So I lifted up my eyes toward the north and behold, north of the altar gate, the entrance, was this image of jealousy. And he said to me, son of man, do you see what they are doing, the great abominations that the house of Israel are committing here to drive me far from my sanctuary? you will see greater abominations still. And he brought me to the entrance of the court. And when I looked, behold, there was a hole in the wall. And he said to me, send a man and dig in the wall. So I dug in the wall, and behold, there was an entrance. And he said to me, go in and see the vile abominations that they are committing here. So I went in and saw there a grave on the wall, all around was every form of creeping things and loads of beasts and all the idols of the house of Israel. And before them stood 70 men of the elders of the house of Israel, with Jazaniah, the son of Shaphan, standing among them. Each had his censer in his hand, and smoke and a cloud of incense went up. Then he said to me, Son of man, have you seen what the elders of the house of Israel are doing in the dark, each in his room of pictures? For they say, The Lord does not see us, the Lord has forsaken the land. He said also to me, You will see still greater abominations that they commit. Then he brought me to the entrance of the north gate of the house of the Lord, and behold, there sat Winn weeping for Tammuz. Then he said to me, Have you seen these and he brought me into the inner court of the house of the Lord and behold at the entrance of the temple of the Lord between the porch of the altar were about 25 men with their backs to the temple of the Lord and their faces toward the east worshiping Is it too light a thing for the house of Judah to commit the abominations that they commit here, that they should fill the land with vines and provoke me still further to anger? Behold, they put the branch to their nose. Therefore, I will act in wrath. My eye will not spare, nor will I have pity. And though they cry in my ears with a loud voice, I will not hear them." And that's where we will end our reading today. Well, let's just get right into it, shall we? A lot to look at here this morning. Go back to Ezekiel 6. This is two chapters ago. It first introduced to us in the book of Ezekiel an idea of idolatry. And idolatry becomes probably the most foundational reason that God was so angry with Israel that he would, as it says in chapter seven, send the worst of the nations, totally given over to idol worship themselves, to destroy his own people. In chapter six, we saw him understanding the earliest of the Ten Commandments, is foundational to any discussion of idolatry. And yet curiously the word used for an idol in what we call the second commandment, the word is a pestle or a carved image, it's actually not used by Ezekiel even a single time even though he focuses many chapters on idolatry. Instead, he opts for words like giluleme, a detestable thing, or a dung idol, or a simul, a kind of a cultic object, or a toiva, an abomination, that word appears in our passage today. or a zana, which means to be unfaithful, each of which take us beyond the mere house of an idol, the vessel that we call the card image or statue, and it takes us to the entity behind those things. And this reflects, I believe, a fundamental interplay in the first two commandments that we looked at briefly just a couple of chapters ago. So I want to return to that discussion of the 10 commandments because it's important for helping us truly understand why God is so angry in this important transitionary chapter in Ezekiel 8. Now, all I'm going to do here is simply notice the words of the text in Exodus 20 and how they form a single literary unit that helps us understand the interplay between these two commandments. So first, what the scripture itself identifies, not as the 10 commandments, but as the 10 words, that's what they're called, it emphasizes their covenantal weight. And that covenantal weight begins with the words, I am the Lord your God. Now the second commandment ends, for I am the Lord your God, creating a symmetry between these two things. The Lord brought them out of the house of slavery, says I am the Lord who brought you out of the house of slavery. And the Lord will then, in the second commandment, visit the houses of the fathers and children for those who love sin or love him. Then the first commandment says, you shall have no other gods or Elohim before me. Now just prior to identifying himself again as the Lord your God, the second commandment says, you shall not bow down to them or serve them. So think about this. