the other goat

Word for today:
Ezekiel 31, 32

A glimpse of the afterlife is seen in our reading today. As we read along, we can be puzzled by some of the biblical terminology concerning the conditions of eternity. Let's look at Ezekiel 32:21 in three prominent Bible versions:

NIV: From within the grave the mighty leaders will say...
KJV: The strong among the mighty shall speak out of the midst of hell...
ESV: The mighty chiefs shall speak of out of the midst of Sheol...

Grave, hell, Sheol. It gets confusing. So let's forget about what we don't know and zero in on what we do know. What we learn from the Old Testament is that our bodies are dust, but our spirits are eternal:
Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it (Ecclesiastes 12:7).

Psalm 103:14 speaks of our finite bodies when it says:
For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust.

Three verses later, Psalm 103:17 speaks of our infinite spirits:
But the mercy of the LORD is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him, to such as keep his covenant.

Terminology aside, the Old Testament presents these truths:
1. Our bodies are finite--dust to dust.
2. Our spirits are infinite--everlasting to everlasting.
3. Some receive the everlasting mercy of the LORD--as seen in Psalm 103:17 (above).
4. Others will everlastingly bear their shame, as seen in our passage today:
There is Elam and all her multitude,
All around her grave,
All of them slain, fallen by the sword,
Who have gone down uncircumcised to the lower parts of the earth,
Who caused their terror in the land of the living;
Now they bear their shame with those who go down to the Pit.
(Ezekiel 32:24; see also Ezekiel 32:25, 30; 36:7; 44:13)

***

Why is the Old Testament so murky about the conditions of the afterlife? Because the real biblical question has never been about where bodies go, or where spirits go. The real question has always been, Where do the consequences of my sin go?

Where do the consequences--the real effects--of pride go?
What about the consequences--the ugly consequences--of hate?
And what about the consequences--the heart-breaking results--of self-centeredness?
Where do the consequences--the family-splitting consequences--of unforgiveness go?

The Old Testament foresees the day when the effects of our sin will be removed from amongst us. This is pictured by a goat over whose head the High Priest confessed all the sins of the children of Israel on the Day of Atonement. This scapegoat, symbolically bearing their sins, was then sent into the wilderness (see Leviticus 16:7-22).

While we've heard about the scapegoat, what we forget is that there were two goats on the Day of Atonement. Scripture teaches that sin is a real entity, a force which will not dissipate until its consequences are paid. Sin has never just gone away, vanished into thin air. In order for sin to go away, the other goat had to die.

As the Old Testament proceeded, we learn that the sacrificial goat or lamb was just a picture--a picture of a person who would pay what the Bible calls the wages of sin (1):
He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.(Isaiah 53:3-6)

The New Testament opens when the Lamb--the one who could pay the price--walks onto the pages of scripture:
The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, "Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!"
***

The real question has never been about our bodies or spirits in the by and by. Even if you live to be one hundred, it won't be long before you'll have those questions answered. The real question has always been about our sins in the now.

The real answer is that sins go away, if another pays a price that I can't pay.

But you can't have one goat without the other.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(1) Romans 6:23

nothing but a bunch of has-beens

(by Pastor Joe)

The Word for today: Ezekiel 29 & 30

mark this: Ezekiel 29:15 --
It shall be the most lowly of the kingdoms, and never again exalt itself above the nations. And I will make them so small that they will never again rule over the nations.

Egypt, in the Bible, is the equivalent of the Detroit Lions.
What do I mean?

Well, Detroit had a great start. They are one of the earliest teams in the NFL, with legendary players and a rich history that included 4 championships.

But in the past 52 seasons, they have made the playoffs 9 lousy times, winning only one playoff game. They are one of four teams that has yet to make it to the Superbowl (and the other three are expansion teams that came into the league in 1995 or later). In the past 52 years, they have the worst winning percentage of any team that's been in the league. More recently, they have lost 37 of their last 40 games, including the pitiful 2008 season when they won a grand total of zero games.
But they are still in the NFL.

Egypt, as seen in today's passage and verified in history, has many eerie similarities.

It too was an ancient culture with a rich history. For thousands of years, it was a dominant world power. They ruled the Nile and, because of that, the surrounding areas. That's no small potatoes. To put it this way, Egypt was a key player longer than Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome combined.

