Ezekiel 8-11: The Crime, The Cost and the Answer to Idolatry — A ‘Christian Growth’ Message

Transcript

Friends, you know, and I know you know that there is a secular gospel that is being preached to us very brilliantly and very repeatedly, which has been saying to us for a long time that you’ll be fulfilled by accumulating.

This is the mantra of the West, and it’s become so familiar to us that we hardly even hear it anymore.

Now it’s an echo in a way of Genesis 3. It’s not a brand new message. Genesis 3, you remember, is where the couple are in the garden, and they’ve got everything, including fellowship with God, but one thing is marked off as being a sign of his rule, and of course that’s not good enough for them and they want everything. I’m kind of apologising whenever I refer to Genesis 3 at Christianity explained Tuesday by Tuesday, but I don’t need to because it is the most brilliant explanation of the human fall and what continues to be our error.

And there’s a Christian variation of course of this which is that God is obligated to provide for us everything. He’s the genie, and we just sort of rub the appropriate side of the lamp and everything must come.

What people are realising more and more under the influence of this secular gospel is that without preaching atheism, without being negative about God, it’s actually producing atheism. That such is the devotion to things, people, pleasure, power.

That God is being forgotten, neglected.

And by very practical nature being disbelieved.

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And so in the short, of course, as we look in the world that we’re part of, the things are going pretty well, we’ve got just about everything, but there’s lots of inward problems. And lots of inward lacks.

And in the long-term, the person who is devoted to the external things, the things that are made, will find that they cannot save and will not save. And so there is great trouble ahead. Now what I want to do this morning is to look with you at what Ezekiel 8 to 11 says to us about idolatry.

The problem and the solution

These are very wonderful chapters. I hope you appreciate them as much as I have. We’re gonna go down 2 steps and then up one huge step. So as we go down, stay with it, even if you’ve come this morning fairly gloomy and cast down, we’re going to go down 2 steps, but then we’re going to come up one very great step.

We’re in a section of church history, it’s Old Testament church history. Where God’s people have been deported. It’s called the Exile, it took place in 597 BC.

The people of God had distanced themselves mentally from God and so God decided that he would distance himself physically from them.

And he chose a kind of a bulldozer called Babylon, and Babylon came in and scooped up 10,000 Israelites from the city of Jerusalem and took them east to Babylon.

And then within the next 10 years, although the Israelites didn’t realise the Babylonians were going to move in and destroy the city. Now among the exiles, God put his servant Ezekiel. We saw this two weeks ago in chapters 1 to 3.

And he gave to Ezekiel a message, a fairly gloomy message, and we looked at that last week, which Ezekiel was not only to speak but was to act out. That’s what we looked at last week.

Why is Ezekiel given such a gloomy message basically that Jerusalem would besieged and scattered? Now the answer comes in Ezekiel chapters 8 to 11, and these chapters are what is known as a theodicy.

And a theodicy literally means God is righteous. They are a kind of a, a defence if you like, for God’s behaviour, that God is doing what is right. And the way the chapters we’re going to look at this morning spell out are chapter 8, the crime of idolatry, 9 and 10 is the cost. And 11 is the answer.

So the crime, chapter 8, the cost, 9 and 10, and the answer, chapter 11.

1st – the crime of idolatry

We need to be very humble about idolatry because the factory of idolatry is not a building somewhere but is the human heart. The human heart creates idols. And we, we may not fall for the wooden or the metal statues that we see on our televisions, but we may easily fall for a mental caricature of God. It’s very easy to do that.

Read the screw type letters and see how the devil is at work to get believers to think falsely about God.

And the human heart, even the converted human heart, is capable of reshaping God to suit us.

It’s capable of prompting us to devote ourselves to another lover. As I say, whether it’s a person or a pleasure, or a power, whatever it is, we’re capable. If you ever analyse what takes place when adultery takes place, it usually happens um in a fair expanse of time, it doesn’t take place in a day.

So it begins normally with less effort or time being put into a relationship. And then it’s fed by the sort of ideas which are, boy, you know, this relationship is hopeless and I deserve better than this.

