Ezra Part 3 and Ezekiel Part 1

Kongsvinger Lutheran Church

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Understanding Divine Service Part 4

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Let's pray and we're going to get into our study. Lord Jesus, as we open your word, we humbly ask that you would help us through your

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Holy Spirit to understand what you have revealed there. Apart from you, we can do nothing, not even draw our next breath.

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And so we pray that as we draw in the breath of your word, that through the Holy Spirit, you would help us to rightly understand what has been revealed.

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Through the power of the Holy Spirit, enliven us to bear fruit in keeping with repentance, in love towards you, and in mercy, grace, forgiveness, and love towards others.

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We ask in Jesus' name, amen. All right, we have been working our way through the book of Ezra, and this is going to seem like a complete letdown.

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In fact, I'm going to make Joshua's life complicated because this is going to be one of those studies where we finish one book and dive into another.

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And the resolve here, when we last left off in the book of Ezra, Ezra has confronted the

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Jews coming out of exile who have married pagan women.

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It's not that they're merely foreigners, that's not the problem. The problem is that these women are believers in false gods, and they're worshipers of false gods, and they're having children with them.

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And that's a big problem, especially in light of how inheritance works, and the fact that the

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Jews just spent 70 years in exile because of pagan idolatrous worship, and they've just laid a foundation for themselves that would result in a similar, if not worse, punishment from God, because these things just kind of take off like wildfire.

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And you'll note that in exile, God has to go through extreme measures in order to basically completely undermine the false prophets and the false teachers, and to get out of their mouth the taste that they have for worshiping false gods.

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And not everybody has learned the lesson yet, but now with the revival of the hearing, and the reading, and the understanding of God's word, now they can be confronted with their sin.

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And so I'm gonna reread a portion of 10 here, and then we're legitimately gonna finish up the book of Ezra, and then we're gonna dive into the book of Ezekiel.

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So buckle up for Ezekiel, it's the best way I can put it. The more I'm studying

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Ezekiel, currently it's like my favorite book of the Bible, just because of all the really most interesting insights

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I'm seeing in it. So here's what we read in Ezra. While Ezra prayed, made confession, weeping and casting himself down before the house of God, a very great assembly of men, women and children, gathered to him out of Israel, for the people they wept bitterly.

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And then Shechaniah, the son of Jehal, of the sons of Elam, addressed

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Ezra, we have broken faith with our God, and have married foreign women from the peoples of the land, but even now there is hope for Israel in spite of this.

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I like his attitude. Yeah, we've done wrong, but we don't intend to continue in that, right?

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Therefore, let us make a covenant with our God, and put away all these wives and their children, according to the counsel of my

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Lord, and of those who tremble at the commandment of our God, and let it be done according to the law.

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What I do find fascinating is that one of the things that's really not on the table is let's evangelize our pagan unbelieving spouses, women, and see if we can convert them.

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That generally doesn't work. And by the way, conversions via compulsion are not conversions.

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You'll note that plenty of person has bent the knee to Islam in order to save their bacon, okay?

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The idea of Islam is you need to submit, okay? They're like the kings of submit, okay?

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In fact, that's what Islam means. It means you need to be in submission to Allah. And so you bend the knee, you say that Allah is

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God, and that Muhammad is his prophet, and you deny Christ and all these other things, otherwise you're gonna die, okay?

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As Christians, we say, okay, I'm gonna die, right? That's the right answer, by the way, because the worst thing that can happen to you is not the first death.

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The worst thing that can happen to you is the second. So here, you'll note that compulsory conversion to Judaism is not on the table because that's not how conversion works, right?

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So arise, it's your task, and we are with you, so be strong and do it. So then Ezra rose, made the leading priests and Levites and all of Israel take an oath that they would do as had been said, so they took the oath.

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Ezra withdrew from before the house of God and went to the chamber of Jehoanan, the son of Eliashib, where he spent the night, neither eating bread nor drinking water, for he was mourning over the faithlessness of the exiles.

