Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / September 20, 2015 | Route 66 - Ezekiel

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September 20, 2015 | Route 66 - Ezekiel · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

0:00
SPEAKER_00: If you're visiting this morning, welcome to Route 66, the sermon series that takes the 66 books of the Bible in order.
0:08
SPEAKER_00: One book per Sunday this morning.
0:13
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
0:14
SPEAKER_00: Get ready, the book of Ezekiel.
0:16
SPEAKER_00: If you're opening your Bible, it's a little past halfway.
0:20
SPEAKER_00: This is the sci-fi book of the Bible.
0:24
SPEAKER_00: If you like sci-fi like I do.
0:26
SPEAKER_00: In fact, I've written on your study sheet, that's the sheet in the bulletin, three holes on it.
0:33
SPEAKER_00: Ezekiel is an alien book.
0:36
SPEAKER_00: It begins with a tornado and God sitting on a chariot throne with wheels and animals in a fire cloud.
0:43
SPEAKER_00: Later, there's a valley full of dry bones that suddenly rattle to life.
0:49
SPEAKER_00: Ezekiel himself is a kooky bird.
0:53
SPEAKER_00: He falls into trances.
0:55
SPEAKER_00: He gets carried off by whirlwinds and angels.
0:57
SPEAKER_00: For six years, he doesn't set foot outside his home.
1:01
SPEAKER_00: I know someone like that.
1:03
SPEAKER_00: He performs weird rituals with hair clippings and fire, just like my barber.
1:10
SPEAKER_00: No, I'm kidding.
1:12
SPEAKER_00: Craig's not that way.
1:14
SPEAKER_00: Despite being a priest who lives purity, God has him cook his food over a pile of dung.
1:20
SPEAKER_00: He's truly strange.
1:21
SPEAKER_00: Yet his book is quite simple and orderly.
1:25
SPEAKER_00: It divides into two equal halves around the fall of Jerusalem, chapter 24.
1:31
SPEAKER_00: Keep in mind that Israel fell and went into exile in three stages.
1:35
SPEAKER_00: First, 605 BC, and that's when the Babylonians siphoned off the cream of the crop, the Krim de la Krim of Israel, like Daniel.
1:45
SPEAKER_00: You know, the high IQ, the uh future NFL players, stuff like that.
1:49
SPEAKER_00: They took the best of them to Babylon.
1:52
SPEAKER_00: And then eight years later, 597, you know, because Israel rebelled, their puppet king that they put in charge said, no, we're not going to send you tax money.
2:01
SPEAKER_00: So they came and they knocked him down again, and they took, now they took sort of the second tier of people, Ezekiel, 30 years old, a priest.
2:10
SPEAKER_00: And uh, but finally the big destruction, 586 BC.
2:14
SPEAKER_00: So the first half of Ezekiel foretells Israel's doom, chapters 1 through 24.
2:20
SPEAKER_00: 25 through 48 foretells her restoration.
2:23
SPEAKER_00: And through it all, God's aim is that all the world and especially his own people will know that I am the Lord.
2:30
SPEAKER_00: So we're in one of the most interesting, strangest books of the Bible.
2:37
SPEAKER_00: We are this morning in Ezekiel, and the one good thing I can say about this is in about 35 minutes, I'll be done with it.
2:46
SPEAKER_00: No, uh is uh we won't.
2:49
SPEAKER_00: No, I bet you know uh you're gonna be surprised.
2:51
SPEAKER_00: This is really a great book.
2:52
SPEAKER_00: It may be confusing.
2:54
SPEAKER_00: I believe that the message from this book is a simple, straightforward message.
2:59
SPEAKER_00: I want to prove that to you.
3:01
SPEAKER_00: My title is The One Thing God Wants the World to Know.
3:04
SPEAKER_00: And of course, just by saying that, I imply I am implying, aren't I, that there is this one thing, there's a lot of people in the world that don't know this, that are ignorant of what I'm about to tell you this morning.
3:16
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
3:17
SPEAKER_00: And and I fully believe that's true.
3:19
SPEAKER_00: In fact, I think there are a lot of people in the world that absolutely reject this one thing that I think you know is so important.
3:28
SPEAKER_00: And God apparently thinks that it's important.
3:30
SPEAKER_00: There are, as you know, some factoids, some bits of knowledge more important than other bits of knowledge.
3:36
SPEAKER_00: Guy jumps out of an airplane for the first time, parachuting for the first time.
3:42
SPEAKER_00: His chute fails to open, and he doesn't know how to open it.
3:45
SPEAKER_00: That's an important bit of knowledge.
3:47
SPEAKER_00: He is plummeting to the earth, and all of a sudden, to his utter surprise, he sees a guy zooming up in the air, past him going the other direction.
3:56
SPEAKER_00: What?
3:56
SPEAKER_00: You don't believe the story.
3:59
SPEAKER_00: Come on, you doubter.
4:00
SPEAKER_00: So he says, so as the other guy's flying past, he says, Do you know how to open a parachute?
4:07
SPEAKER_00: Do you know anything about parachutes?
4:10
SPEAKER_00: The other guy says, No.
4:11
SPEAKER_00: Do you know anything about gas stoves?
4:15
SPEAKER_00: Some pieces of information are valuable.
4:20
SPEAKER_00: And what you don't know at certain times can hurt you.
4:25
SPEAKER_00: It can hurt you if you're hiking in a wilderness you've never been in, right?
4:29
SPEAKER_00: This is called the most dangerous path in the world on that side of that cliff.
4:34
SPEAKER_00: I learned one day that what you don't know about the kitchen can hurt you.
4:39
SPEAKER_00: A couple weeks ago I burned out a pan.
