You Will Know That I Am The Lord

Idolatry and Abomination in the Temple 1:14

They still had all the things that looked religious, but true, legitimate faith was long gone. And on top of the Jewish structure they added a bunch of pagan garbage. They had idols that started to fill the temple. They started to draw on the temple walls beasts and creepy things.

They took that which God had given them, that which was good, that which was sound, and they leavened or sprinkled upon it all sorts of terrible paganism. They had forgotten God. They gave lip service to him and embraced all the crazy, wacky ideas of their age. Literally, if you were to have gone out in the courtyard, just outside the temple, they had taken an idol, just in the courtyard of the temple itself, an idol to a Babylonian, Mesopotamian god named Tammuz, and they were worshiping it.

And even the elders we see in the book of Ezekiel, they were all worshiping idols. Everyone was worshiping something terribly pagan. Abominable things were brought even into the temple itself.

The Prophet's Object Lessons of Coming Siege 2:13

“Take for yourself wheat, barley, beans, lentils, millet, and spelt; put them into one vessel, and make bread of them for yourself.”

— Ezekiel 4:9 (NKJV)

And so, yes, these were God's people, and yet they were fully deserving of God's wrath. All right, verses 9 through 17. So God tells Ezekiel, take for yourself wheat and barley and beans and lentils and millet and spelt, and put them in one vessel and make bread for yourself. During the number of days that you lie on your side, 390 days, you shall eat of it.

And the food that you'll eat shall be by weight 20 shekels a day. From the time you shall eat of it, you also shall drink water by measure, one sixth of a hand. From the time you shall drink, and you should eat it as barley cakes and bake it using fuel of human waste.

Then the Lord said, so shall the children of Israel eat their defiled bread among the Gentiles in the place that I will drive them. And so I said, ah, Lord God, indeed I've never have defiled myself from my youth until now. I've never eaten what's died of itself or was torn by beasts, nor has any abominable flesh ever come into my mouth.

And then he said to me, see, I'm going to give you cow dung instead of human waste, and you shall prepare your bread over it. Moreover, he said to me, son of man, surely I will cut off the supply of bread in Jerusalem. They will eat bread by weight and with anxiety. They shall drink water by measure and with dread, that they may lack bread and water, they may be dismayed with one another and waste away because of their iniquity.

All right, what's going on here? At the start of chapter four, which you read a couple moments ago, God had Ezekiel do something kind of strange. The first strange thing he had them do was to make a clay model of Jerusalem. Remember, we read that in verses one through eight.

He says, all right, son of man, which is a term that you see used for Ezekiel and then Christ in the New Testament, all right son of man, I want you to make this clay model of Jerusalem. And then you can take the mounds and sticks and dirt and so forth, and you can make battering ramps and siege works against this model that you've made.

And the siege works and the batting ramp and these things are going to depict what's going to happen. You make a model in the full view of everyone. They'll look at this thing and they won't understand it, but they will see, as they'll recognize, this is the city of Jerusalem, and for some reason, you, Ezekiel, have put all these things against it, against this city.

Now, that's pretty odd. That's pretty odd. What is God doing here? Well, then he also says, not only are you going to build this model that everyone can look at to see destruction that seems to be imminent, but also in this model, take an iron wall and put it between you, where you're laying down, and this model.

Now, what does the iron wall signify? Well, it signifies that there is a wall that now exists between God and His own. It's a self-created wall of separation by which God is going to watch what's going to happen, but He's not going to stop the Babylonians. Now, if you were a pastor by looking at this, that would all seem kind of weird, but it gets weirder still.

Ezekiel at this point is told to lay on his side. He's told to lay on his side. This is all object lessons that everyone could see and wonder about. But Ezekiel's told to lay on his side, first on his left and then on his right, for a total of 430 days.

This was a time frame that corresponded with the people's sin and iniquity. So there's a reason how long Ezekiel was supposed to be doing this. With that said, it gets weirder still. In verses 9-17, which we just read, he's not only supposed to lie on his side, but in those times in which he eats, he's going to eat a very narrow amount of food, a very limited amount of food, and he's supposed to cook his food, in verses 9-17, over burning human feces.

