Year 3, Day 146: Ezekiel 20

Rebellion

Ezekiel 20 is all about rebellion.  God begins with the Hebrew people in Egypt.  We know that story well.  They rebelled against God.  Even when God brought Moses to them and through the power of the plagues brought them out of Egypt, they rebelled.

So God did away with that generation and brought the next generation into the Promised Land.  But even then there was rebellion.  Remember Achan’s sight right after they won their first battle at Jericho?  Remember the time of the judges where repeatedly it is said that the people did what was right in their own eyes?

Then the people did the ultimate.  They demanded a king.  It was not enough for them to be ruled and protected by God.  They wanted a human being like the rest of the nations.  So they got Saul, then David, then Solomon.  Then the slide into rebellion really begins to pick up steam.

With Solomon came the wives.  With the wives came foreign gods.  With foreign gods came idolatry like never before seen.  With idolatry the people began to believe whatever they wanted.  They began to act as they pleased.  They worshipped whatever seemed right in their eyes.  The relationship between their God and themselves was fractured, then cracked, then broken.  Soon exile was the only choice, because the people would not even accept God’s calls to repentance.  They wouldn’t even do the small things for God.

Through this whole story in the first two-thirds of Ezekiel 20, did you hear what it was that the Lord kept coming back to?  Where was the heart of the violation of the people?  There are two things repeated again and again in this passage.  “They did not walk in my statutes.”  “They profaned my Sabbaths.”

The Statutes of the Lord

Since I brought up the 10 Commandments two days ago, let’s return there.  Exodus 19 begins the “Moses on Mt. Sinai experience.”  It begins the time when the Law was received.  Take a look at one of the first things that the Lord says to Moses.  At the very beginning of this experience, the Lord says to Moses about the people, “If you indeed obey My voice and keep My covenant, you shall be My treasured possession among all the people, for all the earth is Mine.  And you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”  Do you see here?  Obedience and worship are tied together by God from the very beginning!

God knows the heart of mankind.  He knows we are rebellious.  He knows that we cannot live in perfection.  He knows that we sin and we are pulled into it again and again.  So He gave us His statues as a guide and a rule.  It will guide us when we are making decisions.  When we make bad decisions, it will help us know to repent of them.

The Sabbaths

Of course, this naturally leads us into the second part that is repeated again and again in Ezekiel 20.  “They profaned my Sabbaths.”  An obedient and repentant people can be God’s priests.  They can worship God in truth.  They can keep His Sabbath and give honor to Him.  An obedient and repentant people can do this.

However, a disobedient and unrepentant people cannot.  A disobedient an unrepentant people can come into His place of worship.  They can go through the motions.  They can say all the right words appear externally to be on board with God.  But they are not.  Remember Ezekiel’s vision a few chapters ago of the temple in Jerusalem and how many people were worshipping falsely inside God’s temple?  When we are disobedient and unrepentant we are no different.  We may come into God’s place and go through all the motions, but when we live disobediently we are not with God and He is not with us.  We’re just occupying space.

If we want to worship God, we must be obedient to Him and repent in our disobedience.  Ezekiel 20 tells us that much.  These are the two qualities that God finds the most distasteful of the actions of the Hebrew people since He brought them out of Egypt.  They were disobedient and because of their disobedience they profaned God’s holy time.

Restoration

As with many of the harsh chapters in Ezekiel, this one ends with a note of peace.  The Hebrew people will pass through judgment.  But in judgment the faithful will find the path to righteousness with God.  In judgment the unfaithful will be weeded away and the faithful will remain.

We as human beings naturally hate judgment.  We don’t like being caught and we don’t really care to have to pay consequences.  We like living our own life and obeying our own desires.

However, judgment brings many good things.  Judgment brings a time where our freedoms are restricted.  We can’t get into trouble because our punishment confines our freedom.  We can’t be as disobedient because we don’t have the leisure to come and go and do as we please.  In judgment, we find the way back to right living.  So it is with the Hebrew people as they go into captivity.  So it is also with us when we submit to God and allow Him to pass us under His rod of judgment.

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