4:42
SPEAKER_00: So um, and then those of you who drive, you know, you know driving a car that in the summer after a rainstorm, what you don't know about that mud hole can hurt you if you get stuck.
4:52
SPEAKER_00: Or in the winter, how deep the snow is.
4:55
SPEAKER_00: What you don't know can hurt you.
4:56
SPEAKER_00: And what I'm about to share with you this morning is a fact that can hurt you eternally if you don't know it.
5:04
SPEAKER_00: It's such an important fact to God that he spends a whole book, 48 chapters, telling you this fact, sort of in a loop, over and over again, 78 times in this book, he says, I want you to know everything I'm doing is so that you will know this one thing.
5:23
SPEAKER_00: It's more important than knowing that two plus two equals four.
5:26
SPEAKER_00: More important than knowing that the world is ground, or ground, the world is round and that there's a law of gravity.
5:32
SPEAKER_00: It's more important than knowing your own name.
5:34
SPEAKER_00: What is this fact that God considers so important that the whole world knows?
5:38
SPEAKER_00: You ask him his answer, I-A-T-L, four words, I am the Lord.
5:48
SPEAKER_00: Now, in other words, what that means is, well, what he says in Psalm 47 or in many places in the Bible, I rule the earth and all the kings belong to me.
5:59
SPEAKER_00: In theology, we say God, say it with me, God is sovereign.
6:05
SPEAKER_00: That's easy to say when you're on this side of the stained glass.
6:08
SPEAKER_00: Not so hard to say when you're on the other side of the stained glass when you're out in the world.
6:14
SPEAKER_00: And what that means, as you know, we continue explaining it, is that God is in control.
6:21
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
6:23
SPEAKER_00: Now, here's the problem.
6:26
SPEAKER_00: I mean, really?
6:28
SPEAKER_00: I want you to not be religious for just a moment.
6:31
SPEAKER_00: I want you to be normal.
6:34
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
6:34
SPEAKER_00: I want you to be Monday through Saturday.
6:38
SPEAKER_00: Really?
6:40
SPEAKER_00: Really is God Lord?
6:44
SPEAKER_00: I mean, am I right that the evidence is to the contrary?
6:49
SPEAKER_00: At least a dozen times, I'm a huge Calvin Hobbes fan, have all the books.
6:53
SPEAKER_00: Now my my granddaughter's taking them all up to Canada.
6:56
SPEAKER_00: But you know, at least a dozen times in Calvin Hobbes, you had this theme of where Calvin comes to his dad saying, Dad, your reputation has fallen, your poll numbers are slipping.
7:06
SPEAKER_00: You know, I love it.
7:07
SPEAKER_00: There's there was one that has no words in it where he where he where he he has this piece of paper and his dad's bored, but he's explaining dad performance, it's labeled, and he has the line is going down.
7:18
SPEAKER_00: Or in a well-known cartoon.
7:20
SPEAKER_00: He comes to his dad and he says, Bad news, dad, your polls are down.
7:25
SPEAKER_00: My polls, says his dad, who's reading a newspaper.
7:28
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he says, you rate especially low among tigers and six-year-old white males.
7:35
SPEAKER_00: If you want to stay dad, I suggest you adopt some key planks to your platform.
7:44
SPEAKER_00: Dad looks back at his paper and says, Some special interest groups are in for a surprise.
7:49
SPEAKER_00: And Calvin ends by saying, of those polled, virtually all favor increased allowances and the commencement of driving lessons.
8:01
SPEAKER_00: The point being made here is Calvin says, Dad, you ought to be concerned for your reputation.
8:06
SPEAKER_00: Your poll numbers are down.
8:08
SPEAKER_00: You were you're you're being slandered, basically, by me and my tiger.
8:12
SPEAKER_00: Well, I'd say the same thing is true of the God of the Bible.
8:18
SPEAKER_00: Let's be honest and non-religious for a moment.
8:21
SPEAKER_00: His reputation today in the world is at an all-time low.
8:30
SPEAKER_00: As Oliver Wendell Holmes said almost, you know, many decades ago, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, God's plan, this is the most famous limerick, by the way, ever written.
8:38
SPEAKER_00: God's plan made a hopeful beginning, but man spoiled his chances by sinning.
8:44
SPEAKER_00: We trust that the story will end in God's glory.
8:46
SPEAKER_00: Get it, here it comes.
8:48
SPEAKER_00: But at present, the other side's winning.
8:54
SPEAKER_00: The preponderance of evidence in the world today is not that God is sovereign, that God is Lord, but just the opposite.
9:04
SPEAKER_00: You simply turn on a television, you can see it.
9:08
SPEAKER_00: God is not showing up to rescue 21 Egyptian Christians this year who get beheaded in Libya by ISIS.
9:18
SPEAKER_00: He's not showing up to rescue innocent little girls who are getting abused and whose parents are being slaughtered.
9:29
SPEAKER_00: It does not appear in that part of the world as though the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is the Lord of all.
9:37
SPEAKER_00: And then all you have to do is look at home.
9:40
SPEAKER_00: You can go to Ferguson, Missouri, and look at the racial unrest and the conflict there and all of the mess, or or or simply look at how by a vote of five to four, one individual in the Supreme Court determines for 300 million people that the way God has defined marriage between one man and one woman is not true.
10:04
SPEAKER_00: And then you have the conflict where you have a uh you have a woman named Kim Davis, a clerk in Kentucky who refuses to obey that law, and you have sides being taken, and you watch television and you hear the arguments, and you go, God, are you even out there?
10:24
SPEAKER_00: And then maybe you decide on your computer to look up one or more of the Planned Parenthood.
10:31
SPEAKER_00: You know, those videos where they're being interviewed, and you find out that an organization which you and I support heavily with our tax money is buying and selling body parts of unborn babies.