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not bow down to them or serve them. These are complementary in the way that they're written together. Ordinarily, I think this is thought to refer to idols. Don't bow down or serve idols, pestle, carved images. But in the literary structure, it actually refers to the gods, to the Elohim. And so in the center of the commandment you have, you shall not make for yourself a carved image or any likeness. And then it gives a threefold description of what is in heaven and on earth and below the earth. Now what's so interesting is when you start with, I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the house of Israel, and you end at the end of the second commandment, you have an incredibly beautiful symmetry of time, person, and place in this order. It goes from the time, the past, to the present, to the future. The person is me, and then you, and then them, and the place is above, and then here, and then below. And you only get this symmetry if you read all of this together. Now I believe that this helps to explain why Ezekiel does not use the word translated as an idol in the second commandment because too many people get confused here and they think that the sin in the commandment is merely making a statue of something. It isn't. There's much more going on in the Sinai idolatry and at the heart of it is the worship of real created beings. In the context of the sins of Israel, there seems to have been subtle excuses that they used to justify their treachery against God who brought them into covenant with himself. And this gets to the heart of all forms of treachery against God that those in covenant with him to this day can find themselves wandering into as well. So I'm gonna try and give you just a brief grasp of where we're at in Ezekiel's prophecy. Ezekiel is an amazing writer. We saw early on that the first 11 chapters form a unit of thought and chapter 8 and chapter 9 together are the central unit of that thought so they become the focal point. So this is in some ways the most important part of the first 11 chapters that we will look at this week and then we'll look at next week. Now you can make an argument that chapters 8 and 11, 8 through 11, are tied together through the movement of Ezekiel, where he goes outside the temple into the inner courts, and then the Holy Spirit's movement from the inner sanctum to outside the temple. You can make an argument that chapters eight and nine are also chiastically tied together through judgment. But today we're only going to look at chapter eight. And you can read it three different ways. You can read it as a linear progression like an outline with an introduction that then has four progressively worsening sins. with the conclusion of judgment. You can also read that as a chiasm with an ABCCBA pattern where the first and last sins of the four describe idolatry at the outer court and then the inner court, while the middle two sins contrast hidden and public sins. And then finally, this all lends itself nicely to a three-column weave, which is the way that I've written it out for you on the first page of your PDF, where Ezekiel is brought somewhere, then he sees a particularly vile act that violates the first word, or the first two commandments, and then God says, you will see greater abominations. And this repeats itself four times. different times. So each of these is a legitimate way to think about the passage and each one reveals their own unique insights. The most important thing I can tell you I believe about our chapter is how there is a progression of the movement of the prophet from outside the temple to the inner court So from common to secular space, or secular space into the most holy place. And as he moves this way, as he goes from outside to the inside of the temple, there's a progression of sin that mirrors his movement as each one gets progressively worse. So the closer he gets to the center of the temple, the worse the sins become. And this is a powerful way of illustrating both how sinful humans can actually be and how God views those sins apart from union with Christ and being forgiven by his blood. So perhaps a way to set up the chapter best is by noticing the chapter's first two verses, which give the setting, and then they show us a glimpse of the God of Israel in some really fascinating ways, and then we'll see how the sins of the people involve the worship of the creation in various forms and aspects, while at least some of the people were trying to justify all of this as totally compatible with the worship of Israel's God, which I know is, kind of hard to even believe until you start to look at the corrupt worship of the church today and you realize, frankly, there's nothing new under the sun. Now I'm going to come back to all that, of course, at the end. So we begin. In verse 1, chapter 8, with the first mention of a specific time frame since the first two verses of the book. It is the sixth year, the sixth month, and the fifth day of the month. So roughly 14 months since the book began, we're somewhere around August 18th through 20th in 592 BC. That's pretty approximate, isn't it? It's around five to six years before Nebuchadnezzar will sack Jerusalem. The prophet is sitting in his house, he's in Babylon. He's been deported there probably five years earlier and now the elders of Judah are sitting before him. Clearly they want to hear a word from the prophet who hasn't said a whole lot up to this point because he's just been doing all these silent sign acts. They want to hear a word from him and thus obviously from the Lord and so it says, the hand of the Lord God fell upon me there. Now I think this is a fascinating phrase. It typically introduces us to a divine vision or a revelation. But is there something more than just a figure of speech going on here? Let's look at verse two. It helps us answer the question. Then I looked and behold a form that had the appearance of a man. Below what appeared to be his waist was fire, and above his waist was something like the appearance of brightness, like gleaming metal. So Ezekiel is clearly describing the same figure that he saw at the end of chapter