Jody's Devotionals

¹And the YHWH’s word came to me, saying,

²Human, set your gaze toward the people of Ammon and prophesy against them. ³And command the people of Ammon to hear YHWH’s word. This is the word of the Lord YHWH: “Since you said ‘Yay!’ toward my holy place because it was destroyed, and toward the land of Isarel, because it was devastated, and toward the house of Judah, because they have gone into exile, ⁴take a look! I’m going to give you to the people of the east as a possession, and they will set up their encampments among you and they will place their tents among you. They will eat your fruit and they will drink your milk. — Ezekiel 25:1-4

I thought I was going to leave Ezekiel today, but that didn’t happen! This passage has a double lesson, I think. The whole of Ezekiel 25 is given to prophecies against the nations that had rejoiced at the fall of Israel and Judah, Moab, Ammon, Edom, and the Philistines. Eventually we will also find judgment on those who actually invaded Israel and Judah, but here it is simply those who rejoiced at the fall of their neighbors.

I know that many of us when we were growing up (of course we would NEVER do it now as adults!) liked to find ways to get brothers and sisters or fellow-students into trouble. Even if we didn’t actually arrange it, we sometimes gloated when a rival got into trouble. When Jesus speaks of becoming like little children, that’s not the type of behavior he means!

Paul tells us that love doesn’t rejoice at evil or injustice (1 Corinthians 13:6). And of course there was no love between these four nations and Israel or Judah. They had been at war for years. But someone should quickly point out that the fall of Judah, of which Ezekiel was speaking primarily, was something God commanded. What exactly is the problem here?

Jesus tells us that offenses must come. Indeed, if we consider yesterday’s passage and devotional, God is probably using such offenses to grow us up and bring us closer to him. But Jesus adds, “Woe to the person by whom the offense comes” (Matthew 18:7)!

Ezekiel here introduces us to two important lessons about God’s discipline.

First, God will use various instruments to accomplish his discipline. If you are an annoying person, God may use you to bring many other Christians to maturity. But don’t get complacent. Some people think they have permission to be obnoxious, and because people need to hear what they have to say, they are certain that they are doing God’s will in saying it. And sometimes very annoying things need to be said. Just be sure you’re being commissioned by God when you do.

But there’s a second part here. Our passage is addressed to bystanders. Do you ever rejoice, even secretly, when someone else fails? Does it make you happy to see someone receive God’s judgment? If so, watch out. You may be falling into the sin of Israel’s neighbors, and their punishment was to disappear from history. Have you ever wondered why, of all the nations in and around Palestine in ancient times, Israel is the only one that still exists with an identity that traces back more than 3,000 years? There’s no Ammon, no Moab, no Edom, and not a Philistine in sight. There is a nation of Syria, but it is essentially an Arab nation, culturally unconnected to the Syrians of that period. The same is true of Egypt. It’s something to think about!

Second, however, is that God is in control. How do I get that from this chapter? It is simply that God doesn’t just exercise sovereignty over his special people, Israel and Judah. He exercises sovereignty over the world. He doesn’t just let anything happen. There are consequences for those who rejoice or laugh, or go further than they were called upon.

The time comes when instruments of destruction fall themselves (Jeremiah 51:1-58). It may not seem like it at the time, but God is entirely in control of what is going to happen, and he will put limits on it.

That’s something we can rejoice about!

³There are some who say, “It’s not yet time to build houses. This city is the pot and we are the meat.” . . . ¹⁰By the sword you shall fall on the border of Israel. I will judge you! Then you will know that I am YHWH! ¹¹This city will not be the cooking pot for you, and you will not be flesh inside it. At the border of Israel I will judge you. ¹²And you will know that I am YHWH in whose statutes you have not walked, and whose judgments you have not carried out, but who have instead carried out the judgments of the nations around you. — Ezekiel 11:3, 10-12

It was hard for me to pick out the verses to quote for the devotional today. I’ve been doing some almost random reading before I do anything else in the morning. That led me to Ezekiel 23 for two devotionals. I had a reason to be looking at Ezekiel 23. This morning as I started looking around, I was about to pick something else, when I heard “Ezekiel 24” repeatedly. So I read Ezekiel 24. So why is the text from Ezekiel 11? That’s the interesting thing.

In Ezekiel 24 God uses a cooking pot with meat inside to provide a message of judgment. The nation of Judah is so corrupted that the pot has to be destroyed. God is going to pile wood under it until it is gone. It is so rusty and corrupted that only destruction will work to clean it up.