And I really could do better than this, and then into that vacuum comes another person. And suddenly the energy and the skill for a relationship moves to the other person.

And quite quickly the adultery follows. So it is with an idol, neglect with God, a sense of being underprovided, something emerging which is attractive and electric, and soon the heart and the skill go over to it.

Now Ezekiel is given a mental picture of the idolatry that is taking place back in Jerusalem. If you look at chapter 8, verse 3, it says,

That the Lord stretched out what looked like a hand and took me by the hair of my head, and the spirit lifted me up between earth and heaven, and in visions of God, he took me to Jerusalem, to the entrance to the north gate of the inner court. He took me, you see, in a vision.

This is not a physical journey, like a paraglider being caught up in a storm and going sort of 2000 metres higher than anyone’s ever been and unconscious for an hour and then eventually brought down miraculously to survive. This is not a physical carry away, this is a mental vision.

And Ezekiel is taken mentally to the temple of Jerusalem, and you’ll see if you look at verse 5, that in the temple he sees an idol. You see that, the idol of jealousy, chapter 8, verse 5. So someone somehow has set up an idol in the house of God. This is like the husband bringing home his new girlfriend. Honey, like you to meet so and so, she’s the new lover.

And into this very house of God has come an idol.

And Ezekiel is taken further inside the temple and he sees 70 elders, verse 12, and the 70 elders are worshipping the idols, so the leadership of the temple is worshipping the idols. And their logic in verse 12 is the Lord is gone.

The Lord is gone. He, he, he can’t see us. We might as well do this. And it’s possible probable that the elders in the Jerusalem temple have been seeing the Lord up until now as useful.

And because of course a judgement has come on them and their city has been scooped up and divided, they now see the Lord as no longer useful and so they have no conscience about looking elsewhere. Little do they realise, of course, that what he expects of them is that they’ll be devoted to him wherever they live.

And Ezekiel sees in verse 14, further in the temple, some women who are taking part in a Babylonian sort of cult. We don’t know much about it, but it seems to involve some young man called Tammuz, who died, who was a bit of an Adonis, and the women are sort of extremely sentimental about this Babylonian cult. The Israelite women are caught up in a Babylonian cult.

And then we see in verse 16 that 25 men are engaged in classic Babylonian sun worship. Back to the temple, kneeling down facing the sun and worshipping the sun. And in verse 17 is a very unusual verse, which is hard to work out what it means, but it says, the Lord says, look at them, putting the branch to their nose, which is something like they’re thumbing their nose at me. They are basically totally defiant.

And this causes him to be rightly verse 18, angry. Now where is this idolatry happening? It’s not happening in the streets of the community, of the nations around them.

It’s happening in the temple. It’s happening in the church.

Now idolatry in the church is very often taking the idols of the community and dressing them up in church clothes, which of course fools many people, but it doesn’t fool God. He says in chapter 11 verse 12, you’ve conformed to the standards of the nations around you. So you think, for example, what’s the world that we live in? Well, the world that we live in at the moment says accumulates.

And therefore it won’t be very difficult to find a church or a preacher or somebody or an author who’s basically telling the church, you must accumulate, God exists to make you accumulate.

Or think about um the pressure that we must have all our problems solved now. It won’t be very difficult to find a preacher or a church or an author who will say to believers, God exists to solve your problems immediately.

I would say incidentally on the side, friends, one of the biggest problems we have is the people in this church who are reading books that are confusing them about what to expect now and what to expect in the future because the books are telling you to expect now what is promised in the future.

And therefore you have to go into a kind of a despair because it’s not happening or you go into a kind of a dishonesty that it is happening.

The Bible so wonderfully tells us what to expect now and what to wait for.

Is it possible that um self-care is the great um right of the world that we live in, I think it is, and therefore it won’t be too difficult to find a church, maybe our own, which will make sure that all Jesus’ comments about self-sacrifice, you know, all those crazy comments about taking up your cross, that they all get preached to someone else.

Now I’m just pointing this out to you because I want you to notice that idolatry comes into the church up from our hearts, and God’s eyes search the church. He knows what goes on in our minds and he knows what goes on in our hearts, and idolatry makes him angry, rightly angry, and idolatry is dangerous beyond measure for us.