one. It was God embodied in the form of a man. Do you remember that? Climax of chapter one. But this time, rather than using the word Adam, he uses the word Ish. Both are translated as man. This is a word though that humans and angels share in common. Either way, this person clearly has an actual hand. And so it seems to me that the Lord's hand being upon Ezekiel is both a figure of speech and it's literal. In fact, let's keep reading. He put out the form of a hand and took me by a lock of my head. Now, ouch. He didn't lead him around by the hand, he didn't take, okay Ezekiel, let's grab your hand and let's walk around, no. He forced him up from his seat by pulling his hair. Have you ever had somebody do that to you? Remember in the Lords of the Rings? Not the beard! Ezekiel is clearly being forced by a powerful being to go somewhere with great urgency. But let's clarify just who this is that's pulling him up by the hair. It says, and the Spirit lifted me up between earth and heaven and brought me in visions of God to Jerusalem. Now this is very interesting. We might have expected it to be an angel or perhaps even the shining man himself, but it says the Spirit lifted him up. Some of you ask me when we talk about two powers in heaven, where's the Holy Spirit in all this? Here's one of the great places that you can see him. This refers to the Holy Spirit right here in the Old Testament. So yes, it's God, but here we have both the second person, the man sitting on the throne, and the third persons of the Trinity sharply in view together. The language is truly fascinating, much like it is when Moses asks to see God's face. And when you read through the whole dialogue, you're left wondering, well, who in the world did he see? The he put out the form of a hand is clearly the angel, the word, Christ, the second person, and yet it's the spirit who lifted him up, which implies that he put out his hand and pulled Ezekiel up by the hair. So did Christ lift him up or did the spirit lift him up? The answer is yes. Dr. Heiser, who probably better than anyone else, helped us see Christ in these passages, would often go to this one to help them see the same wild language that often is associated with the Father and Son elsewhere, is here associated with the Son and the Spirit. This is what he says. We have a blurring of language about Yahweh in the form of a man, Yahweh embodied, but here it's the Spirit. The Spirit's the one doing the lifting with his hand. So we actually have the spirit described in the same way we would expect the second Yahweh figure to be described, but this time it's the Holy Spirit. We actually see this blurring again in verse six. Then he said to me, and then it refers to the temple that he shows Ezekiel, calling it my sanctuary. Whose sanctuary? Is it God's sanctuary? Is it Christ's? Is it the Spirit's? And the answer is yes. It's just that whereas we normally see this interchange in the Old Testament between Father and Son, now the Spirit comes in, which I think is appropriate, since the Spirit's present fills the temple and will become the glory cloud that leaves it in the next couple of chapters. This is the beauty of the biblical triune God. What is said of one can be said of all three because they are one in divine essence and nature. They are the one true God. They can all speak as one, as I, because there's only one God of Israel. Mind-blowing stuff. Now it's very important to establish this because everything else in the chapter is going to contrast with him. God is the God of Israel, but something profoundly terrible has been brewing in a kind of witch's cauldron back home in Jerusalem, and it's brewing in the very temple of God. It begins with the first of four places that Ezekiel is brought to in his vision. It says, and he brought me in visions of God to Jerusalem to the entrance of the gateway of the inner court that faces north. Now, first of all, north will appear three more times in verse 5 and again in verse 14. North, as we saw previously, is the direction of evil in the Bible. Evil comes from the north. In this case, it's the direction of the invading Assyrian who came 120 years earlier as he brought his pagan worship to Israel. North is the direction of the tribe of Dan that he lived in as he brought the corrupt worship of the Lord in the days of Jeroboam. And north is the direction of Mount Hermon in the divine council of El with his consort Asherah. North is also the word Zephan, which is the exact same name given to the mountain of Baal in Syria. Here, Ezekiel stands at the entrance of the northern gateway of the inner court, so still they're in the courtyard, and it says that there was the seat of the image of jealousy, which provokes to jealousy. So the word jealousy, it's much more than a song by Natalie Merchant or Olivia Rodrigo. And some of you are saying, did he just quote Olivia Rodrigo? And you would say, you don't do that because you don't know who she is. And I say, yes, I do. And I also know that the song is actually called Jealousy, Jealousy. And only Natalie Merchant had a song called Jealousy. Are you going to remember Jealousy now? That's my point. The word takes us right back to the commandments and God being a jealous God, remember? I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity. We saw there that this referred not merely to the carved image by itself, but to the Elohim, the