10:46
SPEAKER_00: And you sort of can sympathize with the Jews during World War II behind concentration camp wire who gave up their faith saying if God really was out there, if he was really sovereign, if he was really the Lord, would he allow his people to be slaughtered six million strong in World War II?
11:07
SPEAKER_00: You see, there's a reason why most Jews today across the world are agnostics or atheists.
11:16
SPEAKER_00: The preponderance of evidence, let's be honest, is against God being sovereign.
11:22
SPEAKER_00: This used to be a Christian nation, America.
11:25
SPEAKER_00: But you have our main paper, the New York Times, which feels free to run an article by Daniel Dennett, in which an atheist says that's not a good term for us.
11:35
SPEAKER_00: We're going to call ourselves brights from now on.
11:38
SPEAKER_00: Quote, a bright is a person with a naturalist worldview.
11:41
SPEAKER_00: We brights don't believe in ghosts or elves or the Easter bunny or God.
11:46
SPEAKER_00: An article picked up by the Washington Post.
11:49
SPEAKER_00: And sure enough, Dawkins and other well-known atheists today refer to themselves as brights.
11:55
SPEAKER_00: What do they refer to God believers as?
12:00
SPEAKER_00: What's the option?
12:02
SPEAKER_00: Well, we're pretty dim bulbs, let's just be honest.
12:04
SPEAKER_00: Now I know that's true of you, but I'm just not sure it's true of me.
12:08
SPEAKER_00: No.
12:09
SPEAKER_00: So I mean, this is a, we live in a very strange world, don't we?
12:14
SPEAKER_00: We live in a country where, let me just give you an illustration, where near about a hundred years ago, Woodrow Wilson, who would then, who would become the most intellectual and educated POTUS president of the United States we would ever have, was president at that time of Princeton University and received a letter, this is in 1909, early 1909, I think February, from a from someone as an ex-Pincon grad who said, I feel I'm wondering, is Princeton University going secular is moving away from God?
12:42
SPEAKER_00: His letter, his letter basically said, it said, and I actually I quote, we firmly believe and teach at Princeton University that the Bible is the revealed word of God and that Jesus Christ is the Savior of all mankind.
13:03
SPEAKER_00: Any university president today, much less Princeton's president, if he even emailed that to a friend and it was caught, would be immediately fired.
13:14
SPEAKER_00: No, we have changed from those days, haven't we?
13:18
SPEAKER_00: Oh, here's another illustration.
13:20
SPEAKER_00: When the telegraph, when Samuel B.
13:22
SPEAKER_00: Morse, you know, sent the first telegraph message in the late 19th century, his first message, does anyone remember?
13:30
SPEAKER_00: Did anybody take history in fifth grade four words?
13:33
SPEAKER_00: What has God wrought?
13:38
SPEAKER_00: Fast forward about 80 years to 1969, Neil Armstrong on the moon takes a step and he says, one small step for giant leap for, yeah.
13:54
SPEAKER_00: The changes are slow and incremental from God to man.
13:59
SPEAKER_00: But let's be honest, we no longer live in a truly Christian nation that believes that the God of the Bible is the Lord, is the sovereign, is in control.
14:14
SPEAKER_00: And so I ask you, you know, when we say he is Lord, we have to be honest, I think, for a moment and ask ourselves the question which leads us to the book of Ezekiel, which is, is he really?
14:28
SPEAKER_00: Is he really?
14:30
SPEAKER_00: And that's why Ezekiel is so perfect, because that's exactly the question the whole world was asking in about 600 BC.
14:39
SPEAKER_00: I mean, up until then.
14:41
SPEAKER_00: Certainly Israel, but almost the whole world, was willing to consider that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was the single sovereign God.
14:50
SPEAKER_00: For after all, you know, you open the word of this God, you look at the creation account, this is actually kind of believable.
14:57
SPEAKER_00: If you've ever read, I've had to study the other creation accounts, a couple dozen of them, they're all silly.
15:03
SPEAKER_00: I mean, the Babylonian one, just to take where the Israelites had gone to, you know, with its gods.
15:08
SPEAKER_00: I mean, they you have the story is that the gods sort of create people on a whim, and then they get mad at them because the people made so much noise the gods couldn't sleep, so they dumped the universal flood on them and wiped them all away.
15:20
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's silly, but you have this really, you know, logical God is sovereign type account.
15:27
SPEAKER_00: And then by the time you get into the second book, you have God's own people are down there suffering in Egypt.
15:34
SPEAKER_00: So, what does God do?
15:35
SPEAKER_00: The sovereign Lord of all God delivers them out at the high point of Egypt, with Ramses there and strong, but a strong and mighty Pharaoh with pyramids, he's no match for the sovereign God of the universe.
15:48
SPEAKER_00: And he plucks them out and he parts the Red Sea and he brings them to the promised land and he plants them in his land and he puts them in his city, Jerusalem, and he and he builds his house through Solomon, one of the seven wonders of the world, the great temple.
16:03
SPEAKER_00: And down then through the years, dozens, hundreds of years, even when his people wander a little bit, God says, Well, my name, my reputation is pretty key, and I'm gonna keep them here.
16:13
SPEAKER_00: I'm not gonna, I'm gonna protect them.
16:16
SPEAKER_00: But now all of a sudden, something absolutely unheard of has happened, and that is in 600 BC.
16:23
SPEAKER_00: The Babylonians, the awful, evil, ugly Babylonians, the bad guys, they ride into town, they knock down the walls, they burn God's house, they take away God's people, they steal God's land, they ruin God's city, and all of a sudden they and everyone else in the ancient Near East, because everybody back then believes that this is really God versus God battle.
16:49
SPEAKER_00: Whenever countries fight, it's gods versus gods, and whoever wins their God is sovereign.