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the famous quote of Alexander Solzhenitsyn from his book The Gulag Archipelago, where he said that it is impossible to get a line which will separate good people from bad people.

It’s very common thought, isn’t it? You know, there are bad people out there and we’re good people. Let’s put a line down the middle and the bad people over there and the good people over here, and Solzhenitsy said it’s impossible to produce the line because the line he said, goes through the centre of every human heart.

And therefore we need to pray in the face of our ability to produce idols and idolatry. We need to pray the words at the end of Psalm 139 – Search me, oh God, know my heart, test me, know my anxious thoughts, see if there is any offensive way in me and lead me in the way everlasting.

I hope every now and again it occurs to you to pray that prayer with great passion. Lord, please save me from an undivided heart, save me from being fooled. Help me to be devoted, not just for your glory, but for my own joy. That’s the crime of idolatry. The second is the cost, and that’s in chapters 9 and 10. And in Ezekiel chapter 9, the Lord plans to do two things, protect and then punish in that order.

And in chapter 9 verse 4, he asks a man to go through the city, and I’m reading verse 4, and put a mark on the foreheads of those who grieve and lament over the detestable things that are done in the city.

And so this man is given the job of going out and putting a mark on the faithful, that is those who have some sense that God is true.

And evil is false.

It’s a very challenging verse, isn’t it, to ask whether God would mark you. Whether you and I really do grieve and lament. On what goes on in the world and what goes on in the church, and whether we have some spiritual longing for greater zeal for God and devotion to God.

It’s quite a test. And so some are marked and protected. And then the Lord asks 6 guards of the city, the guards of the city, that’s astonishing, and they have the terrible task of taking their swords which were to protect the city and go through the city and strike down those who are unfaithful.

It’s a terrible section.

And Ezekiel in chapter 9 verse 8 falls face down in grief and says, Lord, are you going to destroy the remnants? You know there’s only a small group left, are you gonna destroy them?

And God says He will bring down justice on their heads.

Now it is a vision, it’s not a film.

It’s a mental picture of what God will do with idolatry. We may think of course, that God is overreacting.

But that may show actually how far we’ve drifted from clarity and from reality. I’ve never forgotten how Moses coming down from the mountain with God in Exodus 32 and seeing that they have made the golden calf idol, asks the people, the Levites, I think, to strap on their swords and go through and actually get rid of the idolaters in their midst.

And it seems such a terrible thing to do, you know, this is Moses, the meek. The gentle, the patient, the humble. But he has just been in some way with God. And for him, the sin of the idolatry is worse than the penalty.

And we must be very careful that we don’t invent for ourselves a sentimental God who is ruthless. Because once you’ve invented a god who is ruthless, nothing matters. Jesus needn’t have come, he needn’t have died. We’ll very quickly move into universalism.

Now that’s the first cost of idolatry is death.

The second cost of idolatry in Ezekiel 10 is departure

In chapter 10 verse 4, God’s glory, look at 10:4, moves to the outer temple.

Then the glory of the Lord rose from above the cherubim and moved to the threshold of the temple. And then look at 10:18. Then the glory of the Lord departed from over the threshold of the temple.

And then look over at 11:23. The glory of the Lord went up from within the city and stopped above the mountain east of it.

Do you see that God is departing the city? He’s leaving the temple. He said in chapter 8, verse 5, there’s an idol in the temple, it will drive me out. And he leaves out the east gate. Watch out the east gates. That’s where the exiles are. He’s going to go, and he’s going to work with the exiles.

Well, we can’t of course push God anywhere, but he does withdraw from the proud and the resistant.

And we see this in Jesus’ own ministry that he left his hometown because they were marked by unbelief, and he came to his own John 1, and his own received him not but to those who received him, he gave the right to become children of God. Or again, to put this in the positive in Isaiah 57, I live, says the Lord, in a high and lofty place, but also with him who’s contrite and lowly. That’s wonderful.

Or to the lukewarm Laodiceans, the Lord Jesus says, repent, behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone opens the door, I will come in. So the cost of idolatry is death and departure. The rebellious person dies, and the glory of God departs. I wonder if this explains a huge amount of what goes on in Christian circles. I wonder if this explains what is going on in some congregations and churches and countries.

