Saturday, June 28, 2014

Saturday, June 28, 2014

Ezekiel 3:4-17

Ezekiel lived at a traumatic time for his nation.  The northern kingdom of Israel had been permanently destroyed by the Assyrians more than 100 years earlier; now the southern kingdom of Judah was defeated by King Nebuchadnezzar and the Chaldeans.  Jerusalem and much of the country were plundered; God’s temple was ransacked and, with the whole city, was soon destroyed.  The king and all the prominent people were marched as prisoners to Babylon, where they lived as dispossessed captives, confused, hopeless, and yet full of the stubborn rebelliousness that God’s prophets had long warned would bring their downfall.

Ezekiel was one of these exiles taken captive to Babylon.  He was a priest [Ezek. 1:3].  In his time, the work of a priest was to govern the temple in Jerusalem, to help people offer their sacrifices, and to lead worship in the temple.  All this was now impossible: The temple was no more; the sacrifices were stopped; the rebellious exiles did not want to worship God – they likely blamed God for all their trouble, although God through the prophets had long been urging them to turn from their stubborn sinfulness.

Ezekiel was a very unusual person, who had strange and wonderful visions of heaven, of God’s throne, and of immeasurable glory.  In today’s passage, God commissioned Ezekiel to be a prophet of a particularly hard-headed sort, with the daunting task of declaring God’s word fully and faithfully to the rebellious exiles, hard people to reach at this traumatic time.  Ezekiel was to speak in a strong and forthright way whether the exiles would listen to him or not.  If God had sent him to foreigners with huge language and cultural obstacles to communication, they would have listened to him, God said, but his own people would not.  So Ezekiel was to be hard-headed, harder even than the stubborn exiles.  Perhaps, by faithfully declaring God’s message to almost total rejection, a few people might listen and change.

In all this, Ezekiel was still a priest.  Verse 3:15 shows this:  When Ezekiel joined the exiles where they lived, he was so overcome that he just sat with them, stunned and overwhelmed, for seven full days before he said anything.  A good priest, you see, needs to be soft-hearted, compassionate, sympathizing with and caring for people, understanding their heartbreak and reaching out to God on their behalf, listening much more than talking.  Ezekiel was both a hard-headed prophet and a soft-hearted priest, quite an unusual combination.  Soft-heartedness and hard-headedness don’t often go together, but both kinds of ministry are needed to meet the desperate needs of people whose world has collapsed for them.

It’s the same today.  When their world falls apart, people need soft-hearted understanding, comfort, and support, but they also need hard-headed concrete advice and direction on what to do.  As followers of Christ, are we ready to provide both kinds of ministry to people in need? 

May God make us faithful in this calling.

-- Robert Kruse