16:53
SPEAKER_00: It's pretty clear that Marduk, the God of the Babylonians, is sure a lot more sovereign than the God of Israel.
17:00
SPEAKER_00: And even the Israelites, now in captivity, are going, really is our God Lord?
17:06
SPEAKER_00: And God is really concerned about that.
17:08
SPEAKER_00: That's what this book is about.
17:10
SPEAKER_00: Many books in the Bible, issue is God's glory.
17:13
SPEAKER_00: This book is concerned with God's reputation, God's name.
17:16
SPEAKER_00: And he says, I'm really concerned about this.
17:19
SPEAKER_00: When they, meaning my people, came to the nations where they went, they profaned my holy name.
17:25
SPEAKER_00: They shamed my name because it said about them, these are the people of Yahweh, yet they had to leave his land in exile.
17:32
SPEAKER_00: Then I had concern for my holy name.
17:37
SPEAKER_00: So this book, more than any other book in the Bible, has this incredible concern that we understand what God wants the whole world to understand that I am the Lord.
17:53
SPEAKER_00: I am sovereign.
17:54
SPEAKER_00: So let's walk our way through the book really quickly.
17:56
SPEAKER_00: We'll stop in a couple of places, chapters one through three.
17:59
SPEAKER_00: Very famous sci-fi passage.
18:01
SPEAKER_00: Sovereign God reveals his might and his majesty.
18:03
SPEAKER_00: You've heard about this.
18:05
SPEAKER_00: Ezekiel's 30 years old, he's a priest, he's now in captivity in Babylon.
18:09
SPEAKER_00: It's 597 BC.
18:12
SPEAKER_00: And he sees this wild, weird, and crazy type thing coming, you know, in the air.
18:18
SPEAKER_00: I'll summarize chapter one for you.
18:20
SPEAKER_00: He says, while I was among the exiles by the Kibar Canal, it's a body of water that branches out of the Euphrates River in present-day Iraq.
18:29
SPEAKER_00: The heavens opened, he's having this vision, and I saw a whirlwind coming from the north, a great cloud with fire flashing back and forth and brilliant light all around it.
18:43
SPEAKER_00: Wow, that's a nice beginning.
18:45
SPEAKER_00: You go, this is cool.
18:47
SPEAKER_00: And then he says, I saw four living creatures.
18:50
SPEAKER_00: He does not see God Almighty first.
18:52
SPEAKER_00: He sort of looks from the bottom to the top, and he says, I saw four living creatures.
18:57
SPEAKER_00: And he says, they're of human form.
18:59
SPEAKER_00: Each of them had four faces and four wings, and their feet were like the hooves of a calf, and each of the four had the face of a man, a lion, an ox, an eagle.
19:06
SPEAKER_00: Fire's moving back and forth between the creatures.
19:08
SPEAKER_00: They're darting back and forth like flashes of lightning.
19:11
SPEAKER_00: Just to explain to you that you have this sort of platform on which the throne of God is sitting.
19:18
SPEAKER_00: The platform looks like a sheet of thick ice, and it is being held up by four really interesting, weird creatures, each of which has four wings, under which, by the way, are their human hands.
19:32
SPEAKER_00: These creatures look kind of human, but they're strange.
19:36
SPEAKER_00: Okay, they have the hooves of calves.
19:38
SPEAKER_00: Their main, you know, the front face is the face of a man, chief of all creatures.
19:44
SPEAKER_00: Face on the right-hand side is the face of a lion, the chief of all wild animals.
19:50
SPEAKER_00: Then there's the face of an ox, the chief of all domesticated animals.
19:54
SPEAKER_00: And then the face of an eagle, the chief of all the birds.
19:58
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so they have these four heads and they have these wings and so forth.
20:03
SPEAKER_00: And in between these four creatures which are holding up this sort of platform on which is the throne and God and so forth, you have coals of fire shooting forth lightning in between them, representing, I think, judgment.
20:16
SPEAKER_00: And you have this whole thing zooming back and forth.
20:20
SPEAKER_00: So it's really, really, I mean, it's cool, okay?
20:24
SPEAKER_00: I'd see the movie.
20:25
SPEAKER_00: So, and then there's a wheel beside each creature.
20:28
SPEAKER_00: In fact, it's not just a regular wheel, there's a wheel within a wheel so that it can move in any of the four directions without pivoting, it says.
20:36
SPEAKER_00: In other words, so that the creatures and God Himself can just stay looking forward.
20:40
SPEAKER_00: So this whole thing's darting back and forth, you know, faster than you think, with fire everywhere and so forth.
20:47
SPEAKER_00: So there's the wheel within a wheel stuff, all right?
20:50
SPEAKER_00: And then he concludes the chapter by saying there's a form with the appearance of a human on the throne high above.
20:58
SPEAKER_00: And there's fire, and he says, It's surrounded by brilliant light.
21:01
SPEAKER_00: And then the at the very top, it looks like a rainbow and a cloud on a rainy day.
21:06
SPEAKER_00: And this is the appearance of the form of the Lord's glory.
21:09
SPEAKER_00: And when I saw it, I fell face down.
21:11
SPEAKER_00: And I heard a voice, excuse me, heard a voice speaking, and that's chapter one.
21:15
SPEAKER_00: Wow, what a beginning, huh?
21:16
SPEAKER_00: Is that cool?
21:17
SPEAKER_00: Now the question is, why would God show that to one guy, to this prophet?
21:21
SPEAKER_00: Well, he wrote it down, so you and I, we sort of get to enjoy it secondhand.
21:25
SPEAKER_00: But why would he reveal his might and his majesty to the prophet?
21:29
SPEAKER_00: Huh?
21:30
SPEAKER_00: Why?
