Ezekiel is a weird book.  Right off in the beginning you have these crazy looking creatures with four heads and wings and spinning wheels with eye balls on them.  You might almost be thinking that Ezekiel is smoking something or had a bad burrito the night before.  In actuality Ezekiel is written in the genre of literature called Apocalyptic – strong figurative imagery representing God and His actions.

So how does God get your attention?  From Ezekiel, most of it is under the umbrella of judgment upon Judah and the surrounding nations.  The people are handed over to horrendous calamities in hopes that they will know that He is the Lord.  It sounds pretty capricious and mean.  But if you look closely you see God’s true heart in all of it.

In Ezekiel 16 it gives an image of Jerusalem being born with God’s command, “Live.”  And then this baby develops into this beautiful young woman and God makes a covenant, “I spread the corner of my garment over you and covered your nakedness.  I gave you my solemn oath and entered into a covenant with you, declares the Sovereign Lord, and you became mine.”  But it did not end happily ever after for it goes on to say with intense language that we trusted in our own beauty and prostituted ourselves.  Even worse we gave ourselves away without payment, we became an adulterous wife.  God comes back to this oath over and over as His people give themselves away to false God and empty promises.  There is hope as there always is with God – a new temple, a new Jerusalem.  God will make all things new.

So how is God getting your attention for He is always pursuing you.

It makes me think of life in general.  Most of us don’t go walking around hearing from God or seeing supernatural miracles from God.  If so, you are one of the few.  But there are times in our life where something happens and we just know that they are more than just coincidence.  It is almost like a wink from God of His sovereign hand working the tapestry of life.

Each time a king failed, there were serious and often deadly consequences (foretold by seers).  In many cases, the upcoming generation, who I assume would have seen the results of sin, didn’t learn from (or at least question) their predecessor’s mistakes and change their way.

I found myself asking why God didn’t get fed up with all the failures and just start over.  That would be an easy solution to a very messy problem.  As Pastor Bill shared in his sermon earlier this month, God didn’t start over because he made a covenant with his people.  I started thinking about what this says about God’s character.  He has ultimate integrity and is true to and follows up on his word, always.  He has abundant patience.  He has overwhelming love for his people.  The God of the Old Testament showed grace to his people.  I am so thankful God is who he is.  Because just like all those kings, I am a sinner too.

Something else that I find very special about Moses was his passion for God’s glory and reputation.  At least twice we read of God’s offer to Moses to move to a plan B–to destroy all the Israelites and continue to fulfill His purposes with only Moses’ descendants (Exodus 32:10 and Numbers 14:12).  I don’t know about you, but I think I would have been greatly tempted to take God up on this offer.  Even if I would have somehow declined it the first time it came, after more time and experience with the backsliding and ungrateful Israelites, I would certainly have paused to consider God’s second offer and what life would be like with them “out of the way.”  But Moses didn’t seem to hesitate at all to object to this idea of God’s based on what it would do to God’s reputation.  He was concerned that the Egyptians and other nations around them would think that either God was not able to deliver on His promises or that He had had evil motives from the beginning and had brought the Israelites out of bondage only to destroy them in the desert.  Apparently Moses wasn’t motivated by a desire to make his own life easier, to escape the pain and trials of leading this two-timing and uncooperative bunch of travelers.  Instead he longed for God to reveal Himself to the nations as the promise-keeping, delivering and forgiving Father that He was.  There was something in Moses that cared deeply about God’s reputation and what would bring Him the most glory.

I wonder if that same concern lies within me.  When I think about my own motives for my words and actions, I see how rarely they have anything to do with God’s glory.  If I look deeply, I see all kinds of fleshly things regularly driving my behavior–fear, insecurity, a desire to control, a desire to be liked or impress others, a compulsion to “get it right,” a desire to protect myself from hurt, even something as simple as just wanting to feel better in the moment.  The list is long and ever-changing.  God’s glory and revealing who He is are rarely uppermost in my mind as I relate to others–being pain-free is!  I’m sure Moses messed up more times than are recorded for us and had his own battles with the flesh.  But something was alive in him that I want the Spirit to stir up in me–a passion for God’s glory and character to be revealed that surpasses my desire for an easy life.

It got me thinking, though… why is it that our Holy Father feels that all
these rules and regulations for our sin offerings, guilt offerings, wave
offerings, fellowship offerings… are so important?  Why is it that we have
to atone for every seeming thought and action?  How is it that the
Israelites could accomplish these tasks?  Literally, I feel like even if
they didn’t have to sleep, let alone tend the herd or bake bread, there
wouldn’t be enough time in the day to make all the sacrifices God requires of them… of us!

I started to think about how far humanity had gone from God.  In reading
Genesis, Adam and Eve walked with God, talked with God and probably even
laughed with God.  I could just picture Adam and God sitting and trying to
name all the animals on earth.  They probably had laughing fits over what to
name the animals!  I can just hear it… ‘g-g-g-gorilla’ or
‘ch-ch-ch-cheetah’….. ha-ha-ha!