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And a proclamation was made throughout Judah and Jerusalem to all of the returned exiles that they should assemble at Jerusalem and that if anyone did not come within three days, this is again,

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I'm rereading this now, by order of their officials and the elders, all of his property should be forfeited and he himself banned from the congregation of the exiles.

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Mandatory excommunication for anybody who doesn't show up for the meeting. It's that serious, right? So then all the men of Judah and Benjamin assembled at Jerusalem within the three days.

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It was the ninth month on the 20th day of the month and all the people sat in the open square before the house of God, trembling because of this matter and because of the heavy rain.

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And Ezra the priest stood up and said to them, you have broken faith and married foreign women and so increased the guilt of Israel.

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Now then, make confession to Yahweh, the God of your fathers, and do his will.

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Separate yourselves from the peoples of the land and from the foreign wives. Then all the assembly answered with a loud voice, it is so, we must do as you have said.

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But the people are many and it is a time of heavy rain, we cannot stand in the open, nor is this a task for one day or for two, for we have greatly transgressed in this matter.

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Let our officials stand for the whole assembly, let all of our cities who have taken foreign wives come appoint times with the elders and judges of every city until the fierce wrath of our

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God over this matter is turned away from us. Only Jonathan the son of Asahel, Jehaziel the son of Tikva opposed this and Meshulam and Shabbatai the

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Levite supported them. And I would note what's at stake is more than just the nation of Israel, what's at stake is the integrity of the line of the

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Messiah. Just kind of sort this out, this is part of the reason why this is so dangerous on their part.

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Mixing with pagan women, as I said last week, the hot pagan chicks, that you literally run the risk of like destroying the bloodline of Christ in the midst of all of this.

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What's at stake is the forgiveness of our sins and the son of David.

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So then the returned exiles did so. As were the preselected men, heads of fathers' houses according to their fathers' houses, each of them designated by name.

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On the first day of the 10th month, they sat down to examine the matter. And by the first day of the first month, they had come to the end of all the men who had married foreign women.

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And get this, they wrote their names down. Okay, so here's the roster of the sinful.

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So now there were found some of the sons of the priests who had married foreign women, priests. Messiah, Eliezer, Jarib, Kedaliah, some of the sons of Jeshua, the sons of Jehoshadak and his brothers.

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And they pledged themselves to put away their wives in their guilt offering, was a ram of the flock for their guilt.

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They recognized that they had disobeyed a command of God to not marry those women who are worshiping false gods.

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Of the sons of Emer, Hanani and Zebediah, the sons of Harim, Messiah, Elijah, Shemaiah, Jehiel and Uzziah, the sons of Pasher.

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All right, I'm not gonna read all of the names, but you're gonna note, we've got a roster. And some of them read as a who's who of the leaders of Israel.

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And that's kind of the point. And so if you want to read this on your own time, you can.

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But you'll note lots and lots and lots of fellows did this. They recorded all of their names. And then the book of Ezra ends with these words.

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All these had married foreign women and some of the women had even born children. The end.

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What an unsatisfactory ending, right? But that's how this book ends.

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And you'll note, if you want to get a feel for what is the history after this, you're gonna have to read the

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Apocrypha, right? The Maccabean. Okay, so you'll note that now the temple is established, the wall's been rebuilt.

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These people then live, we're gonna go 400 years before Christ is going to appear.

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And in that period of time, you have the rise of Alexander the Great. And basically,

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Jerusalem abdicating to him, just saying, we're not gonna fight you. God prophesied you were coming. And so he didn't sack

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Jerusalem. And then after his untimely death, his empire was split into four pieces.

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And then not long after all of that, Rome arose and conquered the entire

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Mediterranean world. And when the New Testament opens up then, there's a lot of history that's past, that's missing.

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And if you want to get a feel for what some of that history is, you're going to have to read the Apocrypha, like the book of 1 and 2

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Maccabees and things like this. You know, they kind of lived on the razor's edge.