21:31
SPEAKER_00: What's the whole purpose of this?
21:32
SPEAKER_00: The answer is, he says, so that Ezekiel and so that you and I, so that anyone who reads this will understand that he and he alone, the only being in the entire universe who could produce something like this.
21:49
SPEAKER_00: That he is Yahweh, that he is the Lord, that he is the sovereign.
21:53
SPEAKER_00: So then we move to the next 20 chapters.
21:56
SPEAKER_00: A sovereign God looks over Israel's history, and then he Predicts and he accomplishes the fall of his own beloved people.
22:05
SPEAKER_00: That's what the next 20 chapters are about.
22:08
SPEAKER_00: Now, um, I want to in this section, I just want to I could share with you a lot of stuff.
22:14
SPEAKER_00: I want to share with you just the story of one chapter.
22:17
SPEAKER_00: Simply because this chapter is one of the first chapters I ever preached when I was a single kid back age 25 here at Topeka Bible back in 787.
22:26
SPEAKER_00: And because this chapter changed my life.
22:28
SPEAKER_00: This chapter, when I was age 20, I ran across this chapter.
22:32
SPEAKER_00: Had no idea, you know, when you're that age, you know you're in love or you're looking for love.
22:39
SPEAKER_00: And I had no idea that love and romance, that the Bible was at certain places.
22:43
SPEAKER_00: It was a romance novel, and this chapter blew me away with God's romantic heart.
22:49
SPEAKER_00: Now it's also explicit, the ancient rabbis, some of many of them said that they kept the Jewish children from reading it until they hit 16 or whatever.
22:57
SPEAKER_00: But but but I'm just gonna tell you the G-rated story here, okay?
23:01
SPEAKER_00: And the story goes like this in Ezekiel 16.
23:04
SPEAKER_00: God says, one day I was going down the road, and I look in the ditch, and I saw a little girl baby.
23:13
SPEAKER_00: Blood, umbilical cord not cut, mess.
23:17
SPEAKER_00: And by the way, this is common in the ancient Near East, they just throw little babies, especially girl babies, in the ditch.
23:22
SPEAKER_00: And his heart went out to this little baby.
23:26
SPEAKER_00: And so he picked her up and he wiped her off and he cut the cord and he took her home and he decided to raise her.
23:31
SPEAKER_00: Even though he was prince, even though he was famous, God says I was, you know, like, you know, the prince of the kingdom, and I decided to raise her as if she was my own.
23:39
SPEAKER_00: This story, by the way, is a great combination of little orphan Annie and My Fair Lady, okay?
23:46
SPEAKER_00: And if you don't know what those stories are, go right home and watch those.
23:49
SPEAKER_00: So so anyway, so he so he raises her.
23:52
SPEAKER_00: And he really, and he just loves this little girl.
23:55
SPEAKER_00: And then something happens.
23:57
SPEAKER_00: If you know the story of My Fair Lady, uh uh Professor Higgins, you know, finds uh Eliza Doolittle, I think her name is, and he finds her sort of on a in a junky part of London, and and he brings her home and he sort of rescues her and he teaches her English, and there comes this point in the movie, in the story, when he suddenly realizes he's fallen in love with her.
24:17
SPEAKER_00: It's just it's cool.
24:18
SPEAKER_00: I've gotten really mushy in my old age.
24:20
SPEAKER_00: So I mean it's just it's cool.
24:21
SPEAKER_00: That happens in Ezekiel 68, where God says, then one day I looked at her, and I you know, I won't get explicit, he just says, I noticed she had breasts.
24:30
SPEAKER_00: You know, and I noticed that she was really good looking.
24:32
SPEAKER_00: She had long hair, and he falls in love with her.
24:36
SPEAKER_00: Now remember, he's hinting all along, Israel, this is you.
24:41
SPEAKER_00: You were in the ditch.
24:43
SPEAKER_00: You were a child.
24:44
SPEAKER_00: He starts off by saying, you know, you were a child of an Amrite and a Canaanite.
24:49
SPEAKER_00: You know, you just you're the product of fornication.
24:52
SPEAKER_00: And and and so this is the story of Israel.
24:56
SPEAKER_00: Or when I read this story at age 20, I realized this is a story of God and me.
25:02
SPEAKER_00: God falls in love with this girl, and he woos her, and he marries her.
25:10
SPEAKER_00: And they have this incredible, apparently, this incredible marriage, and he's now becoming like the king of the land, and they live in a castle and they're really rich, and she has everything, and it's just like it's like this incredible dream story.
25:22
SPEAKER_00: It's like Cinderella and and my fairly, it's like all these stories in one, and then you have this incredible shock where he realizes she's sneaking out of the palace to have sex with other men.
25:34
SPEAKER_00: And his heart is broken.
25:36
SPEAKER_00: This is God.
25:37
SPEAKER_00: His heart is broken.
25:39
SPEAKER_00: And basically, he uses double language, so you know he's talking about Israel says she's having sex with other nations.
25:46
SPEAKER_00: Like Israel did.
25:47
SPEAKER_00: Israel would go to Babylon, Israel would go to Assyria, Israel would go to Egypt looking for help instead of just trusting God for help.
25:53
SPEAKER_00: And so God's heart is broken, he's wooing her, but she still sneaks out at night.
25:57
SPEAKER_00: She's still going and she's having affairs, she prostitutes herself, and finally, God at the end, close to the end of this chapter, he says, and so I finally decided I have to judge you.
26:06
SPEAKER_00: This is about 600 BC, he's predicting the final fall of Jerusalem in 10 years.
26:11
SPEAKER_00: I've got to hand you over to them, your lovers, like Babylon.
26:14
SPEAKER_00: You're gonna have to bear the consequences.
26:16
SPEAKER_00: But then he can't stop himself.