But I remembered another passage, this one in Ezekiel 11, in which a cooking pot is used in a different way. There, the inhabitants of Jerusalem, say that the city is the pot and they are the choice meat inside. The meat is preserved from the fire by the pot, and rather than being destroyed, it is properly developed and prepared for eating. God follows up by telling them that they have misunderstood the situation. There victims were the ones he preserved. They would not have to live through the exile. But the people who were claiming to be the choice pieces of meat in the pot would be thrown out, and would die on the borders of Israel.

It all looks simple—meat, pot, fire–but it’s really not so simple.

Now this isn’t a message of judgment today. It’s a message of relationship and discernment. It’s very easy to look at hardship in our lives and make the assumption that God is either angry with us, or is disciplining us for some reason. Now both of those are possibilities. In both Ezekiel 11 and 24 the people are under judgment. But if you read further into Ezekiel 24 you will see the story of Ezekiel’s suffering. His wife died, and he was not allowed to mourn. For a very long time he was unable to speak except when he spoke God’s word.

If I were Ezekiel, I think I would have felt rather put upon. That’s hardship! But God is neither disciplining Ezekiel, nor is he judging him. Ezekiel is doing what God wants him to do. What God is doing is teaching others through the suffering of his prophet. In fact, chapter 24 ends with the Lord telling Ezekiel that he (Ezekiel) will be a warning to the people, and then the frequent refrain: “they will know that I am YHWH.”

I’ve known some times of hardship, and I’ve known good times. Recently things have been getting better, but at the same time there are so many things that I would like to see get even better still. It’s the devil’s plan for me, and for all of us, not to see all the possibilities when we suffer hardship. That leads to discouragement. I’ve often felt myself limited to deciding between judgment and discipline. Have I done something that means that God is out to get me? Is God trying to correct me through this? I am bright enough to put something else in there. “In the world you will have tribulation” (John 16:33). The world is just that way.

But at the same time, I claim to be a teacher. If God can teach others through Ezekiel, do I have the right to say he can’t teach others through me?

Don’t let this keep you from seeing when God is trying to teach you something. It’s so much easier to see the faults of others than your own. It’s so much more gratifying to think you’re suffering for someone else’s sake than your own. But when hardship comes, don’t let the devil blind you to all the possibilities of what God is doing. Consider the flexibility of the meaning of the pot, the meat, and the fire in Ezekiel 11 and 24.

Discern, listen, and let God point you to the right application for you.

You have walked in your sister’s path,
And I will put her cup in your hand. — Ezekiel 23:31

What do you do when you see someone else fail? Perhaps it’s a coworker who doesn’t complete a project on schedule. Perhaps someone in your church has made a serious mistake or has fallen into sin. Perhaps it’s another church that has split up. Someone has fallen, and you hear about it. What do you do now?

Our verse this morning speaks of just such a situation. If you need something encouraging and uplifting this morning, don’t read Ezekiel 23. It’s one of those judgment chapters. God is speaking to Judah through the prophet Ezekiel. Nearly a century and a half before, the northern kingdom of Israel had fallen to the Assyrians. Now Judah was under attack. During the intervening time, Judah had behaved very much like Israel, and now while the Babylonians attacked, they were continuing that behavior.

There had not been universal mourning in Judah over the fall of the northern kingdom either. Israel and Judah were rivals, and unfortunately spent a good deal of their resources fighting one another. But the main issue of Ezekiel 23 is faithfulness to God, and in that, both kingdoms behaved in much the same way.

So what do you do when someone else fails? I can think of four major responses.

First, we treat it as a topic of gossip. A juicy rumor is passed around the workplace. We talk to one another, find as many people as we can, and collect more details. “Do you know what so-and-so did?” “No, what?” The chatter goes through the office. Nobody benefits from it, because everyone is too busy enjoying someone else’s failure.

Unfortunately, churches and families often work in the same way. Rumors are passed on and grow without anyone stopping to pray for the person in trouble, or to ask themselves, “Could that be me?”

Second, we treat it as a time for judgment. “That wicked person ______! People like that shouldn’t be allowed in the workplace/church/community. I hope he gets fired! I hope he goes to jail!” Again, we learn nothing from the event at all.

Third, we treat the downfall of others as an opportunity. “First Self-Righteous Church split!” says the pastor of a rival church. “I hope we can pick up some of the members that fall by the wayside!” And don’t think this is limited to churches. If your coworker fails, does that open up an opportunity for advancement to you? If your sister falls out with your parents, does that mean more attention and approval for you?

Fourth, let’s consider what our verse would suggest. God tells the people of Judah that because they have followed their sister’s path (the northern kingdom of Israel), they are coming to the same destination. The same thing is going to happen to them.

