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Reading Ezekiel 7:1-27 where God continues to issue oracles of judgment against the land, speaking even of the day of God's wrath on which it will be too late to repent. Visit wwutt.com for all our videos!
There is a day of judgment that is coming. And when that day comes, it will be too late. No one will be able to repent on that day. So the call to turn from your sin to the Lord Jesus Christ is now, when we understand the text.
This is When We Understand the Text, a daily Bible commentary to help encourage your time in the Word. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday we feature New Testament Study, an Old Testament book on Thursday, and our Q &A on Friday.
Now here's your teacher, Pastor Gabe.
Thank you, Becky. In our study of the book of Ezekiel, we come to chapter 7 this week. In chapter 6 and 7, Ezekiel has been issuing oracles to the land. God will bring judgment upon the land, and in doing so, that will afflict the people as well.
In chapter 7, we have this theme of your time has come, or the day is near. You will hear that come up a couple of times in this chapter. And unless we flee to Christ for the forgiveness of our sins, there is no one who will escape from the judgment of God.
Let me go ahead and read here verses 1 through 13 to start off. Hear the word of the Lord. The word of the Lord came to me, and you, O son of man, thus says the Lord God to the land of Israel. An end.
The end has come upon the four corners of the land. 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, then you will know that I am the Lord. Thus says the Lord God, disaster after disaster, behold, it comes.
An end has come. The end has come. It has awakened against you. Behold, it comes. Your doom has come to you, O inhabitant of the land. The time has come. The day is near, a day of tumult and not of joyful shouting on the mountains.
Now I will soon pour out my wrath upon you, and spend my anger against you, and judge you according to your ways. And I will punish you for all your abominations, and my eye will not spare, nor will I have pity.
I will punish you according to your ways, while your abominations are in your midst. Then you will know that I am the Lord who strikes. Behold, the day, behold, it comes. Your doom has come. The rod has blossomed.
Pride has budded. Violence has grown up into a rod of wickedness. None of them shall remain, nor the abundance, nor their wealth, neither shall there be preeminence among them. The time has come. The day has arrived.
Let not the buyer rejoice, nor the seller mourn, for wrath is upon all their multitude. For the seller shall not return to what he has sold while they live. For the vision concerns all their multitude.
It shall not turn back, and because of his iniquity, none can maintain his life. Now let's stop there for a moment. What comes up next is a trumpet blasting once again. We've heard this before in Ezekiel.
Remember that God has appointed the prophet as a watchman on the wall. And if you remember this theme of the watchman, the watchman sees the enemy coming and sounds the alarm so that the people may respond to the danger that is coming upon them.
If the people defend themselves or if they take action to flee from the danger that is coming, then they will have saved their own lives. But if the watchman sees the enemy coming and does not sound the alarm, then not only will the people be taken away when the sword comes upon them, but even the watchman will be responsible for everyone's life that is lost.
So Ezekiel has been positioned as this watchman. He is sounding the alarm to Israel. The judgment of God is coming. Turn from your ways. Now this particular chapter speaks as if the disaster has already come upon them.
And this is an oracle as though to say, like I said, the theme that comes up repeatedly here, your time has come. It's now too late for you for the judgment of God has come upon you. And this is given so that it would strike fear in the hearts of the people who would see it, who would hear it.
They would come to understand my time is up. I did not repent. And now it's too late. Now the danger is upon me. Now the judgment has come upon me and there's no way for me to turn back. Disaster after disaster, behold, it comes.
An end has come. The end has come. It is awakened against you. Behold, it comes. You hear that again and again. Verses five, six, and seven. Your doom has come to you, O inhabitant of the land. The time has come.
The day is near, a day of tumult and not of joyful shouting on the mountains. Now, so far as we've been through seven chapters of Ezekiel, it's been all of this bad news. We've had these constant warnings of judgment that is coming.
Are there any high points in Ezekiel? Well, certainly there are. And we've already heard promises of a remnant that will be spared and be restored. But these warnings of judgment are very important because better that you hear them now and even hear them repeatedly, if you must, than to be swept away in the judgment once it comes and perish forever under the wrath of God.
Ezekiel is a long book. And most of it, until we get to the description of the temple toward the end, most of it is like this. It is that warning of judgment that is coming upon you. And there's even going to be a list of actions and consequences.
If the person does this, then they will receive this. But if a person does not turn from their wicked way, then they're going to receive judgment. And there's going to be some very colorful descriptions of just how wicked Israel has been as well.
We haven't even gotten to that part yet. So it does get darker even as we continue on with Ezekiel. So why would we spend so much time studying a book that just continues to preach gloom and doom again so that you would not be swept away in it, so that you would heed the warning to turn from your sin?
