Year 6, Day 134: Ezekiel 8

Theological Commentary: Click Here

Discipleship Focus: Up

• Up: Up is the word we use for what we worship.  If we are following God’s will, God will occupy the Up position.  Our life, our identity, our mission, our family on mission is all derived from Up.  This is why God needs to be in our Up position.

Ezekiel 8 is all about idolatry.  Ezekiel is sitting in his house with the leaders of the exiled Hebrew people sitting with Him when he sees a theophany of God.  The image of God brings him spiritually into the temple back in Jerusalem.  Ezekiel sees what regular people could not see.  There is idolatry going on in the corporate spaces.  But even more importantly, there is idolatry going on in the secret space of the religious leaders.  They think that they can hide their idolatry, but God can see.

God takes idolatry very seriously.  He doesn’t want us to worship Him first; He wants us to worship Him alone.  He is a jealous God, jealous of our worship.  It is this jealousy that drives God to bring the Hebrew people under judgment.

This is a very important lesson for us to learn today as well.  He demands that we worship Him alone as well.  Yet we live in a world where there are plenty of other things for us to worship.  We can worship our money.  We can worship our education.  We can worship our children.  We can worship our athletes.  We can worship our media stars.  We can worship our technology.  We can worship the things we build.

In the end, we’re really not much different after all of these thousands of years.  We may be able to do more, do better, and do faster.  But we’re not necessarily any different.  We are just as susceptible to idolatry as they are.  This is why it is important to make sure that God truly is in our Up position.

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