gods that were made to reside therein. God can't be jealous of something that doesn't exist. So what is the image that is called the image of jealousy? Well, it's likely an idol or an asherah pole associated with the Canaanite goddess. Asherah, who's the consort of the Canaanite father god El, which is why I brought up Mount Hermon a moment ago in his divine council mountain. The Hebrew word for an image here is Semel, which refers to a sculpted or a carved object. It's often a graven image of a deity, which you can see in other places in the Old Testament. where, for example, it's linked to Manasseh's Asherah idol in 2 Chronicles. Now, Manasseh was the son of Hezekiah and he was the most evil king of them all until he repented and turned to the Lord in faith after God handed him over to the Assyrian, the Babylonian in exile. The things that Manasseh did were so outrageous that they have never been heard of in Israel's long sordid history, even to that day. It's worth reading a short biography from the book of Kings. He rebuilt the high places that Hezekiah, his father, had destroyed, and he erected altars for Baal and made an Asherah. as Ahab, king of Israel, had done, and worshipped all the hosts of heaven and served them. And he built the altars in the house of the Lord, of which the Lord had said, in Jerusalem I will put my name. And he built altars for all the hosts of heaven in the two courts of the house of the Lord. And he burned his son as an offering, and used fortune-telling and omens, and dealt with mediums and with necromancers. He did much evil in the sight of the Lord, provoking him to anger. and the carved image of Asherah that he made, he set in the house which the Lord said to David and to Solomon his son, in this house, in Jerusalem, which I have chosen out of all the tribes of Israel, I will put my name forever. And I will not cause the feet of Israel to wander any more out of the land that I gave to their fathers, if only they will be careful to do according to all that I have commanded them and according to all the law that my servant Moses commanded them. But they did not listen, and Manasseh led them astray to do more evil than the nations had done, whom the Lord destroyed before the people of Israel. Manasseh lived after the Assyrian captivity that had taken the entire northern kingdom. And yet even though God had predicted exactly what would happen, telling the people why they were being judged, Manasseh followed in their ways. Now it's easy to just scoff him off as a fool, thereby missing the subtlety of his sin. If you do that, you might just find that you haven't actually learned a thing from his life. You must understand the political pressures upon him because he was now a vassal servant of the Assyrian kings, Ezra Hardin and Ashurbanipal. Assyrian records tell us that he was required, with 22 other kings, to provide materials for a palace in Nineveh that he assisted in the campaign against Egypt. He was captured and brought to Babylon. All of this suggests that his corrupt worship was deeply politically motivated. He was trying to look good and win favor with the lords of the earth rather than with the Lord of heaven and earth. And his compromise led him into profound worship disaster that eventually brought Babylon down on his own nation in the days of Ezekiel. But even though Josiah had destroyed the Asherah that Manasseh made in a last ditch effort to seek forgiveness from the Lord, his successors put another one right back up and they did it in the provocative site near the temple's altar in the entrance of the northern gate of Yahweh's temple. The word jealousy reminds us of the commandment, but the Septuagint translates it as the image of the buyer, which could mean a creatress, showing that this symbol, whether it's a phallic pole or a statue of a goddess, was now being viewed alongside of the Lord, just as the consort Asherah was with the Canaanite father El. We might think of her not as a rival to God in their thinking, but to use the language of the blasphemies of Rome as a kind of co-redemptrix, as they call Mary, who likewise in their system shares glory with Jesus. Note, in neither case is this the abandonment of the worship of the true God, it's adding to it with something that makes God jealous. Let's think about jealousy for a moment. I thought jealousy was a sin. Paul has it in the list of vices in Galatians 5. The 10th commandment is, you shall not covet, which of course has jealousy at its core. Yet here, the idea is that you want something that isn't yours, that you can't have. That's sinful jealousy that has selfishness and lack of love for others at its core. But this is not what God's jealousy is about. As C.J. Scott says, God's jealousy speaks of his zeal for his own glory and his ways and his people. God is fiercely protective and unaccepting of disloyalty. If Israel is his bride and she cheats on him, it would be a sin for him not to be jealous, figuratively speaking, for he does not share glory with others, especially when it comes to the people with whom he has entered into a covenantal relationship. There is a proper jealousy, even for humans, and we are to emulate God's zeal for God's holiness and glory. Anything less for us is idolatry. Now I want you to notice how glory becomes the very theme of verse four. Behold, the glory of the God of Israel was there, like the