You can spare reading this book. I can't remember how long it took me to read this out loud in the Bible recordings that I've done. I think it's four hours or something like that, reading it out loud word for word to the very end.
So you could spare listening to this for four hours and hear these continual warnings about the judgment that will come upon those who do not repent of their sin. It would be better for you to listen to that for four hours than to be swept away in judgment and perish for an eternity, the wrath of God poured out on you forever and ever.
And you hear how total and final this judgment is when it comes upon those who persist in their rebellion and their disobedience. The Lord even says, 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, then you will know that I am the Lord. Everyone who is perishing in hell knows that God is God. There are no atheists in hell, none. They know that God is real, that he is righteous, and he is pouring out his righteous wrath on them forever.
And his eye is going to have no pity on them. That statement, and you know, it's something of an anachronism, of course, because God doesn't literally have eyes. He's not a human being with eyes. The God man is Jesus Christ seated at the right hand of the father.
But God, as God, does not have hands and eyes and feet and a head and some of these characteristics, some of these features that he will be described with when we read about this in the Old Testament.
But it's simply language that is used for us to understand how God works, how he operates. When it says that, my eye will not spare you, it means that the Lord is not going to withhold the judgment that we deserve if we persist in our sin and do not flee to Christ to be forgiven and cleansed of all unrighteousness.
God is so righteous and so good, he's not going to let sin go unpunished. And there are a lot of Christians who will soften any idea or concept or teaching of the judgment of God. Well, God is gracious.
He is loving. He's merciful. He wouldn't do anything like that. God is indeed gracious. It's why he gave his son to die on the cross for us so that we will not perish in judgment, but we will have everlasting life if we turn to the Lord Jesus Christ.
We will live, we will be forgiven, and we will live forever with God. That is God's gracious, loving hand extended to us that we would not perish in judgment, but through his son be forgiven and live with him forever.
But just because we understand that God is gracious and loving, and we see that grace and love demonstrated in the cross of Christ, that does not mean that all of the judgment gets erased. If there is no judgment, then Christ is not a savior, because what's he saving us from if there is no judgment?
God's wrath will be poured out on the wicked. God's wrath is going to be poured out on people who thought they were good and thought they were Christians and claimed to be, but persisted in sin and wickedness and rebellion and attacked the church and the people of God.
There are people on the political left and on the political right who are like this. People on the left who, of course, hate anything that is truly biblical Christianity. People on the right who think that they are holier than thou, and they will even attack the church because you are not meeting all of my rules, the man-made traditions that they create and establish.
There are a lot of people who think that God is on their side and will hear on that day, as Jesus said in Matthew chapter 7, depart from me, you worker of lawlessness, I never knew you. So right now we are given these warnings to turn from our sin to the Lord Christ before judgment comes.
Now here's the sounding of the trumpet as we continue on here. We'll go on in verse 14. They have blown the trumpet and made everything ready, but none goes to battle for my wrath is upon all their multitude.
Trumpet blasts in the Bible can have various meanings. There can be, you know, it can be a sound of victory. It can be a battle cry, but it's also a sound of warning. And with regards to the watchman on the wall, that's exactly what the trumpet would symbolize.
It would, it would be an indication of something that is coming. So take action now here. It says they have blown the trumpet and made everything ready, but none goes to battle. Nobody's taking action for my wrath is upon all their multitude.
The sword is without pestilence and famine are within he who is in the field dies by the sword and him who is in the city famine and pestilence devour. Earlier, God had said to Ezekiel that he was to cut his hair and he was to burn a third of it here and a third of it there and a third of it there.
And that was to represent the different ways in which judgment was going to come upon Israel. There was the sword famine and pestilence. And so here's exactly those judgments that you see it in verse 15.
He who is in the field dies by the sword, him who is in the city by famine and the pestilence devours verse 16. And if any survivors escape, they will be on the mountains like doves of the valleys, all of them moaning each one over his iniquity.
No one is going to escape the judgment when it comes. Even if it seems like you've fled away from that, which would devour, you're going to be consumed by your own guilt because you have not turned from your sin.
All hands are feeble and all knees turn to water. That's verse 17. Going on to 18, they put on sackcloth and horror covers them. Shame is on all faces and baldness on all their heads, shaving their heads in mourning.
Like shaving themselves, covering themselves in sackcloth and ashes because they are mourning before the Lord. They are mourning over the consequences of their sin, but not to repent of their sin. And Jesus described hell as a place that was full of weeping and gnashing of teeth.
It's full of people who are weeping over their sin, but not actually repentant of their sin. They're weeping over the consequences, but they don't actually turn from their sin to repent before God. Whatever our hardness of heart would be in life if we don't repent, it is just a judicial, a further judicial hardening of the heart to be cast into hell.
