Ezekiel 1-3: There The Hand of The Lord Was Upon Him — A ‘Christian Growth’ Message

Transcript

We’re going to travel through the Old Testament book of Ezekiel for a few Sunday mornings. You’ll be familiar of course for many with the Ezekiel clothing company today, but we are thinking about the remarkable Old Testament prophet Ezekiel.

Based in Babylon, what we would call Iraq in the 6th century BC.

In exile with God’s people feeling abandoned by God and forsaken by God. And the sentence which I want you to remember and I hope you’ll take away from this morning is chapter 1, verse 3, at the very end of the sentence, the verse, it says there, The hand of the Lord was upon him. There in the exile, the hand of the Lord was upon him, in a place of punishment, the hand of the Lord was upon him.

Outside the promised land. In a place which felt to Ezekiel and the people like the pits. The hand of the Lord was upon him.

Some people, of course, would love to know that the hand of the Lord was on them. If only the Lord’s hand was on me, if only the Lord’s hand was on what I’m doing. Some people, of course, think that they have forfeited any chance of the Lord’s hand being on them, they say I’ve missed my opportunity, I’ve spoiled the chance, it’s gone. And some people couldn’t care less whether God’s hand was on them. And they’re of course the neediest of all.

Well, I want to look this morning at this particular text.

As a summary of the 1st 3 chapters of Ezekiel, that’s our plan to tell the story of the 1st 3 chapters of Ezekiel and the significance of it today. I’m going to break that little phrase into 3 parts. The first part is there in Babylon, the second, the hand of the Lord, and thirdly, upon him.

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The Exile to Babylon

First of all, there in the situation where God’s people were in the exile in Babylon, there in Babylon. The hand of the Lord was on Ezekiel.

Now if you’re not familiar with Bible timeline, I want you to get your perspective with me quite quickly. We are now in the last third of the Bible story. We’ve gone past Noah and Abraham and Moses and all the promises of God.

And we’ve gone past the entry into the promised land and the arrival of King David, and we are now out of the promised land. And we’re out of the promised land because the people of God in the promised land were presumptuous and were disobedient, and they ignored the prophets who kept on telling them, be faithful to a faithful God.

But they didn’t listen and so God brought in from the east, the nation of Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar, and Nebuchadnezzar moved into Israel and defeated the Israelites, and he took 10,000. Of the Israelites back into Babylon with him, including Ezekiel. This was 597 BC. God had asked his people to be a faithful community, a light to the nations, they’d ignored the prophets, they’d lived as they pleased, and now they were being, disciplined, exiled.

I want to ask you if you can imagine, we’ve thought about this before, but can you imagine what what it would be like to experience that. It’s one thing, isn’t it, for Indonesia to move in on us in Australia, conquer, and just take numbers away to Indonesia.

But it’s another thing if it is a religious takeover, and this was a religious takeover. It was as if Islam took over the church. And suddenly the God that you’ve been trusting and praying to and counting on seems to have lost the battle.

And you’ve been moved out into Indonesia to live under an Islamic regime, and you have no longer access to the buildings or the music or the service sheets or the Bible studies or the Christianity explained, and you are now in a brand new place, can you imagine what that would be like?

And for the Israelites it was a bewildering time, they must have asked questions like, is this the end of the plan? Did God lose to the Babylonians, we thought that he was the God of the world, has he lost? What happened to the promises? What happened to the future? What happened to the Messiah?

And then of course the Israelites had to learn an even more disturbing thing, and that is that the reason for this exile was their own rebellion and their own presumption.

If you want to read a good little commentary on the book of Ezekiel, I recommend the Chris Wright commentary in the Bible Speaks Today series. It’s a good popular commentary, and there are copies of it on our back bookstore, and he says this, Ezekiel was faced with people who refused to acknowledge their own sin, who had a self-congratulatory view of their own history, who assumed a kind of benevolent blindness on the part of Yahweh.

And who believed that they had an absolute and eternal right to the privileges of the land and the city and the temple. And then even more seriously, the Israelites had to learn that behind the judgement, behind the exile, behind the movement. Was God Himself. He was disciplining His people. He was humbling them.