That is what makes the prophecy in 29:15 more striking. Ezekiel proclaims a bold prediction that no one of that time would believe. Egypt would remain a nation, but never again would it be any kind of a real power. It's kind of like a person from Tibet predicting that China would no longer be a world power -- presumptuous at best, if not utterly ridiculous.

But what of the prediction?

Suffice to say that Egypt has gone the way of the Detroit Lions. Instead of being the top dog, they, for the last 2500+ years since Ezekiel's time, have become a nation near the bottom of the standings. They have been subjugated by famous historical figures (i.e. Nebuchadnezzar, Alexander the Great, Augustus Caesar, Napoleon) and the not so famous. They, since the time of that prophecy, have been ruled by the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Muslim Arabs, the Ottomans, the French and the British. They are still a nation with a ton of history, but they have yet to "rule over" any nation. Don't count on it happening anytime soon.
In fact I see the Lions winning the Superbowl as far more likely.

What does this mean to us?
Well to start, it means that God's word is never void. Already in Ezekiel, we have seen radical prophecy against three superpowers (Babylon, Tyre & Egypt). In history, we have seen radical fulfillment of those predictions (see the blogs from yesterday and from May 5). And while we might not be able to always fully understand 100% of God's Word and promises, we can be 100% sure that "it is impossible for God to lie" (1) and "Scripture cannot be broken" (2).

Remember, the promises that God makes and keeps apply to both nations and individuals. God's Word is not only reliable for this life, it's the only thing 100% air-tight.

So the next time you see anything related to the Detroit Lions, remember Egypt, and more importantly, the God behind the Word.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(1) Hebrews 6:18 (2) John 10:35

far from Eden, at the tree of knowledge

The Word for today:
Ezekiel 27, 28

What is the origin of evil? Where does sin come from? We reflexively say that sin springs from pride, and we are right to say so.

So what is pride? My favorite Bible teacher, J. Vernon McGee, describes it this way:

Pride of heart is the attitude of a life that declares its ability to live without God.

Today we read of the prince/king of Tyre:
Son of man, say to the ruler of Tyre,
"In the pride of your heart you say, 'I am a god;
I sit on the throne of a god in the heart of the seas.'
But you are a man and not a god.
You were the model of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty.
You were in Eden, the garden of God;
You were anointed as a guardian cherub, for so I ordained you.
You were blameless in your ways fom the day you were created
till wickedness was found in you.
Your heart became proud on account of your beauty,
and you corrupted your wisdom because of your splendor." (1)

The Bible student, in an attempt to track down the genesis of evil, should always associate Ezekiel 28 with Isaiah chapter 14:
How you have fallen from heaven, O morning star, son of the dawn!
You have been cast down to the earth, you who once laid low the nations!
You said in your heart,
"I will ascend to heaven;
I will raise my throne above the stars of God;
I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly, on the utmost heights of the sacred mountain.
I will ascend above the tops of the clouds;
I will make myself like the Most High." (2)

As you read those passages, feel the mounting, galloping, rampant pride. Note the ingratitude towards God, who endowed his creation with such wisdom and beauty. Feel the insatiable desire to vault over every other, to stand alone at the pinnacle. But be careful, for you stand at the wellspring of sin. Don't fall in.

***

Perhaps a safer place to come to a knowledge of good and evil is in the shadow of a tree -- you know the one -- far from Eden and far from Tyre, where he himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness (3).

It all crystallizes and clarifies there, where things are seen for what they are:

Pride seeks to take God's place in heaven, and winds up in hell.
Love seeks to take your place on a cross, so that you'll wind up in heaven.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(1) excerpted from Ezekiel 28:1-19; (2) Isaiah 14:12-14; (3) 1 Peter 2:24

you label it

The Word for today:
Ezekiel 25, 26

Tyre is about to meet its fate.

Tyre was a great commercial center, the seafaring center of the Mediterranean world. Tyre owned the waves and the sea lanes, or so they thought.

But God had long ago made a promise. The promise is embedded in a covenant he made with Abraham:

I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you;
I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you. (Genesis 12:2-3)

The covenant is, of course, a prophecy of Christ. (Abraham has been no direct blessing to me, but Christ--who came through Abraham genealogically--has saved my life.)

