There’s a lot I’m looking forward to coming up over the next 6 weeks or so, retreats, fun church things, opportunities to serve, and in the midst of all that we’re starting a new series that will carry us through Thanksgiving. During this series, which we’re calling A New Heart, we’re going to be talking through the book of Ezekiel each week. Now if you’re like me, you can’t remember a single sermon you’ve ever heard about Ezekiel or you don’t know what the book of Ezekiel is about at all. Maybe you didn’t even know there was a book in our Bibles called Ezekiel, and that’s totally fine!

I’m preaching several times in this series and to be honest I was feeling a little scared of it. Feeling intimidated, like what if I don’t understand it. But now I’m excited about it because I think God’s going to meet us in this unfamiliar text and have something for us. Today we’ll be talking about how God met Ezekiel where he wouldn’t have expected.

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Ez 1:1-3
1 In my thirtieth year, in the fourth month on the fifth day, while I was among the exiles by the Kebar River, the heavens were opened and I saw visions of God.
2 On the fifth of the month—it was the fifth year of the exile of King Jehoiachin— 3 the word of the Lord came to Ezekiel the priest, the son of Buzi, by the Kebar River in the land of the Babylonians. There the hand of the Lord was on him.

Right here at the beginning of this book, we are getting the setting of this story – where and when this happened. And that’s really important! We have to understand setting to make sense of everything that’s happening here.

Ezekiel is this 30-year-old priest, and he’s sitting next to a river in exile when he has this vision. So to understand this a little more, we need to backtrack a little in the Biblical story. Let’s go back to when the Israelites were slaves in Egypt. God sends the ten plagues on Egypt until Pharoah agrees to let them go, and we know that Pharoah still changed his mind after that and God parted the Red Sea to let the Israelites walk through while drowning the pursuing Egyptian army. And then God gives Moses the 10 Commandments, but the people didn’t trust God and didn’t obey so they had to wander in the wilderness for 40 years. After this wandering in the desert, God brings the Israelites into the promised land, and there they are ruled by judges. And they set up the tabernacle and that’s where the people go to offer sacrifices and where the priests act symbolically as mediators between God and the people. And the Israelites start to look around at all of the other people groups around and decide that they need a king. God has Samuel the prophet warn them against this, but they are unfazed. So God gives them a king named Saul.

Then they had many more kings some good some bad, and during that time they built the Temple in Jerusalem. And this Temple was to them the place that the presence of God dwelt. The people would go and offer sacrifices. The priests would dedicate their lives to handling all the rules and regulations at the Temple. But things got worse. The people obeyed God less and less. The kings became more and more evil. And Israel divided itself into two kingdoms. The northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah. Well this didn’t help. The people continued to disobey God and disregard God’s prophets who were telling them to change their ways. And eventually God had enough. God allowed the Assyrians to come in and take out the northern kingdom of Israel. And over 100 years after that, God allowed the Babylonians to come in and take over the southern kingdom of Judah. The Babylonians coming in and taking over Judah was sort of in two waves 10 years apart.

This is where Ezekiel comes in. Ezekiel was a priest that got removed from Jerusalem in the first wave when they took a lot of higher-ranking people out of Judah and left them in modern day Iraq. So Ezekiel was this refugee who was forced out of Jerusalem. And to top it all off, he’s just turned 30 years old, which is the year he would’ve been able to actually start performing his priestly duties as a priest. This thing that he had trained for his whole life, wasn’t going to happen. He was a priest with no Temple to manage, no sacrifices to offer on behalf of the people. Because of this exile out of Jerusalem, he’s just a random 30-year-old refugee sitting by a river in Babylon.

Imagine for a moment how it might feel to be Ezekiel because you might be able to relate in some way. Ezekiel has been training to do something for a long time and now that possibility of fulfilling priestly duties at the Temple has just been ripped away. Beyond that, his whole life has been flipped upside down, he’s been forced to move away from everything he knows. And to top it all off, he would believe that he’s extremely far away from God because God dwells in the Temple, and now he’s hundreds of miles away in a foreign land. When we meet Ezekiel, he’s sitting by a river likely grieving this immense loss. Everything that he had hoped for and worked towards is over. Maybe you’ve felt like that before. Dealing with a loss of close loved one, the end of a relationship, losing a job.

And as he sits by this river in Babylon, this godless place in exile, the unexpected happens. God shows up. The hand of the Lord was on him, and he has this incredible vision. I’ll read some of it so we can get a feel for it.

Ez 1:4-9
4 I looked, and I saw a windstorm coming out of the north—an immense cloud with flashing lightning and surrounded by brilliant light. The center of the fire looked like glowing metal, 5 and in the fire was what looked like four living creatures. In appearance their form was human, 6 but each of them had four faces and four wings. 7 Their legs were straight; their feet were like those of a calf and gleamed like burnished bronze. 8 Under their wings on their four sides they had human hands. All four of them had faces and wings, 9 and the wings of one touched the wings of another. Each one went straight ahead; they did not turn as they moved.