And that things would get worse for them before things would get better. But there, in that very black place, very black time. The hand of the Lord was upon Ezekiel. Now this is not uh the sweetest subject this morning, is it? I was speaking with a lady last year from another church and she said she’d gone to church the previous Sunday and she said I went very tired and I went very discouraged, and I was feeling very weak, and the preacher preached on judgement, and she said I was so angry.

I want you to remember this morning and I remind myself that judgement is part of God’s warning to a needy world.

And if God warns the world, it is because God cares about the world.

If God disciplines his own people for despising his grace, if he disciplines his people, it is a part of his kindness.

It is to bring a people to their senses, it’s to bring a prodigal nation to the pigs and to the pigsty in order that they might come to their senses and return to their God.

It’s part of God’s kindness to be also a warning God, a judging God. Well there they were, they were in Babylon, and God’s wake-up call came to them. The second thing this morning is the hand of the Lord, which was on Ezekiel. It was Ezekiel’s 30th year, as you see in chapter 1 verse 1, and this undoubtedly means it was the 30th year of his life. This was the time when normally he would have become a priest.

But he was well away from the temple and he had been for 5 years, he’d been in exile now for 5 years, and instead of becoming a priest, God’s plan was that he would become a prophet.

And so God gave him a vision, verse one. And God gave him His word, verse 3.

The vision was a storm, you see the storm verse 4, a wind storm, and in the centre of the storm, imagine seeing this come at you is a fire. And in the middle of the fire, Ezekiel says there were 4 living creatures. And the four living creatures were kind of human.

But they had 4 faces and they had 4 wings, and the 4 faces were human, lion, ox, and eagle, and 4 wings. I hasten to add that many people who’ve read the book of Ezekiel have accused him of being everything from mentally weird to medically saturated. There is a real challenge in coming to grips with Ezekiel’s strange, behaviour as well as his strange visions. Now the creatures that Ezekiel saw inside the fire of the windstorm were marked by the strength of creation, human, lion, ox. And eagle.

But they also have this the speed of, immediate movement, and the reason for this 1:15 is because of some strange wheels. There was some type of gyroscopic wheels which enabled them to move very quickly.

And above the creatures, these creatures who are kind of cherubim or gods, attendance of God was a throne. And above the throne, high above the throne, was a glowing, brilliant person, high above the throne. So imagine, there you are, you’re on the banks of the river in exile in Babylon, and it’s your 30th year.

And you’ve been there 5 years and nothing has happened and it’s looking completely hopeless and there’s no possibility of getting back to Jerusalem, and suddenly God gives you a vision of a storm with a fire at the centre and creatures and a throne above and somebody seated or central to that throne.

And Ezekiel struggles to capture the glory of what he sees. He doesn’t dare describe the man who was on the throne. If you look at the end of verse 28, he simply says this was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. Isn’t that wonderful? He doesn’t dare go into details. He just says the appearance of the likeness of the glory.

Our friends, put this vision together. What is Ezekiel being shown? He’s in far off pagan Babylon, and in his mind and in his people’s mind, God is a long way away, and they have no access to him whatsoever. He’s in the Jerusalem Temple. He seems to have been helpless for the last 5 years. Maybe he lives in that little box of the temple. Maybe he’s depressed, God is depressed, maybe he’s cowering with fear at the Babylonians. No, suddenly. God reveals Himself to Ezekiel.

And the throne of God is right in front of Ezekiel.

And all the bits of wood and all the bits of metal back in Jerusalem now look very small. The symbols of the temple. And the holy of holies are nothing compared with the reality. They are just like little plastic trinkets compared with what Ezekiel sees in front of him.

And the wheels show that there is this access of God, he has instant presence, he is cosmic in his speed, and the throne which had seemed to Ezekiel to be nothing but words, just cheap talk is now seen to him to be dazzling and somebody is on it.

