Ezekiel

July 23, 2017 Background Scripture: Ezekiel 1 – 3 Lesson Passage: Ezekiel 3:1 – 11 Oftentimes we are so caught up in Ezekiel’s ministry as a prophet that we rarely notice that he was initially a priest. As you might recall, these are two complementary but mutually exclusive ministries. As a priest, he represented the people’s interest before the altar of God. As a prophet, he spoke to the people as an ambassador of God. Although several individuals are presented in the scriptures who served in both offices—including Jesus—Ezekiel appears to be the only one whose ministry as a prophet supplanted or replaced his ministry as a priest. After the introductory statement in the book of Ezekiel which speaks of him as a priest, the remainder of the book details his prophetic ministry to the nation of Israel which had been taken into captivity. Jeremiah had been prophesying to the nation of Israel for over thirty years prior to Ezekiel receiving his call of God to be a prophet. Ezekiel was a contemporary of Jeremiah and, as such, he was also a witness and a recipient of the chastisement of God’s people. As with the other prophets, Ezekiel heard the voice of God and was given visions. Ezekiel’s visions and explanations have been at the center of many soul-winning revivals over the years. Like Jeremiah, Ezekiel spoke truth at a time when lying was popular. It appears that he accepted his calling at an older age than Jeremiah and while in exile or captivity rather than in Judah. Ezekiel was a member of one of the groups taken into captivity prior to the fall of the capitol city of Jerusalem. Jeremiah was left in the city and saw the fall and was taken from there into Egypt. Some of the images Ezekiel were given are still puzzling today and likely fall into the category of apocalyptic. Yet, God explained some of the images as to what they symbolize relative to the prophecy. Ezekiel described the anointing of God on him as “the hand of the Lord upon him”. God told Ezekiel about the nature of his assignment. The people Ezekiel would speak to were stubborn and rebellious. They were not going to listen to the prophet but the prophet had to prophesy to them anyway. He was told to not be afraid of them and to not be rebellious like them. God commissioned Ezekiel to declare His word to Israel even though they would not listen to or heed them. God showed Ezekiel a scroll and told him to eat it so that he would have the word of God in him. Then God sent Ezekiel to the house of Israel to speak His words to them. Ezekiel did not read and repeat recorded scriptures but was given a prophetic word directly from God for the nation. The eating of the scroll is all symbolic of Ezekiel consuming the word of God so that when he opened his mouth, then the word of God would come forth to the people. There should be no doubt as to where or who the word came from. This was important because it was at a time when many prophets were speaking and most of them were false prophets. When Ezekiel declared “The Lord said…” he did so with the anointing and power of God upon him. The hand of the Lord was upon Ezekiel. Robert C. Hudson June 7, 2017

Jeremiah

July 16, 2017 Background Scripture: Jeremiah 1 Lesson Passage: Jeremiah 1:4 – 10 At one point in his life, Jeremiah seems to have been the most unpopular of all of his contemporaries. The reason for this is quite simple: he spoke the truth when the people preferred to hear a lie. Many of his contemporaries told the people what they wanted to hear and Jeremiah refused to go along with it. He even became angry with God because when he told the people what God told him to say, it caused trouble for him. Jeremiah decided to not say anything to the people that God told him and he thought his life would be less complicated as a result of it. However, God’s calling upon Jeremiah’s life was too much and he could not ignore God’s voice or commission to prophesy. Jeremiah was called by God at a very young age. In fact, God told Jeremiah that his calling was established before he was born. Jeremiah was literally born to be God’s prophet to Israel during what would become one of the nation’s darkest times. The Bible does not give us the specific age Jeremiah was when he learned of his calling but the terms used to refer to Jeremiah suggest that he was either a teenager or a very young man. God informed Jeremiah that he had called and commissioned him before He formed him in his mother’s womb. Again, Jeremiah was born to do God’s bidding no matter how difficult the task would become. Whatever Jeremiah would suffer would be for God’s sake. God told Jeremiah to not be afraid to look the people in their faces and declare God’s word to them. God gave Jeremiah a sign of a boiling pot and told him what it meant. God was going to judge His people harshly for their unrepentant sin and Jeremiah was going to be an eyewitness to the judgment. Jeremiah does not appear to be a person who ever wrestled with whether God called him to be a prophet or not but instead he wrestled with whether he would be better off not doing God’s will. As was the case with the other prophets whose calling is detailed in the Bible, Jeremiah clearly heard God’s voice commission him for the work of prophecy and he was given visual signs to accompany the oral calling. Every prophecy God sent to Israel by the mouth of Jeremiah came to pass. The people hated the message but they could not deny that the future unfolded exactly as God declared it would through Jeremiah. This was probably of little consolation to Jeremiah because the fulfillment of the prophecies sometimes happened years later after he had endured much ridicule. And besides that, Jeremiah was an eyewitness of the account so that whatever Israel was suffering because of the oracle of God, Jeremiah had to live through as well. As a result of this, Jeremiah wept over Jerusalem as he witnessed the devastation that occurred. When you live through the pain, there is no room for “I told you so.” Jeremiah was ultimately vindicated by history because it unfolded according to the prophetic word he spoke. As an eyewitness, later he became popularly known as the weeping prophet of Israel. Robert C. Hudson May 26, 2017