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And they never had their own king again. They were always a vassal state to a different empire altogether.

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But this then is where the Old Testament history leaves off. And then you would have to get a feel for what happened in the

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Apocrypha. And then also note that it's during the 400 -year period that you have the rise of the

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Pharisees, which is not Orthodox Judaism. They call themselves Orthodox Jews to this day, but they're not.

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They are rank heretics who've added to the Word of God things that do not belong there. But that's a whole other story.

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So that's where the history of Israel legitimately kind of leaves off. We don't get history again until we get to the

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New Testament. But we read through the book of Jeremiah.

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And the book of Ezekiel is a book that is super important because it's going to show how

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God has dealt with the Jews who end up in exile. And you'll note that Ezekiel finds himself in exile.

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He was originally a priest, and he ends up in exile himself.

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And he goes with the first wave. There were three waves. There were three groups, three different times in which

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Nebuchadnezzar attacked Jerusalem. Ultimately, it was destroyed. But the first group, he left the temple standing, and Ezekiel's part of that.

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And some of the people who got swept up into the Babylonian exile were the YouTube prophets.

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I call them that just because they legitimately have a parallel with the

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YouTube prophets today. And in the book of Ezekiel, we're going to begin to see how

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God is going to address the false prophets that are still among the people who are deceiving them and misleading them.

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And the cure that he gives is unique, is the best way

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I can put it. But one of the things that you'll see as we get into the middle portion of Ezekiel, that the people are complaining that God's words never come to pass.

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And of course they never come to pass because God didn't speak those words. I mean, it would be like somebody in our day saying, okay,

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I've heard all those Christians saying that God's going to bring a breakthrough and create suddenlies and shiftings and all this kind of stuff.

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And God never follows through on his word. Christianity's stupid, okay? And so God is going to make a huge distinction between his true prophet,

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Ezekiel, and these false prophets as a way of completely discrediting them, and at the same time, you know, creating the seedbed, if you would, for the revival of the hearing of God's word that we saw in the book of Ezra and in the book of Nehemiah.

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So I always like to point out, and I did a recent study during the Homecoming on the Prairie event, on Ezekiel chapter one.

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And Ezekiel chapter one is legitimately, I think, the hardest chapter in all of the Bible to understand.

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It just is not easy. And we have to recognize that this, there are portions of Ezekiel that are apocalyptic in their literature type.

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When we talk about apocalyptic, we're seeing visions of heaven where certain things mean certain things, all right?

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God causes Ezekiel to see a vision of something, not because the something is the thing, it's the thing that it means that's the important bit, and you have to kind of really dig hard to figure out what that means.

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And so this opening portion of Ezekiel, this will be review for those of you who came to the

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Homecoming on the Prairie, and for those of you who may have watched it online, but don't let the review bore you, because I found that as we study these books deeper and deeper and deeper, there's always meaning that we forget or meaning that we overlook.

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So let me read for you Ezekiel chapter one, and I'm just gonna read it out without any commentary, because at the end of this, you should all have a big question mark on your head going, what on earth was that, right?

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So here's what it says. In the 30th year, in the fourth month, on the fifth day of the month, as I was among the exiles by the

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Chabar Canal, the heavens were opened and I saw visions of God. On the fifth day of the month, it was the fifth year of the exile of King Jehoiakim, and the word of Yahweh came to Ezekiel the priest, the son of Buzi, in the land of the

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Chaldeans by the Chabar Canal, and the hand of Yahweh was upon him there. Now you'll note, if this sounds similar to what you read in the

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Book of Revelation, that's on purpose, right? You'll note the consistency in how God acts, whether it's

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Old or New Testament. So as I looked, note that Ezekiel's writing in first person.

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We know who this is. As I looked, behold, a stormy wind came out of the north, and a great cloud with brightness around it, and fire flashing forth continually, and in the midst of the fire, as it were, gleaming metal.