The Defilement of the Priest as a Sign to the People 5:46

Now, if you and I think that sounds odd, weird, strange, undesirable, put yourself in Ezekiel's shoes. Ezekiel had been trained to be a priest since he was young. He avoided everything that was unclean. Everything was unclean.

He tells God, he says, God, since I was young, I've never eaten anything that's been even close to defiled, and now you want me to do that? Now, fortunately for Ezekiel, God is gracious, and He says, all right, all right. You don't have to use the human feces, but use cow dung. With that said, that's still not a huge upgrade.

It's still pretty unpleasant. So what's this all about? Why? If you're a passerby and you see Ezekiel and he's eating burning dung to cook his food on, you're definitely going to stop and wonder what's going on.

He's already built this city that seems to be under siege. He's been laying on his side bound for these different periods of time. He cooks his food using human dung. You definitely have questions.

Well, God is using all this to demonstrate object lessons about what's going to happen. The city, Jerusalem, is going to be attacked. It's going to be assaulted. There will be battering rams.

There will be a siege laid against it on the basis of their iniquity. Iniquity that goes way back, which we see in these 430 days. They had been terrible. They had been sinful.

And God's hammer was going to come down. And when His hammer came down, God wants them to know it's going to be bad. It's going to be so bad that the people, both those who undergo the siege and those who survive it and go into exile, their situation is going to be so dreadful that they themselves, when they eat their own food, it's going to be cooked over dung, cow feces, and the like.

These are all object lessons meant to tell the people something that they'd avoided or ignored when prophets spoke more clearly, that something bad is going to happen. If you're watching Ezekiel do all this stuff, and if you're looking at the city that he's constructed under siege, one lesson, one takeaway would have been abundantly clear, that if Ezekiel was truly a prophet, which he was, then whatever he was prophesying for Jerusalem was going to be dreadful.

The Severity of God's Wrath Against Sin 7:48

“This is Jerusalem; I have set her in the midst of the nations and the countries all around her. She has rebelled against My judgments by doing wickedness more than the nations, and against My statutes more than the countries that are all around her.”

— Ezekiel 5:5-6 (NKJV)

All right, it gets more awful still in Ezekiel chapter 5, verses 5 through 10. Thus says the Lord God, this is Jerusalem. I have set her in the midst of the nations and of the countries all around her. And yet she has rebelled against my judgments by doing wickedness more than the nations, and against my statutes more than the countries that are around her.

For they have refused my judgments, but they have not walked in my statutes. Therefore, says the Lord God, because you have multiplied disobedience more than the nations that are around you, and you have not walked in my statutes, you have not kept my judgments, nor even done according to the judgments of the nations around you.

In other words, he's saying, not only have you not done what's right in my eyes, you haven't even been as pious as the Philistines and the Moabites and the Ammonites and the Egyptians and the like. They're more righteous people than you. You're not even hitting their standard, let alone mine. Therefore, says the Lord your God, indeed I, even I, even the one who loves you, even I am now against you and will execute judgments in your midst in the sight of the nations.

They're going to see what I'm going to do to you. And I'll do among you what I've never done, like which I won't do again, because of your abominations. Therefore, fathers shall eat their sons in your midst. Sons shall eat their fathers.

And I'll execute judgments against you. And all of you who remain, I will scatter to all the winds. R.C. Sproul, he described what was going to happen to Jerusalem, how terrible it was going to be.

And his phrase for what was about to go down, he's the only one who uses it. It's not a popular phrase, but I think it's appropriate. He said, what was about to happen in Israel and to Jerusalem, you could rightly call the first holocaust. There has never been a city in the history of mankind that has undergone what Jerusalem would undergo through the siege of the Babylonians.

To the degree that the water would run dry, the food would run out, people would be compelled to cannibalism and the like to satiate their hungers. This was going to be bad. And as bad as it would be, as bad as the judgment was, their sin was worse still. He said, I will do this because of your abominations.

Abomination is a heavy word. Not because of your trifling sins, not because of smaller things, although all sin is heinous in God's eyes, but you guys have sinned so badly. You killed the prophets. You're not listening.

You're doing everything wrong and nothing right.

That They May Know That I Am the Lord 10:29

“Then they shall know that I am the Lord; I have not said in vain that I would bring this calamity upon them.”