And not only is someone on it, but someone is in total control and totally real and spellbindingly powerful. It’s a fantastic vision, isn’t it? Now if you can understand the significance of this, it would be a little like this morning, us sitting here, and feeling as though all our problems were beyond God and all our difficulties were insuperable, and suddenly the roof of this church peels back, and the veil between us and heaven is peeled back. That veil which prevents us from seeing heaven and therefore coming face to face with the glory of God, which would kill us if we saw it.

And suddenly this roof is taken and the veil is taken and we see God enthroned, and we fall face down. And everything is seen to be small in the face of God. And in the words of revelation. We suddenly see that there are 4 cherubim. One human, one like a lion, one like an ox, one like an eagle.

And there is this lamb central to the throne, and every living creature is falling down before God and the lamb, and that’s what Ezekiel has shown. On the banks of the river in Babylon.

So the hand which is going to be on Ezekiel for ministry is the hand of the ruling god and the personal god, and the powerful god, and the present God. And you can’t get away from his control. Ezekiel could not get away from the presence of God.

The power of God, the rule of God, and the people utterly watched by God.

As of course God’s people today. We come to very dumb conclusions, don’t we, when we think about things, we uh make our decisions often in the face of our own experiences, which is a big mistake. We make our decisions often in the face of our imaginations, which is a big mistake, and we need to go back to the scriptures which tell us the truth.

Now not only did God show himself to Ezekiel, but he also spoke to him, and you see in chapter 2, verse 3, he spoke to Ezekiel and he said, I’m gonna send you, I’m not gonna send you overseas, I’m gonna send you to your own people. But the people I’m sending you to, your own people, they’re tough. Look at verse 4, they’re obstinate.

The people to whom I’m sending you are obstinate and stubborn. Literally hard insight. Stony faces.

And you’ll notice that Ezekiel’s job in chapter 2, verse 4 is to simply say what God says. Whether they listen or whether they fail to listen, he is to say what God says. And so the test of Ezekiel’s ministry is not going to be its cleverness, or it’s popularity, or it’s sophistication, or it’s entertainment or even its tips for living.

The test of Ezekiel’s ministry is going to be that he says what God says. And they will realise, says the Lord, that a prophet has come among you because as Ezekiel begins to tell the people of God that things are actually going to get worse, and the city back home that they hope to go back to quite soon will actually be dropped to the ground.

That city drops to the ground.

People begin to realise that Ezekiel is to be listened to and heeded because he speaks the truth from God. And he’s got to say what God says, whether the listeners listen or not, which is a very important issue for us every time we hear the scriptures read and explained to us because it is the listener for whom the ball lands in the court.

Uh, I know what it’s like to sit and listen to a sermon, I know what it’s like to be sleepy. I know what it’s like to be hard-hearted, I know what it’s like to be personally resistant. I know what it’s like to be distracted, I know all these things, and yet there is an obligation when the word of God goes out for the listener to say, I’ll do it.

Because if the listener says I’ll do it, he benefits, and if he says he won’t do it, the listener loses more than the preacher, because the preacher has discharged. And we who listen need to put into practise. Now the word of God is so concrete, you’ll see in chapter 2, verse 9, that it’s on a scroll, it’s on paper, it’s on a piece of document, and in 2:10 it’s written on both sides, probably because there’s no need to add nothing more to say.

And Ezekiel must do something very unique, you see chapter 3 verse 1, he must eat the scroll, he must absorb it, swallow it, digest it, or as we would say, get it into you. And so he eats it and he finds that it’s sweet to his taste because as Psalm 19 says, it’s the word of God. And that’s his message, he takes it in and then he gives it out.

But the message is not sweet to his listeners, chapter 3 verse 7. The house of Israel’s not willing to listen because they are not willing to listen to me. The whole house of Israel is hardened and obstinate.

We pray, don’t we, for the person who goes to the other culture. Because we understand the difficulty of entering into another culture and learning a new language and slowly, slowly beginning to cross the bridge and communicate and communicate the gospel, and uh we’re praying, for example, for Fiona who’s gone from this church and she’s in a new place in South Asia and she’s got huge challenges before her, poverty, the language, the culture, the difficulties, new friendships and all the sort of things that are up ahead of her, and yet, the fact of the matter is that she may come back in 3 years and say that people are so receptive. I just want to get back.