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And from the midst of it came the likeness of four living creatures, and this was their appearance.

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They had a human likeness, but each had four faces, and each of them had four wings.

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Their legs were straight, and the soles of their feet were like the sole of a calf's foot, and they sparkled like burnished bronze.

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Under their wings, on their four sides, they had human hands, and the four had their faces and their wings thus.

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Their wings touched one another. Each one of them went straight forward without turning as they went, and as for the likeness of their faces, each had a human face.

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The four had the face of a lion on the right side. The four had the face of an ox on the left side, and the four had the face of an eagle.

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Such were their faces, and their wings were spread out above each creature had two wings, each of which touched the wing of another while two covered their bodies, and they each went straight forward wherever the spirit would go.

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They went without turning as they went. As for the likeness of the living creatures, their appearance was like the burning coals of fire, like the appearance of torches moving to and fro among the living creatures, and the fire was bright, and out of the fire went forth lightning, and the living creatures darted to and fro like the appearance of a flash of lightning, and now as I looked at the living creatures,

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I saw a wheel on the earth beside the living creatures, one for each of the four of them.

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As for the appearance of the wheels and their construction, their appearance was like the gleaming of beryl, and the four had the same likeness, their appearance and construction being as it were a wheel within a wheel.

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When they went, they went in any of their four directions without turning as they went, and their rims were tall and awesome, and the rims of all four were full of eyes all around.

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And when the living creatures went, the wheels went beside them, and when the living creatures rose from the earth, the wheels rose.

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Wherever the spirit wanted to go, they went and the wheels rose along with them, for the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels.

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When those went, these went, when those stood, these stood. When those rose from the earth, the wheels also rose along with them, for the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels.

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Over the heads of the living creatures, there was the likeness of an expanse, shining like awe -inspiring crystal, spread out above their heads, and under the expanse, their wings were stretched out straight, one toward another, and each creature had two wings covering its body.

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And when they went, I heard the sound of their wings, like the sound of many waters, like the sound of the

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Almighty, a sound of tumult, like the sound of an army. When they stood still, they let down their wings, and there came a voice from above the expanse over their heads, and when they stood still, they let down their wings.

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And above the expanse over their head, there was the likeness of a throne, in appearance like sapphire, and seated above the likeness of a throne was a likeness with a human appearance, and upward from what had the appearance of his waist,

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I saw as it were gleaming metal, like the appearance of fire enclosed all around, and downward from what had the appearance of his waist,

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I saw as it were the appearance of fire, and there was brightness around him, like the appearance of the bow that is in the cloud on the day of rain, so was the appearance of the brightness all around, such was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of Yahweh, and when

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I saw it, I fell on my face, and I heard the voice of the one speaking, this is the word of the

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Lord, thanks be to God. Now what does it mean? All right.

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Oh, it's super simple, right? I legitimately think this is one of the hardest, if not the hardest text in all of scripture.

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The end, okay. So when we run across a passage like this, let's talk about what we are always tempted to do, especially here in America.

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I would assume that people from around the world suffer from the same problem, and that is that because we have been raised on television, raised on internet shows and things like this, we have the attention span of a goldfish, right?

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And when something shows up and there's a challenge, we know it's going to be difficult, it's going to take some time, we are often tempted to just gloss over it and move on and go, well,

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I'll never know what that means, and just get on to the next thing. Now, that's one temptation.

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The other temptation is to say, oh, this is really simple, and then just make something up. Okay, this is what false teachers do.

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Or to somehow read ourselves into this text and see if we can figure out what's going on. This is, when you run across a text like this, it is

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God's will that you stumble, fall down on your face, dust yourself off and go, what on earth was that?

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And try to apply yourself to figure it out. And the nice thing about being part of a church, okay, the church, the church is the body of Christ.

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And you're going to note that God himself, God, the Holy Spirit, has gifted men throughout the history of the church to have insight and understanding in relation to his word and to teach it faithfully.