26:18
SPEAKER_00: He says, I love you so much.
26:19
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna establish an everlasting covenant with you.
26:21
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna grab you back one day, and you will then know.
26:25
SPEAKER_00: Finally, what will you know?
26:28
SPEAKER_00: The single most important fact that he wants everyone to know that I am the Lord.
26:33
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't look like it today.
26:36
SPEAKER_00: You're in Babylon, but I want you to know I love you that much.
26:40
SPEAKER_00: I'm absolutely heartbroken and devoted to you.
26:43
SPEAKER_00: Do you guys feel this?
26:45
SPEAKER_00: Have you ever sensed how much God loves you?
26:48
SPEAKER_00: How much God's heart aches when you wander away from him, how desperately he wants you to come back to him.
26:54
SPEAKER_00: That's the kind of a God we have.
26:57
SPEAKER_00: So that's chapters 4 through 24.
27:00
SPEAKER_00: Why does he predict and accomplish the fall of his people?
27:02
SPEAKER_00: Why, why, why?
27:03
SPEAKER_00: Answer, you can say it with me, so that they will know that I am the Lord.
27:09
SPEAKER_00: And now he moves to, in the last half of the book, eight chapters of comfort.
27:13
SPEAKER_00: So there were these seven nations surrounding Israel who were mean to her, who insulted her, always made fun of her, who would come in and steal her cattle and do this and so forth.
27:23
SPEAKER_00: And now, thank you, Lord, he predicts and accomplishes the destruction of his enemies.
27:28
SPEAKER_00: He names these seven nations.
27:30
SPEAKER_00: Let me give you an example.
27:31
SPEAKER_00: You come to chapter 28, one of them, which is just north of Israel, is Lebanon.
27:36
SPEAKER_00: Uh, and one of the reasons, by the way, that it's so obvious that the Bible is accurate and inspired, is the name that he gives us is Sidon.
27:46
SPEAKER_00: This happens to be the only time in history that of the two cities, Tyre and Sidon, that Sidon was the stronger of the two cities.
27:52
SPEAKER_00: Rest of the Bible, it's always Tyre.
27:54
SPEAKER_00: But this is Sidon.
27:55
SPEAKER_00: By the way, beautiful.
27:56
SPEAKER_00: I've been to those cities and been to Beirut before the whole place was completely a mess.
28:00
SPEAKER_00: But now, this was a Sidon was this Phoenician city, and they would send down boats and they would raid Israel and they would cause all sorts of trouble.
28:08
SPEAKER_00: And so God's saying, I'm gonna destroy your enemies too.
28:12
SPEAKER_00: So he says, Son of man, Ezekiel, turn your face toward Sidon and prophesy against it.
28:17
SPEAKER_00: Say, this is what the Lord God says.
28:19
SPEAKER_00: Ezekiel 28, 20 to 24.
28:21
SPEAKER_00: Look, I'm against you, Sidon.
28:23
SPEAKER_00: And he backs off and he says, Ezekiel, they will know that I am Yahweh.
28:28
SPEAKER_00: When I execute judgments against her, I'm gonna send a plague against her, bloodshed in her streets, slain will fall, sword against her, then they will know.
28:37
SPEAKER_00: God cares that the world knows.
28:39
SPEAKER_00: God cares that Ted Turner knows, God cares that CNN knows, God cares that ISIS knows, God cares that Malaysia knows, God cares that the whole world knows that he and he alone is the sovereign God.
28:53
SPEAKER_00: He really wants everybody to know that.
28:56
SPEAKER_00: And then he says, you know, the house of Israel will no longer be hurt by the insults, by the prickly briars or painful thorns from all their neighbors who treat them with contempt.
29:05
SPEAKER_00: Wouldn't that be nice?
29:06
SPEAKER_00: Then they will know that I am the Lord Yahweh.
29:10
SPEAKER_00: Three times in four verses.
29:13
SPEAKER_00: Why is it that God predicts and accomplishes even the destruction of his enemies so that even they will know that I am the Lord?
29:23
SPEAKER_00: Sovereign God, chapters 33 through 39.
29:26
SPEAKER_00: By the way, this book just gets happier and happier as you get to the end.
29:29
SPEAKER_00: Sovereign God is going to bring to life the dead bones of his people.
29:32
SPEAKER_00: You know this story, don't you?
29:34
SPEAKER_00: Of them bones, dim bones, dim dry bones.
29:37
SPEAKER_00: Well, as you lead into this story, in the most famous verse in the book, just a few verses before the story of bones and dry bones, God says this in Ezekiel 36, 26.
29:50
SPEAKER_00: I will give you a new heart, put a new spirit within you.
29:54
SPEAKER_00: I'll remove your heart of stone, give you a heart of flesh.
29:58
SPEAKER_00: God's gonna be a heart surgeon.
30:00
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
30:01
SPEAKER_00: And by the way, I like the New Living Translation here.
30:03
SPEAKER_00: He says, I'll take out your stony, stubborn heart and give you a tender, responsive heart.
30:11
SPEAKER_00: Every mommy wishes she could do this with her kids.
30:14
SPEAKER_00: You know, I'll take out that stony, stubborn heart.
30:17
SPEAKER_00: And that's what God says.
30:18
SPEAKER_00: He cares about us like his children, and he wants us to have this kind of a heart.
30:22
SPEAKER_00: And he says, just a few verses later, I'm gonna act in the verses 20 to 23.
30:28
SPEAKER_00: It's not for your sake I'm gonna act, O house of Israel.
30:32
SPEAKER_00: This is for my holy name.
30:33
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna honor the holiness of my name.
30:35
SPEAKER_00: What are you gonna do, God?
30:37
SPEAKER_00: What are you gonna do?