— Ezekiel 6:10 (NKJV)

Well, my hammer is going to come down so that the remnant that survives this will know that I am the Lord, which is the most utilized phrase in the entire book of Ezekiel. Then they will know that I am the Lord, because they'd forgotten. They had taken God and they had made Him a genie.

They had made Him something lesser than He was, a big brother in the sky, a friend in the clouds. They had taken God and spirituality and righteousness and they had turned it into karma, and they had bent the knee to idols and the like. Well, God says, I'm not going to buy this forever.

A time will come when they will know that I am the Lord, and this destruction was going to be a means by which they would understand that. And by telling Ezekiel, and therefore telling the people what was to happen before it would happen, then when the destruction came down, everyone would know this wasn't a cosmic accident.

Why Jerusalem: The City God Loved and Destroyed 11:22

This wasn't chance. This came from the hand of God Himself. Again, why Jerusalem? Jerusalem was really important in Scripture.

You know, 800 times Jerusalem was named in Scripture. You don't find anything else even close, any other city or location. Jerusalem, for reasons that are to God alone, has just incredible historical value and, someone argued, present value in the eyes of God. Jerusalem was very special.

Let's put it that way. It was this region, the same region where Abraham met Melchizedek. It was in this region that Abraham offered up Isaac. It was in this city that the reigns of King David and King Solomon and the temple that was built under Solomon's age took place, in this city.

And it was in this city that God established His own people and in whom His own manifest glory dwelt in Jerusalem. And yet, historically, God has destroyed the very city that He loves. How many times? At least twice.

Once under the Babylon, and the second under who? Rome. Think about that for a minute. God loved Jerusalem.

He Himself had ordained how the temple was to be constructed. Every brick, so to speak, the exact dimensions, the layout, came from God's own hand, His own mind, so to speak. And yet, if the people were going to defile it, He would have zero qualms in bringing it down. He must really hate sin.

The people were not just sinful, but what we saw earlier in chapter 4 is they were incredibly sinful. They were incredibly sinful. Again, within the temple itself, they had shown such disregard for God and His presence that they had begun to inscribe in the temple walls depictions of pagan creatures, all sorts of creeping and abominable things.

There was actually two idols that were set up in the various courtyards of the temple itself, and the elders burned incense to all manner of other gods. And because of that, because they wanted to embrace pagan ways, because the people wanted to embrace pagan ways so badly, God here in chapter 5 says, all right, you want to embrace pagan ways?

Well, see what happens when a pagan nation comes calling for you and when you're exiled and you have to live there. You like Tammuz so much, the Mesopotamian Babylonian God? You like Tammuz? I'll tell you what, I'll put you in Babylon.

You can worship them all you want. How do you like them apples? God's telling them, I do not care for what you have done and I'm going to deal with it, and I'm going to deal with it in a way that not only will you know that my hand is upon you, but all the nations will know this as well.

False Security and the Removal of God's Guardrails 14:03

If you've ever gone bowling, and at the bowling alley, you'll see people will hit this button, and they'll go boop, and all of a sudden these rails will shoot up on the side of the lanes, and then you'll see people bowling. It's usually little kids, maybe some adults, but they'll take the ball, they'll just chuck it down the lane, and boing, boing, boing.

It's like pinball. It can hit any of the rails, and ultimately it gets to the pins, right? That didn't used to be a thing. Maybe I'm just from the Flintstone age of bowling or something, but back in the day, you rolled the ball, and you just hoped it went all the way down, because if it went off to the side, that's it.

You get zero. Game over for you. It doesn't work to throw the ball down carelessly and without precision, because back in the day, there was no bumper rails there for you. With that said, let's say that you're one who's accustomed to these rails, and you bowl all your life, and you're just throwing the ball down.

You really don't even bother to aim it because you know it's going to get down to the pins one way or another. Well, let's say you've been doing that all your life. And then one day the rails are taken away. One day you hit the button and no rails come up.

Well, what do you do then? There's no buffer. There's no guardrails. Well, at that point, I'll tell you this much, your score is going to drop considerably.

Why? Because you've not trained yourself in how to do things the right way. You've not trained yourself in how to properly bowl. And at that point on, the lack of any guardrails to head you in or protect you is going to end up costing you.