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And thankfully, we have the records of many of these faithful men and how they have looked at these passages and texts.

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And so we must not despise how the church has understood this historically, because those guys more than likely got it right.

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And the nice thing is, is that because we all have ADHD, because of the entertainment culture that we live in, right?

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That means that we can cheat and we can look at the cliff notes, and God doesn't count that against us, okay?

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Is cliff notes still a thing? No, it isn't. It is, it - Only in an online form.

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Only in an online form. We have to go and buy those. I remember going to Beat Alton Bookseller, you know,

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Beowulf, oh, grab that, you know, because I'm going to be tested on it, right? And of course, the teachers would always say, don't read the cliff notes.

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That's like saying, read the cliff notes, okay? So I, oh man, the cliff notes have saved my bacon so many times when

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I was in high school. It's not even funny, you know, because I just, have any of you ever had to read

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The Deer Slayer? Oh, it's the worst novel ever written in American literature, okay?

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And I had to read that thing, and I struggled because every time I would pick up that book, I would fall asleep.

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It's like, this is the most boring thing ever. And then I had to read Moby Dick, and it's like, how many chapters is this guy going to go on about whale anatomy?

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You know, just crazy stuff, right? Yeah, but that kind of stuff puts me to sleep.

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Right, so, I see what you're doing there, okay. But the idea here is that it is not cheating to read commentaries.

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It is not cheating to look at the church fathers and see how they have understood these passages to get us into the ballpark of a right understanding of what these passages mean.

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And so, I'm gonna look for a phrase real quick in the Old Testament. I'm gonna look for something here, let's see here.

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What do you see? I'm gonna look for a phrase in the Old Testament. All right, all right, so if we go to the book of Jeremiah chapter one, just by way of review,

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I'm gonna point something out that when we're dealing with visions from God, these things have to be interpreted because what it is that's being seen is in fact symbolic of something else.

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And so, when we look at like the call of Jeremiah, okay, here's like what it says in Jeremiah 1 .11.

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The word of Yahweh came to me saying, Jeremiah, what do you see? And I said,

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I see an almond branch, okay? Now, that's cool for him. I wouldn't even know what an almond branch would look like.

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Okay, you know, it would have to have like the brand of the almond company on it, you know, for me to, right, diamond, it would have to say diamond almonds for me to know that was an almond branch, right?

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That's how little contact I have with things in the wild. But he knew what he was looking at.

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He was looking at an almond branch. Now, watch what God says to him. And so,

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Yahweh said to me, you have seen well, for I am watching over my word to perform it. What?

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So, the meaning of the almond branch is that God is watching over his word to perform his word.

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Next trick question. The word of Yahweh came to me a second time saying, what do you see?

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I said, I see a boiling pot facing away from the north. And then Yahweh said to me, out of the north disaster shall be let loose upon all the inhabitants of the land for behold,

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I'm calling all the tribes of the kingdoms of the north declares Yahweh and they shall come and everyone shall set his throne at the entrance of the gates of Jerusalem against all its walls and all around and against all the cities of Judah.

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Okay, that's a lot for a boiling pot to mean. Okay, but you'll note that the thing he saw isn't the meaning, it represents the meaning.

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And so, this is a constant thing when we read this type of literature in the

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Bible. Whether it be in the book of Daniel, which is the primer for teaching us this stuff.

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There are portions of Jeremiah that are this way. Ezekiel has some very pronounced portions of it that are written in this visionary apocalyptic style and they have to be unpacked.

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And then practically the whole second two thirds of the book of Revelation, it's all this.

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And you have to be able to unpack the symbols and figure out what's going on. Now, when

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I said that it's okay for us to cheat, I'm going to cut to the chase and we're gonna cheat.

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All right, give me a second here while I open up Logos. And by the way, you can always tell somebody who hasn't studied

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Greek, when they pronounce it Logos. I want to take them and go, no, it's omicrons and omicron.

