S5: Day 249: Ezekiel 22–24

0:00Hey, you're listening to a year in the Bible with Daily Grace. This is Shelby and CJ. We are walking you through the book of Ezekiel, chapter by chapter, bit by bit. We hope that you will follow and subscribe wherever you're watching or listening. If you're listening on a podcast app, just know that you can also watch. I need to. It's pretty fun. Okay. So Ezekiel 22 through 24, where are we at in the book of Ezekiel right now, CJ? So in Ezekiel 22, we have more judgment. The Lord calls upon Ezekiel to literally judge Judah for its sins before insisting that exile is coming without a doubt. And the sins described in chapter 22 after you with social justice and sexual sin, which two things that are very important in the Old Testament, two things that are very important to priests. And again, Ezekiel is a priest and he's also a prophet. And in Ezekiel 22 15, we read, I will scatter you among the nations and disperse you through

1:02the lands. So again, exile is coming. Then we get to Ezekiel 22, 26, which says something interesting. It says, Jerusalem's priests do violence to my instruction and profane my holy things. They make no distinction between the holy and the common. And they do not explain the difference between the clean and the unclean. If we reach way back to Leviticus, that's right. I can reach back. I can remember. We spent a lot of time on chapters in Leviticus 8 through 10 when we talked about how the priest is to distinguish between the holy and the common, the clean and the unclean and is supposed to explain those distinctions to the people. So here, the priests have not been doing that. The priests have not been doing what God has asked of them in Leviticus and that is part of the reason, while everything is so upside down and Israel is not doing the right thing and which eventually leads to their exile. And then Ezekiel will go on to criticize Jerusalem's princes or their royalty for leading the people astray. He'll go on to criticize Jerusalem's prophets for being lying prophets who are giving false

2:05visions in leading Israel astray or Judah astray. And then in Ezekiel 23, we have another really heavy brutal chapter. I mentioned when we went through Ezekiel 16 that there are probably two places which are the heaviest in Ezekiel. I think that's chapter 16 and I think that's probably chapter 23. For those of you who read and are following long, chapter by chapter, you probably know what I mean. And well, that brings us to our takeaway. And in Ezekiel 22, 30, we read, I searched for a man among them who would repair the wall and stand in the gap before me on behalf of the land so that I might not destroy it, but I found no one. So I have poured out my indignation on them and consumed them with the fire of my fury. I have brought their conduct down on their own heads. This is the declaration of the Lord God. In other words, there is no intermediary. There's no one who stands in between God and man.

3:08We think about in the Old Testament, we think about Moses after the golden calf. He stood in between God and the people and he said, Lord, if you're going to destroy these people, block me out of your book of life as well. We think of Daniel in, I think Daniel 9, if memory serves, where he prays on behalf of all of the people and he kind of stands in the gap between God and his people. And God is looking for someone like that and he says there's no one and I'm just going to mow through Israel and judge Israel for all of their sins. And I think for me, this reminds me of, well, this has me asking the question, well, who's going to go before them? Who's going to be the intermediary? And of course, those of us who have read the New Testament, we know that that intermediary is Christ. Christ is the one who stands before God and before us and goes before us as our great high priest. So now when the Lord looks at us, he actually sees Christ. And again, somehow Ezekiel, even though it's all of these foreign images and these strange metaphors and all of these brutal judgments, we actually see Christ as we think about it

4:12for a second. And we see that the Christian life really brings these texts to life. Yeah, it absolutely does. For me, when I was reading through these chapters today, the verses that kept coming to mind were Romans 5, 8 through 9. And they really, these verses are already so meaningful, but took on an even deeper meaning in light of the chapters that we read today. So let me read these verses. It says, but God proves his own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. How much more than since we have now been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from wrath? And so in those verses, you see that it was God's love that sent Christ. You see that we have been justified by his blood and saved from his wrath through Christ. And so that verse on its own, very meaningful. When you're reading it in the context of something like a Zekial just explodes with meaning.

5:13And so that was my takeaway from today. Those are the verses that I'm meditating on. Thank you so much for walking us through another difficult section of a Zekial CJ. We're going to continue throughout this book. We're now halfway. I thought we were halfway. I think we're halfway, that's all right. We're halfway now. And so we're going to continue in the second half of a Zekial starting in the next episode. Great.