Israel, Israel had thought that by virtue of being God's chosen people, that they were untouchable. They thought, you know what? We're God's people, not Babylonians, not the Syrians, not the Philistines, not the Egyptians. We are God's people.

And because we're God's people, He's always going to look after us. He's always going to protect us. Whatever we do, God is like the bumper rails. However we live our lives can be accommodated because God's never going to let anything bad happen to us.

The guardrails are always going to be up. Well, surprise, surprise, God tells them repeatedly that an iron wall is now between them and Him. And not only are there no guardrails to protect them from the Babylonians at this point, but if anything, the Babylonians have been sent to them by His own hand.

So verses 5 through 10, God tells him. I'm prepared to withdraw, protecting hands, and let you endure the consequences of your own choices.

The Consequences of Divine Justice 16:19

Now, verses 11 through 14 go on to describe these consequences, again, in a horrifying way. Verses 11 through 14, God says this, Therefore, as I live, says the Lord God, surely, because you have defiled my sanctuary with all your detestable things, with all of your abominations, therefore, I will also diminish you. My eye will not spare, nor will I have pity.

One-third of you shall die the pestilence and be consumed with famine in your midst, and one-third shall fall by the sword all around you. And I will scatter another third to all the winds, and I will draw out a sword after them. Thus shall my anger be spent, and I will cause my fury to rest upon them, and I will be avenged, and they shall know that I the Lord have spoken in my zeal when I have spent my fury upon them.

Moreover, I will make you a waste and a reproach among the nations around you in the sight of all who passed by.

The Patience and Long-Suffering of God 17:10

Now again, had God been patient? I want to make this clear. We're seeing text that is among the hardest words that God has ever spoken to anyone anywhere. This is undoubtedly difficult words to hear.

This is very difficult for us to hear. It would have been really difficult for the Israelites to hear. But perspective, perspective. Had God been patient with them for a long time?

Yes, yes, and yes. This is not a rush to judgment. This is not God just on a fly to fancy or a whim or just because He's irritated one day, saying, aha, I'm going to deal with you now. That's not the way it works.

If anything, God had been so patient, so long-suffering, so much forbearance. If you go to Deuteronomy, if you look in, I think it's Deuteronomy 30, Moses says a day is going to come when you, you hard-headed people, are ultimately going to undergo exile. Moses, through the Holy Spirit, through God's own inspiration, anticipated that exile would probably happen at some point because they knew the hearts of people.

And yet, the time between Moses and this are centuries and centuries and centuries. God is really, really patient. In your own life, can you not see that? In your own life, have you not done hideous things?

In your own life, have you not defiled your own faith? In your own life, have you not done that which is wrong time and time and time again? Yet, you're still here, right? You're still breathing.

You're still beloved. God has not cast you out. God is slow to wrath and quick to show mercy, but dear heavens, when the hammer falls, you do not want to be beneath it. When the hammer drops of this loving, forbearing, patient, merciful God, when the hammer ultimately drops because he's just and he has to deal with sin, when it drops, you don't want to be beneath it.

The people, the people had heard this sort of thing and they just went, all right, and they went on and did their own thing. And part of it was because they never quite believed it. The temple is still here, right? We got our priests, we're doing our sacrifices, what's the deal?

They looked at the accoutrements of faith and said, come on, God's never gonna, what's He gonna do, knock down His own temple? I don't think so. They had that sort of mentality. And again, the prophet said, no, no, no, no, no. Watch out.

If God did not spare His own Son when His Son on the cross became sin for us, if He did not spare His own Son, why would He spare you? Why would he spare a brick on top of another brick? He'll knock it all down to deal with sin.

Religion Without the True Object of Worship 19:36

But the people, the people, they didn't apprehend this rightly. And again, part of that's because they were still religious. They were still religious in their mind's eye. A lot of them thought that was enough.

They were still religious, even though they'd lost touch with the object of worship, the only object, the only object that matters. It's like their ancestors. Do you remember when Moses went up to Sinai? He's there a little bit too long.

What do the people do? Well, they come up with a golden calf. See, what people do is they still are religious. People are always religious.