Sure there are difficulties, but they’re so hungry and they’re so humble and they’re so receptive.

And there are missionaries of course who come back to a place like this and find that there is a difficulty, a lethargy, an apathy.

Which makes ministry so difficult and you know the experience as you try to minister to your own family perhaps, or to your own wider family or to the group that you’re leading, or to the neighbours who are unbelievers, you see this, the difficulty and the deadness.

And some people of course who go to the mission field go to a place where the language is difficult like Japanese or French, and there is the opposition and the apathy and the disinterest.

But that’s Ezekiel’s challenge, he’s got to go to a people who are not receptive. That’s the hardship for him.

However, God is wonderfully sufficient, and you see in chapter 3 verse 9, he’s gonna make Ezekiel strong for the task. I’ll make your forehead like the hardest stone, harder than flint. Don’t be afraid, don’t be terrified, though they are a rebellious house. The power of God will be with him, the Holy Spirit will work and enable him, and the word of course is sharper than any two-edged sword, and Ezekiel comes out with the most extraordinary, extreme, shocking, remarkable teaching.

And if I was to read to you some sections this morning from the book of Ezekiel, you would need to be over 18 to listen to them because the design of the text is to shake and wake the sleepy. Chris Wright says such armour plating, as worn by the Israelites, needed some high-grade explosive.

And Ezekiel was given it.

So God’s spirit led Ezekiel back to God’s people, and we see in chapter 3 verse 14 that he went, but he went in bitterness and he went in anger. Some people think that’s because he was bitter with God or angry with God. I suspect it’s much more got to do with the word which is in him, and he is now feeling something of what God feels about the situation. It is a bitter angry situation.

And he sat overwhelmed for 7 days. There in Babylon, despite the problems, despite the unworthiness of the people, the hand of the Lord, the Lord who rules the universe and speaks and is omnipresent.

The hand of the Lord was on him.

Now the last thing this morning. The hand of the Lord was on him.

The responsibility that Ezekiel has in 3:16 is to be a watchman. These are very famous words and they come up again later in the book.

Son of man, I’ve made you a watchman. For the house of Israel. So hear the word I speak and give them warning from me when I say to a wicked man, you’ll surely die, and you don’t warn him or speak out to dissuade him from his evil ways in order to save his life, that wicked man will die for his sin and I’ll hold you accountable.

But if you do warn the wicked man and he does not turn from his wickedness or from his evil ways, he’ll die for his own sin, you’ll have saved yourself. So here is Ezekiel, so to speak, the man who stands on the wall of the city and he calls out the enemy is coming, and if the people listen, of course, it’s a benefit to them and if they ignore the watchman, it is of no benefit to them.

The remarkable thing here. Is that if Ezekiel is faithful, the ball again will be in the court of the listener.

If he is unfaithful, of course, he will be accountable.

The apostle Paul felt something of this when he said in Acts 20 at the end of his ministry, he said, I am innocent of the blood of people, which is a remarkable testament to the fact that he did the work of being faithful as a watchman with the word. And there is a part of us which feels the burden of wanting to tell.

We must ask God to give us the strength and the way to do it.

But in 3:17, he says, give them warning NIV from me, literally give them warning about me. God says, I want you to go and warn my people about me. I’m their danger, I’m their enemy.

But he also provides a watchman because he’s loving, so God, you see, has the great, ability to not only be the one to be feared, but he also has the ability to provide the one who will warn and protect.

We see this of course most clearly in the work of the Lord Jesus, that there is the judgement of God at the cross, and there is the mercy of God at the cross.

So Ezekiel has to go and explain all that God says. He has no time for chit chat. He has no social niceties. If you look at 326, God is going to make him dumb unless he speaks God’s word. Can you imagine this? Ezekiel is not able to speak except the word of God.