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They are not omegas, they are omicrons. And omicron is the short O, not the long O. Okay, so Logos, lambda, omicron, mu, omicron, sigma.

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Two omicrons make it Logos, not Logos. Logos, it would be lambda omega mu, and it's not, okay?

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So it's a pet peeve of mine, but alas. All right, now let me hunt this down.

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We're going to look for Ezekiel chapter one. And I'm gonna introduce you to one of my favorite commentaries.

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And of course, once again, I have way too many tabs open. I have got to stop reading this much. Okay, I think my wife would actually be mortified if she sat next to me one day and watched how

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I do my study. It's embarrassing, actually.

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Yeah, okay. All right, so the name of this commentary, okay? Let me show you the title page.

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The name of this is The Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. And this is a series that was published a while back by InterVarsity Press.

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And this is a wonderful commentary series. The reason why it is is because what this commentary does is it goes to the entire scriptures,

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Old and New Testament, and anywhere where a church father wrote an instruction or delivered a sermon or some theological teaching based upon a biblical text, it's keyed to that.

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So you want to know what the church fathers say about Ezekiel and these four creatures with their wings and the four faces.

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Four creatures, four faces. Face of a man, face of a lion, face of a cow, of a bull, and the face of an eagle, right?

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You want to know what they say about this. This commentary is brilliant. And if you get it in Lagos, not

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Logos, you get it in Lagos, the wonderful thing is you can actually key your biblical text so that as you're scrolling through this, when you get to it, you'll note that it'll refresh on the right as well, right?

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Moving without turning, the burning coals, darting to and fro, the wheels within a wheel. It explains all of this on how the church fathers did it.

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And the nice thing is you don't have to, you can go back and read it in context if you have a copy of the writings of the church fathers.

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I can read all of these back in context, but I can see specifically what they wrote about these things. So let me see if I can find what they wrote in regards to the appearance of the four creatures, okay.

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All right, let's see here. Four creatures as the four gospels. Ah, here we go, watch this, okay.

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Irenaeus, who has an amazing pedigree within the history of Christianity.

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Irenaeus is the guy who wrote the first definitive apologetic work against false religion in Christianity, Heresies.

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He wrote it against the Valentinian Gnostics, and the name of the work is called Contra Heresies. And Irenaeus was trained by Polycarp.

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He was discipled by Polycarp, and Polycarp was discipled by the Apostle John, okay.

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So we're talking, these guys are like really short.

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There's like a very short chain from the apostles to Irenaeus. And so here's how

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Irenaeus handles the four creatures. He says, the cherubim have four faces, and their faces are images of the activity of the

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Son of God. So watch what he's doing here. He is legitimately saying, listen, you cannot understand what these are unless you understand that these are reflecting different attributes of Christ.

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So these four beasts all represent different aspects of Christ and his work for us, right.

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For the first living creature, it says, was like a lion signifying Christ's activity and princely and royal character.

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Think Aslan, right. The second was like an ox, showing his sacrificial and priestly order.

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The third had the face of a man indicating very clearly his coming in human guise.

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And the fourth was like a flying eagle making plain the giving of the Spirit who broods over the church.

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So you'll note that the ancient church read this Christologically, okay.

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And now let me show you a couple of things in the text itself that are gonna help us out a little bit here, okay.

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So when we get into the description of the, so they had the face of a lion, ox, a face of an eagle, face of a man, all of those things.

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There's more to the details on this, okay. Listen to this.

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Over the heads of the living creatures there was the likeness of an expanse.

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Let me give you how the King James translates this word in the book of Genesis.

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It translates it using the word firmament, okay. Now that does not create any clarity.

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In fact, it creates more confusion because what on earth is a firmament? I remember reading the Bible for the first time in the

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King James, getting to that portion and God created a firmament. I'm all, what's a firmament? That doesn't really help.