In the Books of Leviticus and Numbers, God seemingly longed for that same
relationship with man again but he is SO holy, SO good, SO pure and
righteous that no sin, no thought or smell of sin could stand in His
presence. And by this time in the Bible, Man reeked of sin.  So, in order
for God to live among the Israelites, they needed to make themselves pure
again, before God, in order to stand and live in his presence. You can see
God’s limitless holiness in the story of Leviticus 10:1-2, where Aaron’s sons, Nadab and Abihu, lit an ‘unholy’ fire in one of God’s Tabernacle censers and ‘fire came out of the presence of the Lord and consumed them’.  Wow!… it’s interesting though that the text didn’t say that God punished them, or His anger seized them… the fire just came out of God because of the unholiness of the fire.  It was almost as if God
couldn’t help it.  That everything surrounding our God on earth needs to be
so perfect, so holy, in order to stand in His presence.  It’s hard to
understand but God is not made in OUR image.  He is a Fearful God!

But thank God for Jesus!  Jesus came to be our holiness, where our humanity
fails to be holy.  He came to be our sin offering, our guilt offering and
our fellowship offering.  With Jesus God can stand in our sinful presence!

• Numbers 11 – when some of the people complained, “fire from the Lord burned among them and consumed some of the outskirts of the camp.”
• Numbers 11:33 – the people were struck with a plague because of their gluttonous cravings.
• Numbers 15:34 – they are commanded by God to stone a sabbath breaker
• Number 16:25 – the tents of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram including their families were swallowed up by the ground because of their dissent.
• Numbers 20:12 – because Moses hit the rock instead of commanding the rock for water in line with what God commanded, Moses and Aaron were not allowed to bring the people into the promise land.
• Numbers 21 – God sent venomous snakes when the people grew impatient and spoke against God.
• Numbers 25 – the Israelites who slept with the Midianites women were killed.

I can not totally wrap my mind around this, which is probably a good thing because we don’t want to put God into a box.  But I would say there there are two thoughts that have given me some perspective on this issue of God’s judgment and anger.

1)  Larry Crab writes in his recent book ‘Love letters,’ “The Road to life is rough…the road to life will expose you to terrible failure and crushing conflict.  But only that road leads to the life you want.”  What he is speaking of is that the Israelites were wandering in the desert for 40 years like this rebooting process of being children of God rather than slaves.  This is reflected in the imagery of the New Testament as it speaks of being crucified with Christ or to deny ourselves.  So in God’s sovereignty it was necessary for the Israelites to walk through this hard period of life to draw closer to God.

2)  God was calling the Israelites to be Holy.  Deut. 7:6 says, “For you are a people holy to the Lord your God.”  And the sin in their community was like a cancer in the body.  The cancer is often attacked through the chemotherapy process which in essence is pumping poison into the body to specifically kill the cancer cells.  The cancer needed to be killed so that the body may life.  Similarly, the cancer cells within the Israelites needed to be killed so that these called people of Israel may live.

Maybe what God felt like with the Israelites in the wilderness (see below)

What’s the deal with yeast?  Why doesn’t God like yeast?  We love our
yeast!… In doughnuts, bread and cinnamon rolls…

In doing some internet research I found out that yeast is seen as a symbol
for sin (Exodus 34:25 is mentioned).  ’Specifically it came to signify the
sin of pride because of their similar properties’… Interesting!  So yeast
‘puffs up’ the bread, just as pride ‘puffs us up’.

The other comments I read was that yeast is a mold.  In the Book of
Leviticus we read how important to God it was to rid the Israelites from
mildew … homes, clothes, leather… because it is unclean.  When we come
to God the Israelites needed to be super-clean, as we’re learning with God’s
instructions in Exodus and Leviticus.

‘Very basically it (yeast) represents an impurity that can spoil pure
worship.’  Just a thought.

There is a thread in scripture that is often missed as God chooses Abraham and later his descendants, the people of Israel.  The thread is that the first command to Adam and Eve, “Be fruitful and multiply” echoes throughout scripture and that he calls a people to live out His presence to the world.

Gen. 50:20 – speaks about God using Joseph to save not only Israel but many of lives.

Exodus 9:16 – the calling on Moses and the plagues on Egypt – “But I have rasied you up for this very purpose, that I might show you my power and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.“

Exodus 12:38, 48 – God’s heart and inclusion of aliens (foreigners).

Exodus 14:4 – “But I will gain glory for myself through Pharoah and all his army, and the Egyptians will know that I am the Lord.”

Exodus 33:16 – God threatens to not go with the Israelites due to their disobedience.  Moses responds, “How will anyone know that you are pleased with me and with your people unless you go with us?  What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?”

So I guess the next question is, “How well does the thread of God’s heart for others weave within our own heart?”

Maybe that’s the point.  She didn’t have the secured position as someone’s wife or an important man’s daughter… she was alone.  And God found her, revealed himself to her, and renewed her hope.  I like Hagar’s story because even though she doesn’t seem to be an important piece in his plan of building the nation of Israel through the Patriarchs, she is still important to God and in His grace, He pursues her.  He allows her to “see the God who sees me.”