We rejoice over the blessing promised in this pivotal scripture. But we forget that there is a flip side to the covenant:

I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse.

Every part of the Bible is in perfect agreement with every other part of the Bible. So, going from Genesis all the way to John, let's look at another pivotal scripture which has an often forgotten flip side:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.
Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. (John 3:16-18)

The Bible presents a picture of the blessed and the unblessed,

the saved and the unsaved,

the forgiven and the unforgiven.

We can be lulled by lies--emanating from our culture and from unbiblical churches--into believing that Jesus is a blessing to all people. Scripture teaches that he is not. Scripture teaches that he is a curse and a condemnation to all who will oppose him.

Just ask Tyre. Because Tyre exulted over Israel's destruction, she brought a curse upon herself:

"Son of man, Tyre has rejoiced over the fall of Jerusalem, saying, 'Ha! She who controlled the rich trade routes to the east has been broken, and I am the heir!'
"Therefore, I am your enemy, O Tyre, and I will bring many nations against you, like the waves of the sea crashing against your shoreline. They will destroy the walls of Tyre and tear down its towers. I will scrape away its soil and make it a bare rock! It will be a place for fishermen to spread their nets. They will plunder all your riches and merchandise and break down your walls. They will destroy your lovely homes and dump your stones and timbers and even your dust into the sea. (Ezekiel 26:2-5, 12)

The prediction of Tyre's ruin in chapters 26-28 has been fulfilled with literal accuracy. Just as Ezekiel predicted, Nebuchednezzar conquered and destroyed the city. When he did, some of the people from Tyre escaped to an island and built a new city there. Three hundred years later, Alexander the Great, desiring to conquer this island city, scraped the dust and rubble of ancient Tyre and dumped it into the sea, building a causeway to the island nearly a half mile out. Thus the remains of ancient Tyre are in the sea, and the ancient city remains as bare as the top of a rock.

***

Just as the covenants are a blessing to some and a curse to others, so the gospel of Jesus Christ is salvation to some and condemnation to others.

The Good News is not good news to the person who will not go to the cross of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of his sins. In fact, the Bible teaches that what is life to those who trust Christ is death to those who will not:

Wherever we go God uses us to tell others about the Lord and to spread the Good News like a sweet perfume. But this fragrance is perceived differently by those being saved and by those perishing. To those who are perishing we are a fearful smell of death and doom. But to those who are being saved we are a life-giving perfume (2 Corinthians 2:14-16).

I bring news. For those who will receive it, it's the Good News. For those who will not receive it, it's their obituary.

I bring a bottle of fragrance. You label it.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Don't you cry."

Ezekiel's wife dies/Buesking

The Word for today:
Ezekiel 24

mark this: Ezekiel 24:16-17
"Son of man, behold, I am about to take the delight of your eyes away from you at a stroke; yet you shall not mourn or weep, nor shall your tears run down. Sigh, but not aloud; make no mourning for the dead."

How could God do such a thing? First he told Ezekiel that he was taking away his wife--the desire of his eyes, the delight of his soul.(Ezekiel 24:16, 21)

And then God added what sounds like the cruelest command:
"Ezekiel, don't you cry."

The people asked what in the world was going on. We ask the same:
"Won't you tell us what these things have to do with us?" (Ezekiel 24:19)

So God told them that through what appears to be the unjust death of an innocent person, he would make himself known:
"(This) will be a sign to them, and they will know that I am the LORD." (Ezekiel 24:24, 27)

***

Promised long before, on a cross yet to come, God would remorselessly judge the desire of  his own eyes, the delight of  his own soul. Seen in the context of the cross, God's cruel command to Ezekiel is actually a picture and prophecy of a heart which so loved the world that he (crucified) his one and only (1); a heart which did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all (2).

Whenever we begin to wonder what these things have to do with us, we must take our questions--about the Bible, about life and death, about God--to the cross of Jesus Christ. Because that's where God made his whole heart known.

Ezekiel's wife served as a picture of the pitiless judgment that Jesus, bearing our sin, would undergo. Rest assured that, having portrayed his death, she will re-enact his resurrection as well.

