

Both heard the message.

Do you realise that? Both heard the message, both heard the message. One of them put it into practise. His house was on rock. The test for the preacher. Is has it been said? The test for us who are listeners. Is what will we do? What will we do?

So when we come and hear the word of God in our private reading or our small groups or our Sunday services.

We need to remember that God is going to back all of the scriptures. He’s going to back what we select and he’s going to back what we don’t select. He’s going to back what we listen to and what we don’t listen to. He’s going to back what we do and he’s going to back what we don’t do. And therefore, that’s extremely good reason.

For seeking to do all that we know he tells us. You often hear the preacher, don’t you lean over the pulpit in some kind of desperate way, as if to say please believe this, please believe this, please believe this, as if by believing it’ll come true, no, no, no, the word will come true.

That’s an excellent reason for you and me to believe it. So the people in Ezekiel’s day, you see, they’re just on the cusp of the comfort. And there’s some of them who really need the comfort. They really do. They need to know how good God is.

They’ve met the dangerous god, they need to know the good, comforting God. He’s very, very real. But then there’s some people who are just too casual, they think that the comfort is all simple and, wrapped up with them, it’s all on their terms.

And they need to realise that God is bigger, greater, even we might say more dangerous. And Ezekiel gives to those two groups, the faithful words of the faithful God and friends, you are going to find all you need for your comfort and all you need for your challenge, and we need both.

Within the faithful words of the faithful God, and let us ask him regularly that we would not only hear it because that’s hard enough, but once we’ve heard it, we would be quick to do it.

Let’s bow our heads and pray.

Our gracious God, we thank you that you are a God who not only is great, but good. Not only powerful but comforting.

We thank you that you have provided in your word, the things that we need to know, to hear. And by your grace to do. And we ask that you would forgive us for the many times that we’ve not heard, and then the many times that we’ve not done. We thank you for the Lord Jesus, our saviour.

We pray that taking refuge in him we might be fully comforted, walking with him, we might be greatly challenged. And we pray, our heavenly Father, as we live for you in this world, we might put into practise all that we know that you’ve told us.

We pray this to your honour, and we pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.