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Now let me explain what's going on here, okay. The Hebrew word is, you have to roll your

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R's when you say it, it's rakia, rakia. And rakia is an expanse, all right.

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So when God created the rakia, he basically took the universe and did this, like this, okay.

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People call that the Big Bang. We should call it what it is. It's the rakia, the rakia, because God took all the matter.

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Because basically, if we were to go into Genesis one, and I'll show this to you. Genesis one, okay.

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Barashit bara elohim et ha -shamayim ve -het ha -eretz. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

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And it says, the earth was without form and void, dark was those over the face of the tahom. And the spirit, the ruach of elohim was hovering, merkefetim, over the face of the waters.

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Let me give you just a quick summary of what this is going on. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

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Basically, he created a dump truck of matter and had it back up, peep, peep, peep.

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And it just dumped all of it in one place, okay.

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And it was wet, and there was a deep water over all of this. And this is the beginning of everything.

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This, the earth was without form and void. Darkness is over the face of the tahom.

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And then you have the spirit, the ruach of elohim, okay. Yeah, the ruach elohim.

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This is the Holy Spirit, merkefetim. Note the merkefet is a bird word, okay.

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Have you ever been driving down the highway out here and you see a hawk just hovering over the ground and not moving at all?

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It's a weird behavior. I see it from time to time. But whenever you see a hawk do that, that's what merkefetim is, okay.

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To merkefet is to do this. So you have the Holy Spirit going, okay, brooding over all of this matter as if it's like a big egg, right.

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And then God said, let there be light. And of course, it says blamo in the Hebrew. And there was light.

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It doesn't really say blamo, but you get the idea. All right, there was light, and God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness.

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God called the light day. The darkness, he called night. There was evening. There was morning, the first day.

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But here's the thing. Day and night are created before the sun, the moon, and the stars. So God assigned light to the sun, the moon, and the stars, but he created it first, unassigned, okay.

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And God said, let there be an expanse, and here it is. God said, let there be a rakia in the midst of the waters.

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And basically, God goes like this and just blows everything up. And God separated the waters from the waters, and God made the expanse, and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse, above the rakia, and it was so, and God called the rakia

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Shemaim, heaven. It's probably both, okay.

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So the idea here is when we talk about heaven, the heavens, and you'll note that it says, in the beginning,

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God created the Shemaim, the heavens, and the earth, okay. So here he creates this expanse, which gives us the sky and gives us outer space.

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And how expansive is that expanse? It's the universe, all right.

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And it always cracks me up when I see updates coming from people who are monitoring the images coming out of the

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James Webb Space Telescope. They don't know what to make of what they're seeing.

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It's just crazy, and they're seeing all the way back to some of the first light, and guess what?

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They don't even know what the universe is expanding into. But here's the weird bit. It's speeding up as it expands into what we don't know.

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It's a crazy bit. But all of that, that expanding, they call it the

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Big Bang. We just need to call it what it is. It's the rakia, all right. So when you talk to a flat earther, and they say, well, it's so terrible that God made the firmament.

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Okay, your firmament's way too small, sir, and you do not understand what a rakia is, all right.

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So God said, let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and separated the waters from the waters. God made the expanse, separated the waters that were under from the waters that were above.

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Okay, he called that heaven, and there was evening, there was morning, the second day. So I want you to think about this.

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Day one, day and night, light. Day two, the expanse of the universe was created on day two.

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And a lot of people just never make that connection, right. And so when we're looking then back at Ezekiel, over the heads of the living creatures, these four creatures which exemplify different attributes of Christ, there was an expanse, a rakia, shining like awe -inspiring crystal spread out above their heads.

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And under the expanse, their wings were stretched. So you have this expanse, and you begin to see glimpses of the throne of Christ.

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Now I'm getting ahead of myself, but I do that sometimes. Let me show you this then, coming back then to how the church understood this.

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And then watch this. One of the other church fathers, Epaphanius of Salamis.

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I know you guys love reading his stuff, but this will be review for all of you.

