The word of the Lord came to me, and you, O son of man, thus says the Lord God to the land of Israel, an end. The end has come upon the four corners of the land. Now the end is upon you, and I will send my anger upon you. I will judge you according to your ways, and I will punish you for all your abominations. And my eye will not spare you, nor will I have pity, but I will punish you for your ways. All your abominations are in your midst. Then you will know that I am the Lord. Thus says the Lord God, disaster after disaster. Behold, it comes. An end has come. The end has come. It has awakened against you. Behold, it comes. Your doom has come to you, O inhabitant of the land. The time has come. The day is near, a day of tumult and not of joyful shouting on the mountains. Now I will soon pour out my wrath upon you and spin my anger against you and judge you according to your ways, and I will punish you for all your abominations. And my eye will not spare, nor will I have pity. I will punish you according to your ways while your abominations are in your midst. Then you will know that I am the Lord who strikes. Behold the day, behold it comes. Your doom has come. The rod has blossomed. Pride has budded. Violence has grown up into a rod of wickedness. None of them shall remain, nor their abundance, nor their wealth, nor shall there be preeminence among them. The time has come. The day has arrived. Let not the buyer rejoice, nor the seller mourn, for wrath is upon all their multitude. For the seller shall not return to what he has sold while they live. For the vision concerns all their multitude. It shall not turn back, and because of his iniquity, none can maintain his life. They have blown the trumpet and made everything ready, but none goes to battle, for my wrath is upon all their multitude. The sword is without. Pestilence and famine are within. He who is in the field dies by the sword, and him who is in the city, famine and pestilence devour. If any survivors escape, they will be on the mountains like doves on the valley, all of them moaning, each over his own iniquity. All hands are feeble and all knees turn to water. They put on sackcloth and horror covers them. Shame is on all faces and baldness on their heads. They cast their silver into the streets and their gold is like an unclean thing. Their silver and gold are not able to deliver them in the day of the wrath of the Lord. They cannot satisfy their hunger or fill their stomachs with it, for it was a stumbling block of their iniquity. His beautiful ornament they used for pride and they made their abominable images and their detestable things of it. Therefore, I make it an unclean thing to them, and I will give it into the hands of foreigners for prey and to the wicked for the earth for spoil. And they shall profane it, and I will turn my face from them, and they shall profane my treasured place. Robbers shall enter and profane it. Forge a chain, for the land is full of bloody crimes, and the city is full of violence. I will bring the worst of the nations to take possession of their houses. I will put an end to the pride of their strong, and their holy places shall be profaned. When anguish comes, they will seek peace, but there shall be none. Disaster comes upon disaster. Rumor follows rumor. They seek a vision from the prophet while the law perishes from the priest and counsel from the elders. The king mourns. Prince is wrapped in despair and the hands of the people of the land are paralyzed by terror. According to their way, I will do to them. According to their judgments, I will judge them and they shall know that I am the Lord. Back in time here at the beginning of this sermon. It's a Sabbath morning. It's sometime around 723 BC and you're in the city of Jerusalem. Prophets like Isaiah and Amos have been saying some pretty disturbing things about God and how he's going to punish Israel and lead them into captivity. The Psalm scroll is taken out in the synagogue and the reading for the week is Psalm 46. God is our refuge and strength, the very present help in trouble. Therefore, we will not fear, though the earth gives way, though the mountains be moved in the heart of the sea, though the waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble at its swelling. There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy habitation of the Most High. God is in the midst of her. She shall not be moved. God will help her when morning dawns. The nations rage. The kingdoms totter. He utters his voice, and the earth melts. The Lord of hosts is with us. The God of Jacob is our fortress. Come behold the works of the Lord, how he has brought desolations on the earth. He makes wars cease to the end of the earth. He breaks the bow and shatters the spear. He burns the chariots with fire. Be still and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations. I will be exalted in the earth. The Lord of hosts is with us. The God of Jacob is our fortress. And the priest sets down the scroll and tells the people, see there, Do not listen to the raving lunatic prophets. God dwells in Jerusalem. This is his temple. He owns this land taken by his allotment. We have the covenant with David. Kingdoms may rage, but we will not be moved. The Lord of hosts is with us. He will not fight against us. We are his chosen people. Now it's 133 years later, around 590 BC. The northern kingdom of Israel is long since obliterated. The Assyrian invaders struck with ferocity and force, just as the prophets said. But he didn't take the temple. He didn't take