30:38
SPEAKER_00: Ho ho ho, he says, you just wait.
30:41
SPEAKER_00: So he plucks Ezekiel up and he drops him into this strange scene, a valley of bones.
30:47
SPEAKER_00: The hand of the Lord's on me, Ezekiel 37, 1.
30:50
SPEAKER_00: He brought me out by his spirit, set me down in the middle of the valley, and it was full of bones.
30:55
SPEAKER_00: And they were very dry.
30:57
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I've never referred to bones as dry.
30:59
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I don't know, did he feel them?
31:01
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I don't understand the whole.
31:03
SPEAKER_00: But anyway, dry bones, dry bones.
31:06
SPEAKER_00: And he sent to me, good and God, he's wandering around in the bones.
31:09
SPEAKER_00: Ezekiel's picking his way, and God goes, Can these bones live?
31:13
SPEAKER_00: I love Ezekiel's response, very politically correct.
31:16
SPEAKER_00: He goes, only you know, Lord.
31:18
SPEAKER_00: Pop out, you know.
31:20
SPEAKER_00: Maybe so, maybe not.
31:22
SPEAKER_00: You tell me.
31:23
SPEAKER_00: So God says, Yeah, and you know what I want you to do?
31:27
SPEAKER_00: He says to Ezekiel, I want you to preach to the bones.
31:32
SPEAKER_00: Now that had to be interesting.
31:34
SPEAKER_00: I mean, can you imagine if he hadn't told Ezekiel what to say?
31:37
SPEAKER_00: I can see Ezekiel setting up going, I hope I preach better than you look, you know.
31:45
SPEAKER_00: Or uh nice to see you all here today.
31:47
SPEAKER_00: When I was young, you know, when I was in you know early days of preaching here at TBC, I'd go out in the backyard and I'd preach to the trees.
31:54
SPEAKER_00: Billy Graham, by the way, when he got his start, he'd preach to the alligators in the swamp out behind his house in Florida.
32:00
SPEAKER_00: But preaching to dry bones, that's a little weird.
32:04
SPEAKER_00: But fortunately, God gave Ezekiel the words to say, so Ezekiel just had to preach God's message.
32:10
SPEAKER_00: This is what the Lord God says to these bones.
32:12
SPEAKER_00: And so Ezekiel's looking at the bones, goes, I will put breath in you so that you will come to life.
32:18
SPEAKER_00: Then you will, you can repeat this out to me, then you will know that I am Yahweh, I am the Lord.
32:24
SPEAKER_00: And then, all of a sudden, I've had weird things happen as I preached in church.
32:30
SPEAKER_00: I've had noises, you know, obviously crying babies, people fainting.
32:33
SPEAKER_00: One guy fainted, hit his head on the pew so loud, you know, we all jumped five feet, you know.
32:40
SPEAKER_00: But uh anyway, but there's the noise he hears is really weird.
32:44
SPEAKER_00: There was, so if you really want to freak me out, someday bring some dry bones and start rattling them.
32:50
SPEAKER_00: There's a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together bone to bone.
32:54
SPEAKER_00: And as I look, tendons appeared on them, flesh screw, and skin cover this.
32:57
SPEAKER_00: So so they get, so they they become skeletons, and and then there's flesh and everything, but they're still not alive, which is, I told you it's a sci-fi movie, iRobot, you know, all of that stuff.
33:08
SPEAKER_00: So, okay, here we are.
33:10
SPEAKER_00: And then you have, and then God says, Well, they're not living, so I want you to predict again that that they're gonna have breath in them, and and so then a wind blows, and then we read, then breath entered them, and they came to life and stood on their feet.
33:22
SPEAKER_00: And this is kind of interesting to me.
33:24
SPEAKER_00: You have this two-step process where the bones come together in step one, and then step two, the breath.
33:29
SPEAKER_00: And I I wonder sometimes, I think it might be true, that what God's wanting us to know here in you know, the year 2015, uh, step one of Israel gaining new life is that the bones come together.
33:43
SPEAKER_00: And they've been coming together in the land of Israel since the late 1800s, you know, Jews flooding back into the land, especially, you know, after Israel was given statehood in 1948.
33:53
SPEAKER_00: But let's be honest, Israel is not spiritually alive.
33:57
SPEAKER_00: I mean, Jews for Jesus has had a campaign, you know, on the coast just north of Gaza and Ashkelon and so forth the last couple of weeks, and and Jews are coming to Christ, but they come to Christ by the ones and twos, which is more than by the zeros 20 years ago.
34:12
SPEAKER_00: But so the things are happening in Israel, but the nation spiritually is not alive.
34:17
SPEAKER_00: The vast majority are agnostics and they're or they're atheists, okay?
34:21
SPEAKER_00: Or or and the others, you know, do not believe in Jesus the Messiah.
34:26
SPEAKER_00: So, so they need life.
34:29
SPEAKER_00: And so it makes sense to me that perhaps we have a two-step process, and we know, biblically speaking, that one day Christ will appear and Israel will look upon him whom they pierced, and they will mourn, and it says in Romans 11, and all Israel will be saved.
34:44
SPEAKER_00: And breath will enter them, and they will come to life and stand on their feet.
34:48
SPEAKER_00: So that may be what this refers to.
34:51
SPEAKER_00: And a few verses later, God says, I want you to tell Israel this I'll put my spirit in you and you will live, and I'll settle you in your own land, and then you will know that I am Yahweh.
35:03
SPEAKER_00: I have spoken and I will do it.
35:06
SPEAKER_00: I have a question for you.
35:08
SPEAKER_00: Why will sovereign God bring to life the dead bones of his people?
35:14
SPEAKER_00: He answers that question in this way.
35:17
SPEAKER_00: He says, so that they, my people, will know that I am the Lord.