It's wired into our nature. But what's interesting is that the object of their faith can change or drift. If it happened in 40 days under Moses' watch, over centuries, imagine how far they had drifted to get to this point that God says the hammer is coming now. Now, even the people who heard Ezekiel talking this way, or who had heard Isaiah, or who had heard Jeremiah, or Daniel, or Micah, or any of the contemporaries, again, they discounted these guys.

Those guys, they don't know what they're talking about. And part of the problem was that the people, when they went and bowed down to Tammuz, or they put inscriptions in the temple, do you know what? They thought what they were doing, they thought it was virtuous. Well, you and I, through the history of time, look at it and go, dear heavens, you wicked people, how could you do something so wicked?

They were conditioned in their own society, in their own religious society, to see all this depravity as virtuous, to see the very things that God hates the most as being good things and virtuous things.

Paganism Calls Good Evil and Evil Good 21:10

Paganism always does that. It calls good evil and evil good. It takes the very stuff God hates and it dresses up with nice sounding words. I don't know, words like pride.

Words like choice. Virtuous words. Words that sound good and have virtuous sign to it. Meanwhile, God hates it and He will deal with it in His time.

The people had done that. People had done that time and again. And again, he says, the day is coming when they will know that I am the Lord. And because I am the Lord, and because I have the attributes and characteristics that I have, I will not abide this any longer.

And I am patient, but I am also just, and I will bring justice in time.

The Preservation of a Remnant 21:51

All right, let's look at chapter 6, verses 8 through 10. Verse 8, and this is an encouraging verse here. Chapter 6, verses 8 through 10. And yet, I will leave a remnant, so you may have some who escape the sword among the nations when you're scattered throughout the countries.

Then those of you who escape will remember me among the nations where they're carried captive, because I was crushed by their adulterous heart which had departed from me and by their eyes which played the harlot after their idols. And they will loathe themselves for the evils which they committed in all their abominations.

And then they shall know that I am the Lord, and I have not said in vain that I would bring this calamity upon them. At the very start of our series on Ezekiel, I mentioned you before, and I mentioned it this morning, the first two-thirds of the book are pretty difficult. Pretty difficult.

They're difficult because they deal with God's judgment against sin. And on some level, we don't like that because each one of us is a sinner. See, anytime you ever talk about God being angry, there's a part of us that goes, no, no, no, let's get to the happy God. Let's take the Old Testament, close that up.

Let's do a series from the New Testament when God is happy, right? There's a part of us that thinks that way. Now, that's bad. That's stinking thinking.

That's not right at all. But there's a part of us that wants to take the chapters or books or parts of the scripture that talk about His wrath against sin and put that at our arm's length.

The Watchman's Duty to Warn of Judgment 23:11

We don't like the idea of judgment. With that said, who needs to hear most? Who needs to hear most about judgment? Who needs to pay attention?

Well, really, I mean, everyone does, but especially those who are standing in a position where judgment is about to befall them. If you see a man, you see a man standing on one of the train tracks, right? At first glance, you don't think too much about it, but what if? What if you see a man standing on the train tracks, and you look over here, and you see there's a train coming?

A train is barreling down on this guy who's standing on the tracks, oblivious to what's about to happen. What's your concern then? Well, your concern is entirely different, because you see what is about to befall this man. This man is about to have an encounter with something much larger than him that will leave him utterly destroyed.

The person who needs to hear about God's judgment the most is the person who's standing on the train tracks of God's wrath. That's everybody. In this case, though, it was especially true of those whose judgment was imminent, was imminent in Ezekiel's age. Now, Ezekiel, again, he was a watchman, so he told people this.

He shared this. He made the models. He did all this sort of stuff that did not make him the life of the party, that did not make him the most wonderful guy to have order the house. And yet he was faithful, because that's what watchmen do.

They see the danger and they say something. They say, get off the tracks because the train is coming through.

Behold, the Day Has Come: The Sadness of 'Too Late' 24:36

All right, let's look at our last verses now from chapter 7. I'm gonna look at verse 10 and then I'm gonna skip to verse 27. So chapter 7, verses 10 and verse 27. Behold, the day, behold, it has come.

Doom has gone out. The king will mourn, the prince will be clothed with desolation, and the hands of the common people will tremble. And I will do to them according to their way, and according to what they deserve I will judge them. And then they will know that I am the Lord.