Imagine God had given me this responsibility with you. We shake hands after this service, and I say nothing to you. You ask me if I want some tea or coffee, I say nothing. I never ask you how you are. I never tell you about the last week. The only time I open my mouth is to say what God says. It adds tremendous weight doesn’t it, to what God asked Ezekiel to say, and that’s what he asks him to say.

And he had to contradict the optimists, there were many optimists in Babylon, people who were saying, hey, God’s on the throne, we’ll be out of here in weeks, don’t worry, all will be well.

And Ezekiel had to say, no, I speak from God when I say to you, Jerusalem must fall and we won’t be back for 70 years. Now the structure of Ezekiel’s message is very simple, if you want to get a handle on it. The 1st 24 chapters are the warnings to the people of God. Warnings of word and warnings of drama.

Chapters 25 to 32 are a warning to the nations. And chapters 33 to 48. Uh, the restoration, the rebuilding, the brand new world that God himself would create. So we not only see that he’s a sober preacher, but we also will see in the next weeks to come that he is a crazy dramatist. And he wakes up his people with the ear but also with the eye. Let me close by giving you some implications for this morning, things for you to take away.

First of all,

As Ezekiel saw the glory of God in the vision. I want you to remember that that is exactly what God is working towards for all people. God is working towards every single person recognising his greatness and his glory.

And of course we will either see his glory in the word of God and in the person of the Son of God, and we’ll respond to his mercy and we’ll be part of his family, or we’ll turn our back on all that and we’ll eventually see his glory, but we’ll be a terrifying glory. But God is committed to people knowing his greatness and His glory.

And this is the key, and this is the reason why we pray on a regular basis, may your name be hallowed and honoured, because we want people to know how great He is.

The second thing which flows from this is the love of God for his people, He’s very jealous, He’s involved with his people.

Involvement you remember brings cost, and that’s why a lot of people don’t want to be involved with people, because it’s too costly, it’s too hurtful, it’s too painful, and so they avoid any involvement, but God is not like that. God is interested in involvement, and he’s involved to the hilt, he’s involved to the death.

And if you belong to the Lord through Christ. He will not accept from you some mini-involvement. He won’t put up with just a nod at 10 o’clock or a visit here at every 2nd, 3rd or 4th week. He will not put up with that. You’ll either have no relationship, or you’ll have an involved relationship. And the way you’ll have an involved relationship of course is that he’ll pay everything through the blood of the Lord Jesus for the relationship, and then He’ll rattle everything in your life so that you’ll draw near to Him.

And you may have experienced even in these last days or weeks, the Lord rattling your life. Because He loves you.

And he’s not going to put up with some kind of distant arm’s length relationship. And that’s what He’s working on with his people in Babylon, He’s working to purify and to refine and for them to be involved with Him.

And the last thing is that he will therefore bombard the eye and the ear. He’ll keep reminding you every way He can.

And you’ll see this as part of Ezekiel’s ministry to keep um giving the word of God and also some dramatic presentation because God is a God who communicates. Now supremely, of course, he communicates in the Lord Jesus, the great words of the Lord Jesus and the great work of the Lord Jesus is what stands in front of us as God’s great communication, but that is inescapable.

And the reason that it’s inescapable is because He wants us to not escape. He wants us to be inescapable. He wants to be able to say to his people, I am with you always. Never will I leave you, never will I forsake you. My hand is on you.

There – wherever you are, the hand of the Lord is on you. Well, we’ll pursue Ezekiel in the weeks to come, you may like to read ahead.

Let’s pray.

Our gracious God, we thank you this morning for giving to us in your word a picture of your greatness, your glory. We thank you for peeling back the veil. That Ezekiel might see something of the likeness of your glory, and we thank you for communicating that.

We especially thank you for displaying your glory supremely in the Lord Jesus. We thank you for His work on the cross so that we might be drawn to you. And that we might have involved fellowship with you.

And we thank you for the way you continue to communicate and to challenge and correct. And rebuke and comfort and woo us. That we might be involved with you. We pray that you would help us as we study your Word in the weeks to come to see you more clearly, love you more dearly and follow you more nearly, and we ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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