And a person continues in that state for eternity. If you were not repentant in life, you're not going to be repentant in hell either. So verse 19, they cast their silver into the streets and their gold is like an unclean thing.
Their silver and gold are not able to deliver them in the day of the wrath of the Lord. They cannot satisfy their hunger or fill their stomachs with it, for it was the stumbling block of their iniquity.
I've been teaching in the book of Revelation on Sunday evening at our church, and I've been showing that there are parallels between some of the things that we read about in Ezekiel and some of the things that are demonstrated in Revelation.
And where we are in Revelation right now is in chapter 8. You have the sounding of the trumpets, which again are soundings of warning. But each one of the judgments that are listed there, connected with each one of those trumpets, they are spiritual judgments.
And the people who don't turn from their sin, the wicked who are not in Christ Jesus, the spiritual judgments that they experience are spiritual famine, a spiritual being slain by the sword, spiritual pestilence.
They try to find satisfaction in the world and cannot find it. And that's part of the judgment that comes upon them. The world won't save them. Their own government won't save them. Food and water won't save them.
None of it will ever actually satisfy them. They will still perish under the judgment of God. The only way to be saved is to turn to the Lord Christ. So here, what's being described in Ezekiel, this is a real judgment that's coming on the people.
It's not just a spiritual judgment, but there is a spiritual judgment connected with it. They cannot satisfy their hunger or fill their stomachs, for it was the stumbling block of their iniquity, their silver and gold, which they thought was their life's meaning and purpose.
It's not giving them any satisfaction. It's not saving them from the wrath of the Lord, just as it will be upon all of the wicked. Everything that you look to in the world for your satisfaction is never going to fill you.
It's never going to save you. God's judgment will come. The things that the people turned to, thinking that it would save them, it didn't save them, and they have perished in their iniquity. Going on in verse 20, his beautiful ornament they used for pride, and they made their abominable images and their detestable things of it.
Therefore, I make it an unclean thing to them, and I will give it into the hands of false foreigners for prey and to the wicked of the earth for spoil, and they shall profane it. I will turn my face from them, and they shall profane my treasured place.
Robbers shall enter and profane it. Those things that the Lord gave, they turned into detestable things, and now it is by those detestable things that they will perish. Here's the remainder of the chapters.
We kind of come to the end of our time here. Verses 23 to 27. Forge a chain, for the land is full of bloody crimes, and the city is full of violence. I will bring the worst of the nations to take possession of their houses.
I will put an end to the pride of the strong, and their holy places shall be profaned. When anguish comes, they will seek peace, but there shall be none. Disaster comes upon disaster. Rumor follows rumor.
They seek a vision from the prophet while the law perishes from the priest and counsel from the elders. The king mourns. The prince is wrapped in despair, and the hands of the people of the land are paralyzed by terror.
According to their way, I will do to them, and according to their judgments, I will judge them, and they shall know that I am the Lord. Again, even in judgment, everyone will know that the Lord is God.
And beloved, the only way to be saved from the judgment that would come upon anyone for their iniquity and for their sin is to turn to the Lord Jesus Christ. Whatever nation you live in, the majority of my listeners are going to be in the United States, but whatever nation you live in, the judgment of God is coming against it.
You don't live in a righteous nation. It will eventually fall, and Scripture guarantees that. And the only way to be saved from the judgment that comes—the only way for you and your neighbor and anyone else—is to turn to Christ.
Everything of this world will eventually perish in fire. Jesus Christ died on the cross for our sins. He rose again from the dead so that whoever believes in him will not perish under the judgment of God.
But in him, we have salvation. We have the forgiveness of our sins. We have reconciliation with God. We have deliverance from the wrath of God. We have peace with God, a place to be with God forever. We have everlasting life in Jesus Christ our Lord.
That's a reminder that you need. And it is a message your neighbor desperately needs. Heavenly Father, help us to heed the warning that the judgment of God is coming. The wrath of God is coming against the sons of disobedience, the Scripture tells us.
Against such things, the wrath of God is coming—Colossians 3 .6. And the only way to be saved from judgment is by faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. Thank you that he died on the cross for our sins, that he rose again from the dead.
Help us to continue to look to him every day, away from sin, to Christ, to receive forgiveness and walk in righteousness. God, help us to hate our sin, that we would stop going back to it again and again.
And instead, we come to Christ again and again to be satisfied, filled, and cleansed. It's in Jesus' name that we pray.
Amen. This has been When We Understand the Text with Pastor Gabriel Hughes. For all of our podcasts, episodes, videos, books, and more, visit our website at www .utt .com. If you'd like to submit a question to this broadcast, or just send us a comment, email whenweunderstandthetext at gmail .com.
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