Friday, November 3, 2017

November 3

Ezekiel 7:1-9:11; Hebrews 5:1-14; Psalm 105:1-15; Proverbs 26:28

These were the words that greeted me as I sat down to read: “Now the end is upon you, and I will send my anger upon you; I will judge you according to your ways, and I will punish you for all your abominations. And my eye will not spare you, nor will I have pity, but I will punish you for your ways, while your abominations are in your midst” (Ez. 7:3-4). Whew! What a way to start the reading. I happened to be reading this in the same room as my husband and I said to him, with no small amount of weariness in my tone, “Sheesh! I’m getting a little tired of the prophets. I feel like we’ve been reading them for months!” Maybe you feel that way, too. (In truth, we started with Isaiah on September 8, so we have been working our way through for a while.) I think today all the doom and gloom of the prophets was starting to get to me. Like the Israelites, I felt like saying to them, “Say something positive! I’m tired of all your nay-saying!”

But then I kept reading and came across this verse: “And he brought me into the inner courts of the house of the LORD. And behold, at the entrance of the temple of the LORD…were about twenty-five men, with their backs to the temple of the LORD, and their faces toward the east, worshiping the sun toward the east” (Ez. 8:16).  Did you catch that? Their backs are toward God’s temple and they are worshipping the sun. God says to Ezekiel, rhetorically, “Have you seen this, O son of man? Is it too light a thing for the house of Judah to commit the abominations they commit here…”(vs. 17). This has me greatly convicted. Here I am, complaining about the doom and gloom and wishing God could let up a little, but the truth is, I’m minimizing their sin and almost accusing God of unjustly disciplining them. The truth is, Israel had lots of chances but they made LOTS of bad choices. They turned their backs on God and worshiped a false god instead. God takes sin very seriously and he cannot overlook their abominations. It is no small thing, what they have done.

It got me thinking about us today. In what ways do we turn our backs on God in favor of facing the sun? Perhaps we don’t even know it – we just want to feel the sunshine – and we don’t realize that our actions are putting us in direct opposition to God.

What I’m about to say next may not be popular, but I feel it should be said. There are lots of ways in which we, even as Christians, turn our backs on God in pursuit of something else. The first thing that came to my mind was pornography. We may feel like we’re not harming anyone, that it’s just this one time, that we just want a little bit of the “sunshine,” but the truth is, we are putting ourselves in direct defiance to God’s plan and desire for us. We are turning our backs and worshiping something else.

This happens in less obvious ways as well. For example, maybe we fudge the truth at work. Our boss asks why the contract with the new client hasn’t come across his desk yet and we answer that the client is slow in responding but perhaps the real truth is that we forgot to email it over. We face the sun, while our back is to God’s temple. Or perhaps we get together with friends and during conversation, it comes up that another friend, not present, is struggling financially. We judge him and accuse him of making foolish decisions, while not actually knowing the whole story. Maybe we even spread this news to others as we go about our week, feeling smug about our own smart investments and hard work. Our backs are to God and his ways, while we worship the sun.

Let us not require the chastising words of Ezekiel in our own lives; may God have mercy on us as we strive to face him fully and turn our backs on sin and idolatry.


- Esther McCurry 


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1 comment:

  1. Thank you for your good and honest post, Esther. So true.

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