vision I saw in the valley. So it's very, very important because it establishes that the glory of God, which came down and filled the temple when Solomon dedicated it, is still there. In a word, the glory of God is God, but we'll save more of this for chapters 10 and 11 when the glory leaves. The point here is, as of right this moment, God and his glory has not left the temple. He's still there, and yet Israel is committing adultery with the goddess while Yahweh's in the room next door. This all repeats itself in verse five when the spirit says, then he said to me, son of man, lift up your eyes now toward the north. So I lifted up my eyes to the north and behold, north of the altar gate at the entrance was this image of jealousy. Now we've thought much about what's going on here, but we need to see God's verdict of the matter, which is verse six. He said to me, son of man, do you see what they're doing? The great abominations that the house of Israel are committing here to drive me far from my sanctuary. But you will see still greater abominations. And this foreshadows that the Lord is getting ready to leave his temple. But first, Ezekiel must see more. Because as bad as this Asherah was, he's going to give three more examples of what was happening in Jerusalem in the Lord's temple, and each one gets progressively worse. Now, in Canaanite lore, Asherah was the mother of the 70 sons of God, gods like Yam and Baal. Enter our second of the four great abominations in this chapter. It begins in verse seven when Ezekiel is brought to the entrance of the court. So, he's moving in closer to the center of the temple complex. He looks and he sees a hole in the wall. This refers to the wall, presumably the north wall, of the actual temple building itself, but not the wall that directly guards the holy place. Instead, you had around that, on three sides, a wall that guarded the holy place. It was a three-story wall around that central structure that was for storage. where priests had living quarters. It would have been a simple thing, especially since no one else was allowed inside, to repurpose any of these spaces for more nefarious purposes. And the Spirit told Ezekiel, Son of man, dig in the wall. So I dug in the wall, and behold, there was an entrance. So Ezekiel finds a secret entrance into this place in his vision that no one else was even aware of. And the spirit tells him, go in and see the vile abominations they are committing here. Notice, they're secret. As he goes in, he sees there, engraved on the wall all around was every form of creeping thing and loathsome beast and all the idols of the house of Israel. That language reminds me of the sins that God tells us the Gentiles commit in Romans 1, when it says they exchange the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. Now those things are not necessarily unclean, they're simply created creatures of all kinds that belong, properly speaking, down here to the earthly realm. Now here's where it starts to get interesting. It says, and before them stood 70 men of the elders of the house of Israel. Now, 70 elders of Israel, 70 is almost always associated in one way or another with the divine council. Those sons of Asherah that I just talked about a moment ago, those entities that God gave the nations over to in Deuteronomy 32. And of course, we've just seen Asherah herself in the previous abomination. So now this, it's like resembling her 70 children. But these are the 70 elders of Israel. They're humans. They're distinct from the elders of Judah who are sitting at Ezekiel's feet in Babylon. Because these guys are in Jerusalem. They probably just simply were not deported. They were left to remain behind to continue some form of government there. One of them is mentioned by name. His name is Jazaniah. His name is deeply ironic because it means something like, he will be heard of the Lord, or Jehovah hears, or Jehovah hearkens. Because he and his fellow elders are each one standing in a religious posture with a censer in their hand. It's a sign of sacred space and of worship. With the smoke of the cloud of incense going up. And when you have that activity, it was supposed to be reserved for priests, and it was to be done in very specific places as a pleasant aroma to the Lord, as a symbol of the glory cloud that filled the temple. But these are non-priests, and they're doing it in dark recesses of secret coves within the temple to creeping things and loathsome beasts and idols. One of you pointed out to me this week, Yaazan Yahu, which is his name in Hebrew, could be a wordplay on Safan, the north, and the divine council mountain, Baal. This is a creative way to think about Jazaniah as the leader of a false divine council, one that isn't even worshiping the heavenly host, like the pagans in Manasseh did, but it's worshiping the creeping things and the beasts of the earth. Although you can make a case that all those things were also depicting the gods in other places. But this becomes a greater abomination than Asherah, as it says. And let me give you some reasons why that would be. First, it now includes an entire pantheon of created beings rather than just one, Asherah. Second, they're clearly worshiping these entities as opposed to merely having a pole or a statue present. Third, these are so obviously not gods because they're earthly that it shows the absolute foolishness of what