35:22
SPEAKER_00: And then the last section, I won't spend any time here.
35:25
SPEAKER_00: It's this amazing section where he says he predicts the kingdom and says, Sovereign God will one day bring a new age for his people when he'll live with them in glory, and he talks in detail about a rebuilt temple in the New Jerusalem and so forth.
35:40
SPEAKER_00: But why will God do that?
35:41
SPEAKER_00: And the answer again is so that they will know that I am the Lord.
35:46
SPEAKER_00: Dear friends, do you get the message of this book?
35:49
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it may be a weird book.
35:51
SPEAKER_00: He may be a kooky prophet, but we haven't a loop the solution, the answer, the key to this book, and it's so important that everybody in the world needs to hear it, especially Christians.
36:02
SPEAKER_00: And God ends the book by saying, you need to know that soon all the world's going to see it and going to know it, because every knee will one day bow and every tongue will confess that what?
36:13
SPEAKER_00: Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.
36:19
SPEAKER_00: One day the whole world will know, and God wants that so badly, and the only question left is do you understand it?
36:27
SPEAKER_00: Do you understand, as James Russell Lowell wrote over a hundred years ago, truth seems today forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne, and yet that scaffold sways the future.
36:39
SPEAKER_00: Christ on the cross sways the future, and behind the dim unknown stands God within the shadow.
36:49
SPEAKER_00: The preponderance of evidence is the other way.
36:52
SPEAKER_00: He's in the shadow, keeping watch above his own.
36:57
SPEAKER_00: A movie a few years ago pictured this, I thought, wonderfully, in which the movie maker asked us to imagine a world in which everything we saw was unreal, was untrue.
37:08
SPEAKER_00: The world he called was called the Matrix.
37:11
SPEAKER_00: And in that movie, uh, sort of the guy who was the leader of the rebel forces, guy on the left there, Morpheus, is talking with a new possible recruit named Neil.
37:22
SPEAKER_00: And he says to Neil, the Matrix, he says, is everywhere.
37:27
SPEAKER_00: It's all around us.
37:29
SPEAKER_00: Even now in this very room, it's what you see when you look out your window, it's what you see when you turn on the television, it's what you see when you go to work.
37:36
SPEAKER_00: It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
37:41
SPEAKER_00: In other words, what you see is not the way it really is behind the scenes.
37:47
SPEAKER_00: And he gives Neo a choice between a red pill and a blue pill.
37:52
SPEAKER_00: Take the blue pill, he says, you'll wake up, forget all about this meeting, and you can go ahead and live in this world where the things appear to be just fine.
38:04
SPEAKER_00: And it'll be the easier life for you if you do this.
38:09
SPEAKER_00: That's not the real world.
38:12
SPEAKER_00: If you take the red pill, you'll suddenly understand you'll be in the world of reality.
38:17
SPEAKER_00: It'll be a much harder life.
38:19
SPEAKER_00: Listen, dear friends, Ezekiel is the red pill.
38:23
SPEAKER_00: Ezekiel says what you see today in the world abroad, in America, perhaps even in your own life recently, in your finances or in your family or in your health, what you see is not really the way it is, because what you see is that God is not in control.
38:41
SPEAKER_00: Someone else, or maybe blind chance is in control.
38:44
SPEAKER_00: That's not really the truth.
38:46
SPEAKER_00: Take the red pill, take Ezekiel, understand that behind the scenes, and eventually everyone will know that I am the Lord.
38:55
SPEAKER_00: And my son is the King of Kings.
38:59
SPEAKER_00: In my favorite set of books, Lord of the Rings, you get almost to the end thinking, you know, that this ranger, that this guy named Strider, that that's what he is.
39:08
SPEAKER_00: He's just a really cool guy.
39:11
SPEAKER_00: He sort of wears rags, and then all of a sudden at the end, you see the real truth that all along he has been a descendant of Alessar, the great king, and he is revealed as Aragorn, the great king.
39:24
SPEAKER_00: That's going to happen one day.
39:26
SPEAKER_00: Jesus Christ, who has always appeared as the servant of servants, upon whom people spit and stand, the one they can crucify, his followers' heads can be sliced off with impunity, but one day he will rise and he will reveal himself.
39:44
SPEAKER_00: God his father will reveal him as the King of kings and the Lord of Lords.
39:48
SPEAKER_00: And God says today, would you take the red pill?
39:51
SPEAKER_00: Would you believe, please, ahead of time, that I am the Lord, though all evidence points to the contrary.
40:03
SPEAKER_00: From his lips this morning to your heart, how about you?
40:10
SPEAKER_00: Do you know, he asked, that I am the Lord?
40:18
SPEAKER_00: Do you bow your head with me in a word of prayer, will you?
40:22
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to give you a chance to talk to God about this, to take that act of faith.
40:29
SPEAKER_00: It's easy to say he's sovereign, that he's Lord, to sing the songs you are Lord when you're on this side of the stained glass.
40:37
SPEAKER_00: But when you're in the world, when you're out there this week, will you be bold enough?
40:44
SPEAKER_00: Will you have faith enough to truly believe despite the evidence, despite what you see on television?
40:53
SPEAKER_00: Will you believe that He is the sovereign Lord, that He is in control of the world at the end of your life?
41:02
SPEAKER_00: If you're here not knowing whether or not you're really, say, on God's side, what you think of Jesus, the Nazarene, the stories of Christmas and Easter.
41:13
SPEAKER_00: Stop there, start there.
41:15
SPEAKER_00: Look at those stories, please.
41:18
SPEAKER_00: See that God sent his son Jesus for you to save you, to bring you to himself, so that then you can open your eyes and see him as the King and as the sovereign Lord.
41:35
SPEAKER_00: All God's people said, Amen.