And a little bit further on in the description:

Ez 1:22-28
22 Spread out above the heads of the living creatures was what looked something like a vault, sparkling like crystal, and awesome. 23 Under the vault their wings were stretched out one toward the other, and each had two wings covering its body. 24 When the creatures moved, I heard the sound of their wings, like the roar of rushing waters, like the voice of the Almighty, like the tumult of an army. When they stood still, they lowered their wings.
25 Then there came a voice from above the vault over their heads as they stood with lowered wings. 26 Above the vault over their heads was what looked like a throne of lapis lazuli, and high above on the throne was a figure like that of a man. 27 I saw that from what appeared to be his waist up he looked like glowing metal, as if full of fire, and that from there down he looked like fire; and brilliant light surrounded him. 28 Like the appearance of a rainbow in the clouds on a rainy day, so was the radiance around him.
This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. When I saw it, I fell facedown, and I heard the voice of one speaking.

God showed up in a mighty way. God showed up to Ezekiel in this mighty way that he could have never anticipated. In this moment, God is letting Ezekiel know that he’s not confined to the Temple. God is on the move. These creatures that Ezekiel describes contain a lot of icons and symbols that would have been present in the Temple, signaling to Ezekiel that the presence of God can reveal itself in powerful ways away from the Temple.

So these images to us may sound crazy, but they would have carried more meaning to Ezekiel. Here’s a little minimalist illustration that The Bible Project made of what Ezekiel’s vision could have looked like. You see the creatures Ezekiel describes are like legs of the throne that the presence of God is sitting on in this image. Obviously, we have no idea what it could have looked like aside from Ezekiel’s description, which can spark a lot in our imagination. The important takeaway though is this: God is big, God is powerful, and God is on the move.

God shows up where we least expect it. When we’re in those moments in our lives where we feel like everything is wrong – when our dreams have died, when all of our hard work hasn’t provided the results we wanted, when we’re grieving the sudden loss of a loved one or the end of a relationship – God can meet us there. God is not confined to the moments in our lives where everything is good or working out according to plan, and some of y’all in this room may know this from personal experience.

Psalm 34:18 The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.

So God shows up in this powerful, overwhelming way to Ezekiel. But God doesn’t just show up to let Ezekiel know He’s there. God has a purpose for Ezekiel. God reveals himself to Ezekiel in a mighty way, and now he is commissioning Ezekiel with a new purpose.

Ez 2:1-8
He said to me, “Son of man, stand up on your feet and I will speak to you.” ² As he spoke, the Spirit came into me and raised me to my feet, and I heard him speaking to me.
³ He said: “Son of man, I am sending you to the Israelites, to a rebellious nation that has rebelled against me; they and their ancestors have been in revolt against me to this very day. ⁴ The people to whom I am sending you are obstinate and stubborn. Say to them, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says.’ ⁵ And whether they listen or fail to listen—for they are a rebellious people—they will know that a prophet has been among them. ⁶ And you, son of man, do not be afraid of them or their words. Do not be afraid, though briers and thorns are all around you and you live among scorpions. Do not be afraid of what they say or be terrified by them, though they are a rebellious people. ⁷ You must speak my words to them, whether they listen or fail to listen, for they are rebellious. ⁸ But you, son of man, listen to what I say to you.

God raises Ezekiel up and gives him a purpose. Before this vision, Ezekiel has got to be feeling purposeless. The thing that he thought was going to be his purpose got ripped away from him. When you’re not near the Temple, there’s no need for a priest. But here, we see God meeting Ezekiel in his grief and giving him a new purpose.

In those moments in our life where we feel like we’re floating aimlessly, God wants to meet us there and reorient us to something better. God provides us a purpose. For Ezekiel, this looked like being a watchman for God, warning the people of the peril they would be facing for their evil and unrepentant ways. God tells him straight up, nobody’s going to listen to you. But that’s not your fault. Just be true to your purpose, and the results aren’t on you.

While this is probably a disheartening thing for Ezekiel to hear, I kind of find this message encouraging. We live in a results world. If you’re in business and you’re not making money, you’re not a successful business. If you’re a team that’s not winning games, you’re not a successful team. But God’s metrics aren’t our metrics. When God calls us to do something, we just got to do that thing, and trust that God’s going to work it out from there.

In these first chapters of Ezekiel, we see God show up in a place and in a way that Ezekiel would never expect, and in this way, God gives him a new purpose. While this isn’t an encouraging time to be an Israelite, this story can give us hope. When things look bleak, when we’re at the end of our rope, when things we hold onto are ripped away from us, God meets us there. And God wants to use us to work for redemption.

Each week we go to the Table together and remember Jesus who was God and came to meet us here on earth. Because Jesus fulfilled His purpose in living a perfect life, defeating death at the cross and rising again, we too get to have a purpose for more than what we can see in the here and now. Because of Jesus, like Ezekiel, God has come to us and given us purpose.

October 13^th, 2024

Watch here: https://youtu.be/kPvs9RngXNs?si=S1dKszMdrzq0tKre&t=1459