they're doing. And fourth and fifth, as we see in verse 12, they did it all in secret and each one in their own room. Look at what it says in verse 12, Then he said to me, Son, a man, have you seen what the elders of Israel are doing in the dark, each in his room of pictures? For they say the Lord does not see us. The Lord has forsaken the land. And there's the irony, because a man whose very name means the Lord hears, thinks that he's doing something in secret that God will not see. He's very mistaken. But if this is bad, God tells the prophet, you will see still greater abominations that they commit. And that takes us to the third of the four abominations. It begins in verse 14, where the spirit now brings the prophet to the entrance of the north gate of the house of the Lord. So that takes us even closer to the inner holy place than he's yet been. He's still on the north side, though, the direction of evil. And then it simply says, and behold, there sat women weeping for Tammuz. Now in your Bible, it's likely that Tammuz is capitalized. This is meant to reflect the Sumerian god, Tammuz, or Damuzi, as he's sometimes called. He may have been identical to Osiris in Egypt or Adonis in Greece, and aspects of him are found in Baal, though some think that he was one of the Genesis 6 heroes from before the flood. Whatever the case, this deity was first of all a shepherd god, as opposed to the god of farmers, and more importantly, he became the prototype of what they call the dying god. whose annual death and resurrection from the dead personified the yearly decay and revival of life in the springtime. He was thought to be held in the underworld and they mourned him because of his absence. There were actually many laments that we still have today that bewailed the far one who has disappeared, detained in the underworld. The Hebrew here has the Tammuz, and since proper names don't take the definite article, Heizer suggests it refers to a ritual religious act of weeping for the God. This seems to imply that at least these women believed that Yahweh was no longer there, so they've turned to the worship of the God who embodies new life in the springtime. But friends, we've seen God is there and he sees it all happening on his front porch. And then he says of this, like the others, have you seen this, O son of man? You will see still greater abominations than these. Now I want to ask, what would make this one greater than the Asherah or the perversion of the worship of even her sons by the 70? Well, this one hits closer to home than the other two in that there are two different ways that this could attack actually Yahweh himself. First, if it implies that they believe the Lord is gone, then they're utterly without faith and they've now totally turned to the worship of other deities in the Lord's house. Or perhaps they're now attributing elements of rising and dying to the God of Israel who has immortality. God doesn't die and rise each year. That's the seasons that do that and so they're blurring the attributes of God with the creation. And even more, it isn't difficult to think as a Christian that in fact Jesus is the only one who truly dies and rises and he only does this once. So in this act, they're actually stealing glory from the Son of God without even realizing it. Those are three ways in which this ritual act of weeping for a pagan God in the house of the Lord is worse than the other sins. And it isn't even in secret. It's right there in public, in the open, in the court of the temple. They aren't even hiding it. They have no shame. They don't even blush. So that makes it four ways that it's worse. And that brings us to the ultimate sin of the chapter. It occurs as the spirit brings Ezekiel into the inner court of the house of the Lord. So here he is now, right in front of the door to the holy place itself, the place where the priests are supposed to be offering sacrifices and washings for purification to the Lord. The place where, right inside, just behind the curtain, sits the glory of God himself, seated on the Ark of the Covenant. And behold, at the entrance of the temple of the Lord, between the porch and the altar, were about 25 men. Now, 25 is a curious number. Does it mean something? Well, I don't know. It's half a jubilee. We saw that jubilee hinted at in the previous chapter, that there would be no more of them. It's the age the priest began his ministry in Numbers 8. It's also the number that will appear in the vision of the restored temple in Ezekiel 40 through 48 several times. There could even be some astronomical connections, particularly with Babylon in the number. The point is, like 70, it appears to be highly symbolic of the temple, of the priest, of the calendar, and worship of the Lord. So what are they doing? They are doing the unthinkable with their backs to the temple of the Lord. Now, I don't know if you know this, but there were traditions in the Talmud that, for example, the high priest exited the Holy of Holies, when he went in there once a year, facing the ark, and then he backed out of it in order to avoid turning his back on God's presence. You don't turn your back on God, it is a great disrespect. But it was more than that, because it says their faces, they turned toward the east, worshiping the sun toward the east. Ezekiel says that right there, in the very doorway of the holy place, 25 men were facing the