So don't you cry.  You'll see them again.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(1) see John 3:16 and Isaiah 53:10; (2) Romans 8:32

for the love of God

The Word for today:
Ezekiel 23

A. And so we reach the infamous 23rd chapter of Ezekiel. The story is simple. There are two sisters with hard-to-pronounce names. One represents the northern kingdom (called 'Samaria' here, after its capital city.) The other sister represents the southern kingdom (called 'Jerusalem' here, after its capital.)

Q. OK, two oddly-named sisters who allegorically represent the northern and southern kingdoms. Nothing that needs to be wrapped in plain brown paper yet.

A. Both of the sisters are prostitutes.

Q. Oh.

A. Not only that. These two take the concept of prostitution to new, ever-lower levels.

Q. Oh. Well, why's that in the Bible?

A. So we'll stop being prostitutes ourselves.

Q. I find that offensive.

A. So does God. That's why chapter 23 is in there. The Bible's primary concern is our relationship with God, and so it uses words that define relationship--words like husband, wife, bride, bridegroom. If a positive relationship with God is expressed in terms of a marriage, then a relationship gone bad is expressed in terms of spiritual adultery or spiritual prostitution.

Q. So it's just spiritual adultery or prostitution, it's not real adultery or prostitution.

A. To God it's real. God is Spirit (1), so spiritual adultery is real enough to break his heart.

Q. I don't want that.

A. Prostitutes 'love' for money. If we're in this for something, anything, other than God himself, then we're no different than the two sisters in Ezekiel 23. For the love of God, stay with him. Stay with him, for the love of God.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(1) John 4:24

you'll find him where things were first broken

The Word for today:
Ezekiel 22

mark this: Ezekiel 22:30
So I sought for a man among them who would make a wall, and stand in the gap before Me on behalf of the land, that I should not destroy it; but I found no one.

I was 15 when the walls broke down and the enemy entered.

I remember a certain girl. I thought she was the world itself.

I remember a race. I cheated to win, because I thought the girl in the sentence above would like me if I were to win.

I remember a phone call. A friend was run over as he walked home. He was the other guard on the Emmet Belknap basketball team. He was the best pure shooter I have ever seen. Then he wasn't anymore.

I remember a swim meet. We'd driven through the snow all the way to Jamestown. I won a green ribbon for the breastroke. But I lost the ribbon, or so I'd thought. Two weeks later, when a teammate pulled his towel out of his gym bag, a green ribbon fell to the ground: 'YMCA District Championships / 50-meter breaststroke.' Another boy picked it off the ground. "Jeff, you've never raced breaststroke."

Maybe he wanted to impress a girl. People have been known to stoop that low.

When I was 15, I walked out of the 'Y' after a basketball game and was slugged in the face. I got off the ground and fought. Charley wanted to fight me because I was white. Charley had failed two grades and we thought of him as a giant. Charley unhinged my jaw that night.

When I was 15, it was 1968. I remember the race riots and the war and the protests and the assassinations. We started to hear about drugs. For a while it was far away. But when the girl in the sentences above wasn't ever seen anymore unless she was seen with the pot-smoking crowd, it had moved right in to my town.

It was as if, in one year, the world had broken. My city was broken. Friends were broken. I was broken. Death had entered. Sin and death had marched right in through the broken promises, the broken principles, the broken hearts.

***

The city was broken far before I became aware of it in 1968. My Dad was born in 1914. He was 15 in 1929, the hinge year between the Roaring 20's and the Great Depression, which would stretch for a dozen broken years.

God, in Ezekiel, looked down on a broken city. He looked for someone who would stand in the breach, the gap in the wall. But he could not find anybody. Because they were all broken, too. Nobody--no not one (1)--could fill the gap.

So God found the solution in himself. There, at his right hand, was the man who would repair the breach. But it would be costly. Fixing what was broken would break the man himself. And, as the law demanded, when the man became sin for us, God for a time would sever his own right hand (2).

When I was about 45, I found the same man God had found. You keep looking and you'll find him too. You'll find him where things were first broken.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(1) Psalm 14:2-3; (2) see 2 Corinthians 5:21 and Matthew 5:30 and Psalm 22:1