I don’t want to get into the question of God being with us always, there is a sense in which the saved are saved.

But I wonder if this passage doesn’t explain to us something of what happens where God withdraws his blessing and His power. It is a tragedy, isn’t it, if people forget that the key that God looks for is devotion to him.

If we ever think that we can sort of lock God in because we’ve got a building and we’ve got some pews and we’ve got a preacher and we’ve got some songs, and therefore we just turn the wheels and he’s obligated. He’s looking for devotion to him and we may, you see, tragically continue with our mantra.

And he’s looking for the person who’s devoted to him. God is not looking for places. God is not looking for prayer books. God is looking for people. I do urge you – here’s a humbling question.

I do urge you, if you can ever do it, to go and visit God’s blessing on the youth groups of this church.

It’s a humbling thing to see. The zeal of the youth. The prayer of the youth, the devotion of the youth, and the discernment of the youth, and the wisdom of the youth.

And we need to make sure that we are asking God, Lord, we may know lots of stuff. We may have been around a lot, but don’t abandon, and leave us to be lethargic and sleepy and careless. It’s a very wonderful thing to see how God’s blessing is on so many of the youth, so many of the youth.

Now if that seems hard and unfair, look at Ezekiel 11 cause we come to the third section this morning, and this is a very wonderful step up. It’s the answer to idolatry in Ezekiel chapter 11 at the east gate in chapter 11, as God’s glory is leaving the city and the temple, can you believe this? The leaders in Jerusalem are plotting and totally clueless as to what is happening. Look at chapter 11 verse 1.

The spirit lifted me up, brought me to the gate of the house of the Lord that faces east, and there at the entrance to the gate were 25 men, leaders of the people. Verse 2, the Lord said to me, son of man, these are the men who are plotting evil and giving wicked advice in the city. They say, will it not soon be time to build houses? This city is a cooking pot, where the meats.

In other words, we are inside a safe pot. The future is with the city.

Look at verse 11.

This city, says the Lord, will not be a pot for you, nor will you be the meat in it. I’ll execute judgement on you at the borders of Israel. So there are the elders, utterly clueless that the very blessing and glory of God is leaving.

As they plot and plan their own resources and ideas for the future. And as a mark that God means what he says in verse 13, 1 of them dies. And now comes the most wonderful and incredible reply. Look at verse 16.

Therefore, this is what the sovereign Lord says, although I sent them far away among the nations and scattered them among the countries, yet for a little while I’ve been a sanctuary for them in the countries where they have gone. You see, the far away people are the people that God is going to work on and work through. They’ve not been rejected by God. In fact, he has been their sanctuary. He’s been their temple in Babylon.

They’re cut off from the physical temple. Too bad, who cares? God Himself has been their sanctuary, and he verse 17 will restore them, because the future is with God. The future is not with the city, it’s not with clever people. The future is with God and with God’s plans and humble people.

And the exiles are becoming a humble people.

And so God is going to gather and return the exiles, and he’s going to work in them so that they chuck away their idols, and he’s gonna give them a new heart and a new spirit, and they’ll follow his ways. Now partly this came true within 70 years because the exiles came home to Jerusalem and they rebuilt it and they rebuilt the temple.

Significantly, this prophecy came true when the Lord Jesus came as the good shepherd, and started to gather his sheep and gave them a new heart and a new spirit. And finally this will come true when we are gathered into glory, and our hearts will be truly, perfectly, totally undivided.

Now friends, we have to ask, how’s God going to do this, because there is idolatry, there is idolatry in my life and there is idolatry in your life, and there’s absolutely no way God’s going to look at our idolatry and say, well, they were idolatrous and they got death and departure, but you’ve been idolatrous, forget it, nothing matters.

God is the judge. He’s gonna do everything perfectly. So how is it possible that I and you who’ve been idolatrous, are going to be gathered into the family of God and one day into the glory of God, and the answer is, it’s going to be because of a death and a departure.