rising sun and worshiping it. God is incensed, and you'll see why I use that word in a moment. He asks Ezekiel, have you seen this, O son of man? Is it too light a thing for the house of Judah to commit the abominations that they commit here, that they should fill the land with violence and promote me still further to anger? God has already talked about this in the previous chapter, but now he adds, behold, they put the branch to the nose. Now you read that and you go, what in the world does that mean? Well, interpretations are actually all over the map. The Targum, though, translates it as a stench. And so Heizer speculates that in another of Ezekiel's euphemisms, rather than throwing around incense or a wave offering like you find in the law, the polite way to say this is that they were waving around their used toilet paper. in these branches. And yes, they use branch leaves for that. Ezekiel's never one to mince words, even if we don't repay him in kind in our translations. It's a very graphic way of saying this stinks. Now this time, after the full tour of the corruptions of the temple are complete, rather than say you will see still greater abominations, God says, therefore, I will act in wrath. This is the fourth and the final straw. They've turned their literal backs on God in order to worship the rising sun, which the temple only emulated in its eastern gate as a way of reflecting that heaven and earth are God's temple. What I mean is, the sun rises in the east, right? And then it moves into the west. And also, you enter the temple in the east and you move to the west, to the holy place. They're emulating each other. Waving around scatological toilet paper is the ultimate insult. They don't love the Lord. They don't even think He's there anymore. And they're treating His temple like an outhouse, literally. and spiritually, through all their idolatrous abominations and the worship of other gods. And thus, my eye will not spare, I will have no pity, and though they cry in my ears with a loud voice, I will not hear them." And guess what? That's how chapter 8 ends. On a note that you never hear anyone in churches say these days, when was the last time you heard a pastor say, don't bother praying, God won't hear you? Now, we may have reasons why we say such things, but in light of the disaster that has become so much of the modern church, from Rome to liberals to the train wreck that has become Big Eva, evangelicalism, we must listen to Ezekiel. It is incredibly easy to read things like we have just witnessed and say, yeah, those silly people, I'm glad we're not like them, but I must speak a little into what has happened in our day. from the reimagining conference in Minneapolis in 1993 that saw female mainline pastors chanting to the goddess Sophia using feminine pronouns for God and celebrating rituals of milk and honey in their gathering. to the prosperity gospel teaching that faith guarantees wealth, health, and success, to the lining of so many churches with the American flag, to the unchecked abuses of mariolatry and the divine feminine at Catholic retreat centers, to emergent churches incorporation of literal occult practices such as walking the labyrinth, to the woke church and its worship of moral relativism and sexual perversion, to many Christians that deeply confuse the church and America and Israel, to seeker churches redefining the word church altogether and incorporation of virtually anything in worship of God that they see as helpful to bringing in these seekers at any cost. We have lost our way. And I want you to understand something. It is very easy to pick on something like what you see in Ezekiel 8, or a king like Manasseh, or the goddess worship returning in our day, and not understand the subtlety of the enemy in bringing such things into God's worship. Because no one sits out to dethrone God at first. At least very few do. I suppose a couple of them out there do. But no, it's much more common that people simply compromise one little step at a time for reasons of political expedience, going along with the culture, or simply because they want to be liked as pastors. And it's a simple thing to convince yourself that what you're doing is actually perfectly fine with God. Well, look, El had a consort. God is called El, so let's just bring Asherah or Mary or Sophia in while we worship God. Why would he mind that? We need to get back to our Christian roots as a nation, so let's bring in that political candidate and have him speak about his platform for our morning service. Well, people are supposed to get saved by hearing the gospel at church, and no one's getting saved at church anymore, so let's bring more of them in with things that they will like. Well, God didn't really mean it trans-culturally when He talked about women pastors or homosexuality. Those are cultural conventions. Well, God wants you to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps and love one another. That's the gospel. Friend, that's good advice, and it's the law, but it's not the gospel. Love is not the gospel. The gospel is what Jesus did for you. We're so clever at how we decide to pervert God's worship. Forgetting that God's worship is not for us, it's for him. That's the whole point of this. God is so angry because he will not share his glory with anyone else, whether it's a fallen angel, or a representation of a man, or something in