And that’s what we often fail to consider in our own lives. When somebody else falls, that fall is the result of a course of action, of a path they followed. Their destination was the place that path was headed. Now I’m not encouraging gossip here. Let’s endeavor not to hear any more bad about other people than we absolutely have to. But when the consequences are laid bare for all to see, instead of gossiping, judging, or gloating, we need to do a foot check—check carefully where our feet are, and where we’re going.

I try to do this when I hear of a church leader who has fallen into sexual sin or engaged in financial improprieties. Can I be tempted to the same sin? I would be very foolish to assume that I was immune from temptation! Am I doing anything that opens me to such temptation? If not, I can praise God for that, and pray for the person who is in trouble. If there is any weakness, any opening for sin in my current path, it’s time for a correction.

The same path will lead to the same destination every time. If you follow it, you’ll get to the destination. Check your path!

¹⁴But she committed even more fornication. She saw men sculpted on the wall, images of Chaldeans inscribed in vermilion. ¹⁵They had loincloths around their wastes and turbans on their heads. They all looked like high officials. They had the look of Babylonians, Chaldeans from the land of their birth. ¹⁶She was infatuated with them when she saw them, and she sent messengers to them in Chaldea. — Ezekiel 23:14-16

This short passage comes from a pretty heavy chapter in the Old Testament. Ezekiel 23 uses some pretty raunchy metaphors to describe the history of Israel and Judah. If it weren’t in the Bible we’d choke on some of the language. The passage I’ve quoted is pretty mild.

Now we’re used to the phrase “writing on the wall.” It means doom, trouble ahead. “The handwriting is on the wall” means that there’s not much time left. That comes from Daniel 5, in which Belshazzar is having a feast, and a hand appears and writes the words of doom on the wall. Many of us use the saying without any idea where it comes from.

But our passage talks about a different kind of writing on the wall. The Babylonians loved to inscribe images on their walls. They made inscriptions celebrating victories or other powerful deeds. Even Hammurabi’s famous law code which has helped us so much in understanding the ancient near east was inscribed not to inform people of the laws, but to tell people how important the lawgiver was.

Perhaps we could add to the classical saying, “Beware Greeks bearing gifts,” which goes back to Homer’s story of the Trojan war. The Greeks brought a gift of peace, a large wooden horse. Unfortunately for the Trojans it was hollow, and inside was another “gift”–Greek troops ready to attack Troy from the inside. We could add the saying “Beware walls bearing inscriptions.”

You can get an idea of the type of inscriptions I’m talking about at the Metropolitan Museum of Art page on Assyria. Now that’s Assyrian, not Babylonian. In general, the Babylonian was a bit more creative, or perhaps I’m just biased. This is when us moderns scratch our heads and wonder how someone could be so attracted by these inscriptions as to send messengers. That’s because this art isn’t in our style, and Babylon is this almost mythical place, which very few of us can place accurately on a map. (It’s in modern day Iraq.) But for Israel and Judah, this was the great, rich country, the folks with successful armies, economic and political power, and lots of prestige.

That’s what monumental inscriptions and reliefs are for, after all, is to present the person who makes the inscription look important and attractive, awe inspiring, or overpowering as desired. And the Assyrians and the Babylonians were pretty good at it.

We shouldn’t look down on the Israelites for their foolish attraction to this Mesopotamian art. Yes, it was wrong for them to abandon God in favor of the Assyrians and Babylonians. It was wrong, but it was understandable. You see, each one of us not only lives our lives; we also paint a picture. There’s the way we are, and the way we try to make ourselves appear. Integrity has to do with making those two similar. But that’s another topic.

Today I’m thinking about what we allow to attract us. The world paints a picture. The devil paints a picture. Each politician paints a picture. Retail stores paint pictures. I’m a businessman too. I try to paint a picture of what my publishing company is. Some of these pictures will be fairly accurate. I certainly hope mine is. But some of them will not be. Many of them will try to attract us away from what God wants us to do. They won’t do that by being blatantly ugly. They won’t announce, “He look! I’m inviting you to sin!”

They’ll offer you the power to do what you want to do, but they’ll lead you away from God in order to do it. The Israelites didn’t go to Assyria and Babylon asking to be conquered, driven into exile, and turned into slaves. They went there so they could be secure and prosperous and build better lives for themselves. But the inscriptions told a different story from the one the Israelites needed to see. Instead of security and prosperity they ended up with exile and slavery.

God offers spiritual sight to see beyond the inscriptions and sculptured reliefs that the enemy paints on the wall. Will you accept that sight and look?