You know the two saddest words in the human language? The words too late. Too late. See, the words too late imply that a window of opportunity is closed.

There's no more time, once something is too late, to either cause or to forestall a certain outcome. Well, in chapter 7, we see it's now too late. Behold, the day has come. Behold, it has come, and doom has gone out.

This is one of the saddest verses in all the Bible, because it says that it is now too late for Israel. Looking ahead into the future, there will come a time when it is too late for every sinner who is not redeemed through the blood of Christ. There will come a day when, behold, the day has come and doom has gone out.

And this concept, is, it's sad. It's sad because judgment at one point was avoidable and now it's imminent.

Covenant Faithfulness: God Is Not Done With His People 26:06

With that said, let me offer, as we close, let me offer something encouraging to help us to bookend or to understand that judgment appropriately. You know, the fact that God's people were about to be judged here in the book of Ezekiel, the fact that God's people were about to be judged, it didn't mean that they were going to stop being God's people.

You see, the fact that God was going to judge His own nation, that was bad news, but it did not mean that they were going to stop being God's chosen people. Why? Because God made a covenant with His people. And yes, that covenant both included and allowed for His discipline, but the discipline would not sever the relationship.

They would continue to be His people. God was not done with Israel. In spite of what was about to happen, in spite of the city being taken down, in spite of the Babylonians coming in with their battering rams and their siege works, in spite of the temple being decimated, not one stone on top of another, God was not done with the people, and their future was still bright.

In fact, a remnant would return even from this. Ultimately, Babylon itself would be taken over. Ultimately, Cyrus and the Persians would take them out, and Cyrus would issue a decree that would allow the people to return and to begin to rebuild. And all that was done according to God's love and God's plan.

He would be dealt justly, but He was not done with His people. Well, here's good news for you and I. He's not done with you either. As we look at all this, as we look at sinful people deserving judgment, I hope that we're introspective enough to know that apart from the grace of God, we all deserve judgment.

We all deserve condemnation, and the hammer would come down on every man, woman, and child apart from God's grace. God was not done with Israel. There was still grace He would give to them, and they would still be His own. This morning, if you're a child of God, if God has redeemed you, if your heart has changed, if you're now a son and daughter of the most high God, then the good news is this, that even if He should discipline you, using a means that you would not desire, a circumstance you would not call down upon yourself, and even if you have strayed like the prodigal son and gone in a direction that you ought not go, God's not done with you.

Because the nature, the covenantal nature of His relationship with you is one by which He is patient and long-suffering, and one by which His everlasting arms are always thrown open. As we said earlier with the prodigal son, the prodigal son did all sorts of things wrong. Fled the father, ran from the father, went off into pagan lands to do pagan things.

And in God's time, the prodigal son saw that his circumstances were dreadful. He was basically burning food on cow pies, so to speak. Different circumstance, but it was terrible all the same. And when he realized my circumstance is terrible and he determined maybe I should go back, the father's response was to throw his arms wide and rush across the field to fall upon the neck of his beloved child and to kiss him, to give him his signet ring, kill the fatted calf and say, we're going to have a party.

Today, if you're a sinner, the bad news is that the wages of sin is death. But the good news is that God has always had a plan to redeem sinners, to call them back to himself. If you're a believer in Christ, if your heart has been changed, if you're indwelt with the Spirit, nothing's going to change that tomorrow.

Now, God may discipline you for some sins you engage in in the time yet to come, and yet He will never cast you from His sight. Furthermore, He's committed to sanctifying you, using good situations, good circumstances, and bad circumstances all the same. He will use the situations of your life and even the mistakes that you've made to make you better in the time yet to come and to sanctify you.

And that was His intentions for Israel. I'm going to put you in exile. And it's going to be hard. But you will come back stronger.

For you and I this morning, if we're feeling weak, if we're feeling like we've stepped outside of the lanes of God's will for us or His desires for us, if we've done that which is wrong and very little of that which is right, then the warning would be to come on back, return to Christ, run to Him, knowing that He will run to you, He will fall upon you.

And what's more, know that in the time to come, He will sanctify that which He's bought with His own blood. There are better days ahead. It was true of Israel, and it's true for you. Let's pray.