creation that he's made, or something that comes from our own imaginations. This is why he's gone to such great pains to not only detail how he wants to be worshiped, but to show how even his own people corrupted it, and how he finally dealt with it. But beloved, you need to know that even how God dealt with it here in the coming chapters, as just and holy and righteous as that was, it was not enough to solve the problem. The captivity of Judah did not solve their sin. The law won't solve our idol-prone wandering hearts, nor will judgment. The only way this problem can ultimately be solved is when sinners are arrested in their sin, stop dead in their tracks, and come face to face with the reality that our every thought is an idol factory in the flesh. by the law of God. Everything we do, ultimately, is to worship anything but God until we are convicted of our sins, brought to faith, and repent. And that's where we need the actual gospel, the real one, not the fake one. The gospel is that God loves you through Christ and sent his son to die, not that you love one another. At the end of the day, the glory due to God alone was meant to be funneled through His Son, who's the only dying and rising God that forgives sin through His death and brings justification and life through His resurrection. The Spirit of God is the only one who gets the glory for opening sinners' eyes to the reality that it is their hardened heart, and only He does that through the good news that no matter what you have done, you may be forgiven in Christ by turning to Him in faith. and believing that he loves you and that he took God's judgment on himself so that he might, in turn, through a free act of grace, give you his perfect righteousness as a way that God now views you. This good news is the only thing that is capable of continuing to keep Christians from turning down these dark paths too. You never graduate from needing to hear the gospel. It's only the free gospel of Jesus that tells you God the Father continues to forgive all your sins. And that judgment has fallen on Jesus once and for all. It's also incredibly unfair that Jesus would do that for you. Yet, this is the news that changes hearts and brings the worship of God back to order by causing us to want freely to read God's word again and to ask, well, what kind of worship does he in fact want? And what he wants first and foremost is worship that is of him alone, from our hearts, no rivals, no other gods before him. This is what Josiah found out. Remember, he goes into the temple, like in the dark recesses, and he finds this dusty book, and he, pfft, dust all over, and he opens it up, he's like, oh my goodness, it's the law of God. Imagine that scene. And he figured out, all the things that they were doing wrong and he repented of his own sin and he reformed Israel. God wants us to find our happiness in him alone. Find our purpose in him alone. Find our joy in him alone. Anything else ultimately brings judgment. I pray you can see just how angry God gets by worship that increasingly steals glory from him and the lengths that not only he went to to punish sinners that did these things, but also that he went to in order to save you from an even worse punishment. But make no mistake, if you will not turn to Christ, the anger and the wrath of God still abides on you. You have seen that he turned his back on his own people after they turned their back to him, and he would not listen to their prayers because they would not and did not repent of their sins. Do not do this, knowing that he has come to you with such good news as we find in the gospels, for that is the ultimate act of sacrilege, to turn your back on grace like that. Lord, I pray that you would help us to see the truth of Ezekiel 8 and that you would help us to see that it's not the end of the story, but the story takes us to the gospel and that that is the ultimate news that we need to hear. It's a very sharp edge to have to walk, thinking about your judgment in a passage like this, and trying not to soften it, but at the same time giving people hope. And I think that that is what the reformers were onto when they talked about the law and the gospel being totally different things. And here we're seeing the law come to fruition in their rebellious acts and what it deserves. And the good news is the only thing that solves that problem And Lord, it's about glorifying your Son, and I would pray that for every person hearing these words, you would arrest them in their own sins, cause them not to look out at other people, the people that have hurt them, the evil church that's out there, but to look first and foremost in their own heart, and to say, I have sinned against God, and I need to repent of that sin, and help them to know that you will listen to them and hear their prayer requests, no matter what they have done. because you are kind and merciful and you, Jesus took all of the judgment upon himself. There's nothing that we can do to be outside of that love, bar repenting of our sin and staying in the darkness. Bring people into the light by your word, show the glory of the gospel to them, open their hearts, shine the light inside so that these dark secret rooms that we all have might be exposed and that we might sanitize them with the light of the truth that we have seen today. We would pray that you would hear this prayer in Jesus' name, amen.