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But he writes that he believes that the four creatures announced the coming of Christ.

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The four living creatures with the four forms stand announcing the coming of the Christ. The form of the man for one of them because Jesus Christ was born at Bethlehem as the evangelist

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Matthew tells us. The form of the lion for another as Mark proclaims him as having come from the

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Jordan like the royal lion as it is written, behold, like a lion coming up from the jungle of the

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Jordan. The form of the bull for another because Luke proclaims, and not only him, but all the evangelists also, that at the appointed time until the ninth hour he was sacrificed on the cross as the ox of the world.

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The form of the eagle for the last because John proclaims the word that has come down from heaven and became flesh and has gone to heaven like an eagle for a complete resurrection full of the divine nature.

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Isn't that interesting? And then, are any of you familiar with what's called the Book of Kells? Book of Kells, all right?

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The Book of Kells is an illuminated manuscript of the Bible that is in Ireland, okay?

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And it's part of Irish history. And what's fascinating in all of this is that in the

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Book of Kells itself, they take this imagery from the

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Book of Ezekiel and apply it to the four gospels.

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Let me pull this up over here. Let me see if I can open this in a different tab. Open image in new tab.

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Here we go. All right, so this is part of the illuminated manuscript of the Book of Kells.

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And watch how this works. So here you have a creature that appears in the form of a man.

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Here, one, a lion. Here, the ox. Here, the eagle.

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And the church then takes these different aspects of Christ and sees then in the four gospels themselves how these attributes are highlighted more in certain gospels than in others.

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So the Gospel of Matthew, the symbol for the Gospel of Matthew in the Book of Kells is the man.

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The symbol for the Book of Mark is the lion. The symbol for the Gospel of Luke is the ox.

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The symbol for the Gospel of John is the eagle. And this is just great stuff.

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And the thing is is that what I'm touching on right now is just the intro. Next week when we come back, we have more to dig out of Ezekiel 1.

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You know, when I taught this at the homecoming on the prairie, it was just with the admonishment that you need to dig deeper and try to figure out the mysteries.

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Well, since we're teaching on this in a Bible study, we actually are going to take the time to dig in and figure out what more of these symbols mean.

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But this is just to whet your appetite for what's coming, right? All right, let's see here.

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So people were asking about the commentary. Let me see. All right. Yeah, it was raining here earlier.

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I think about my mother. She's being attacked by Hillary Clinton right now. It's really weird. So. Yeah, yeah, yeah, hey, hey.

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I saw several really funny videos on social media where they depicted the track of the hurricane with the face of Hillary Clinton.

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I can't unsee that. Okay. Louise says, my vote for worst novel,

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The Old Man and the Sea. I'm not gonna complain there. And in and of itself, it was a crime and a punishment.

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Oh, Grapes of Wrath, other people didn't like. I liked the Grapes of Wrath. That was actually, I liked the Grapes of Wrath. Okay, so Jacob says,

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Ezekiel was so humble and holy before Yahweh, the God of heaven. Different with prophets of nowadays.

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It's like they're doing church business while Ezekiel was serious with God. I would note something, Jacob. God was extremely serious with God.

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And we'll emphasize this next week when we get into the text, if I'm still alive. And that is that this vision undid

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Ezekiel and threw him on his face. And that was its purpose, right?

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So we'll talk about that more. Whereas today's so -called prophets, they're just a bunch of winger wackadoodles. The Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture edited by Kenneth Stevenson, and just noting this for my future references.

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Yes, it is a fantastic book. I cannot remember the last week that I wasn't in it.

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I'm always referring back to this commentary series. Because I work with this assumption.

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And that is that if I, in preparing a sermon, come up with a clever and innovative spin on scripture that has never been heard before in the church or the ancients wouldn't have understood it,

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I've probably erred. So I always use the cliff notes of the church fathers to keep my imagination in check.

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Because my imagination has no place in exegesis. So, but all right.