But you know what I’m saying, don’t you? The most wonderful truth of the Christian faith is that one has come into the world, the Lord Jesus, and he has experienced the death in our place, and he has experienced the departure in our place in order that the judgement of God might be poured out on him and we might be spared.

And being spared, we might be called and being called, we might be gathered and being gathered, we might be kept and being kept, we might be glorified. This is the great gospel of Christ.

Henry Skogle, who wrote a book many years ago that helped George Whitfield become a believer. Wrote in the book:

God had long contended with a stubborn world. And he threw down many a blessing. And when all his other gifts could not prevail, He made a gift of himself.

Now there are two hints that God is going to wonderfully work through the work of the Lord Jesus, and one of them is in chapter 9 verse 4, where we read that there are people who are marked, and they’re marked literally with the Hebrew letter tau, which is the t.

And it’s intriguingly, fascinatingly, like a cross.

And the other hint in these chapters that God is going to work through the work of the Lord Jesus is that in chapter 11 verse 23, when the Lord leaves the city, he goes through the east gate and it says he stopped or he hovered over the mountain east of the city, and what is the mountain east of the city? It is the Mount of Olives where the Lord Jesus, you remember in the garden of Gethsemane, knelt down, and gave himself willingly to the task of the cross in order that people like you and I who put our trust in him might be spared death and departure and be gathered in.

And so we have even these tantalising hints in the Old Testament scriptures, but I do want you to notice this very carefully. The future is not with the city. The future is not with the ritual. The future is with God.

And with the humble. Repentant. Willing. Open people.

The future is with those exiles.

And suddenly Ezekiel’s Vision comes to an end. And he finds himself sitting face to face with the exiles. And he tells them everything. And they’ve got a choice on their hands, and the choice is to go humbly with the living God. Or to foolishly walk with an idol.

I tried to think of a way of finishing this morning where I could just capture this whole idea of idolatry for us, and this is the best that I can do and see if it makes sense. There is a sense in which I want you to remember that God is objectively wonderful. He existed before the world. He outweighs the world. He’s worth more than the world. He’s worth more than me, he’s worth more than you. He is objectively, factually wonderful and great.

Therefore, if you come to know him through the Lord Jesus, you have become the richest person in the world.

And when the world and the universe is all taken away, you’ll find yourself immeasurably wealthy. But the second thing to say is that God has made us to worship Him, not an idol.

You know what it’s like when you go overseas, maybe for business, maybe for pleasure, and you come back and you’ve just got such a lot to say to your friend and your friend says, how was it? and you say it was good, and then they say, look at my new shoes.

That’s it, you’re not gonna get to say anymore. You’ve seen something quite special, but your friend doesn’t want anything special.

Or they’re sitting at a dinner beside somebody who is a music expert or a history expert or an art expert, and they have the opportunity to totally expand their knowledge and their mind and their heart.

And they say to the art expert, look at this little drawing that I did this afternoon. And they say to the history expert, let me tell you what I did in my holidays, and they say to the music expert, let me sing my favourite song to you.

And the tragedy you see is that their heart and mind, which could have been so hugely expanded. Is shrivelled and impoverished and ingrown. Into what they have settled for, which is tragically small.

And God, you see, has created the people of this world to worship Him. His attributes, his character, his personality, his eternity.

That we might be people of great mind and great heart. And we live sadly in a world and so many sadly in the church who settle for something which shrivels.

Well, may God spare us. Because he’s provided a perfect solution in the Lord Jesus.

Let’s bow our heads and pray

Our heavenly Father, we ask that you forgive us first of all for the idolatry which lingers and lurks and multiplies in our mind and heart.

There are so many things that we find ourselves gripped by.

And we ask that you would forgive us and change us and sanctify us and lead us to see and to love and to be devoted to, and satisfied with, and absorbed with the Lord Jesus.

We pray this for his glory, since he deserves it.

We pray this for a watching world that we might be marked by a greater and more wonderful God.

And we pray this for ourselves that we might be set free from all that would make us small and shrivelled and dead.

Thank you for the Lord Jesus and his death and departure in our place.

Thank you that you are a God who gathers and renews and promises and keeps.

Help us, we pray to go in the fuel of this Word, to live for you in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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