Jerusalem. He didn't take those Israelites who had the Davidic king, unlike those rebels up north. But now a new prophet has arisen far away in Babylon. He's been taken into exile along with your king. You've heard rumblings of his prognostications and his name is like a foul smell in the air. Ezekiel. He's been saying some of the same things as Isaiah, and especially Amos, even taking some of the Sycamore Shepherd prophet's ramblings as his own, and acting very strangely as he does it, laying on his side for over a year, cooking food over human dung, playing war games in his front yard. What a kook! Nevertheless, you are here far away from that prophet at the temple in Jerusalem, and the reading for the week is again Psalm 46. The words of that priest from long ago may have been wrong or even forgotten, but a new priest reads the text and says virtually the same thing. See there, do not listen to these raving lunatic prophets. God dwells in Jerusalem. This is his temple. He owns this land, taken by him at the allotment. Kingdoms may rage, but we will not be moved. The Lord of hosts is with us. He will not fight against us. We are his chosen people. Now, scholars refer to this attitude as the inviolability of Israel. This word reflects its absolute security, its protection. Daniel Block explains. in his commentary, in the introduction. Throughout the Babylonian crisis, the people had maintained confidence in Yahweh's obligation to rescue them. In keeping with standard Near Eastern perspectives, the sense of security was based on the conviction of an inseparable bond among the national patron deity, Yahweh, and the territory, the land of Canaan, and the people, the nation of Israel, which they perceived to be inviolable, meaning unbreakable. More specifically, he continues, Israelite confidence in Yahweh was founded on an official orthodoxy, resting on four immutable propositions, four pillars of divine promise. the irrevocability of Yahweh's covenant with Israel, Yahweh's ownership of the land of Canaan, Yahweh's eternal covenant with David, and Yahweh's residence in Jerusalem, the place he chose for his name to dwell. The nearer the forces of Nebuchadnezzar came, the more the people clung to the promises of God. What promises? Those promises. Friends, this is a peculiar idea that someone could do basically anything they want, and God somehow owes them his allegiance, obviously. Not because they somehow control God, of course, but because God's promises and covenants are somehow utterly unconditional. Nevertheless, we see this same attitude today in our own country, in our own churches, and even with the modern state of Israel. For example, there are Christians today who believe, no matter what the modern state of Israel is, or how it came to be, or more importantly, what it does, that this is God's chosen nation and he blesses them no matter what, and that anyone who says Israel is wrong about something or anything will be cursed by God. John Hagee, the famous TV preacher in San Antonio, has said things such as how trying to convert a Jew is, quote, a waste of time. because the Jewish people have a relationship to God through the law of God as given through Moses, because Jews already have a covenant with God that has never been replaced with Christianity. But this attitude is deeply ingrained even in our own country. Perhaps, maybe, due to its Puritan roots in the Mayflower Compact, most historically fascinating beliefs of the settlers, one of whom was actually my great-great-great grandfather, who was actually the pastor of the Mayflower, William Brewster, that they could enter into a covenant with God as they started a new nation Maybe it's because of this that people have long believed that America is virtually the kingdom of God on earth, that we are his nation, that nothing we could do could ever shake this foundation, let alone bring his displeasure. We are, after all, the city on the hill, as Ronald Reagan called it. The almost chosen people, as Abraham Lincoln referred to us. Chosen by God to smite the tyranny of kings, hierarchs, and oligarchs, and carry the glad tidings of peace and goodwill to the world. Destined to lead the way in the moral and political emancipation of the world, ushering in the millennium which will begin in America. And it isn't just America. Many Christians believe that even our own churches are inviolable, and that they will always be here, that God would never snuff out the light of their candlestick, even if they profaned every one of his laws, from worshiping other gods and turning to the goddess, to making you shall not commit adultery and you shall not murder mean that your gender is not assigned at birth, and that you can sleep with whomever you want, and murder little helpless babies because they stand in the way of your personal happiness. Having come out of the nine sign acts of Ezekiel, which probably took a couple of years for him to fully perform, we find ourselves inching ever nearer that fateful hour when Babylon would ransack Jerusalem and the temple. Chapter six gave us the first of two terrifying messages. It dealt with God's judgment against the idolatry of Judah. Chapter seven, which we're in today, will now take up a discourse on the very soon coming day of judgment. Though we will see it crop up again, especially in chapter 30 and 38, Ezekiel 7 is one of the most undiluted, blunt teachings about the so-called day of the Lord in the entire Bible. And it is terrifying to read. Perhaps best summed up by Amos, a book that Ezekiel will allude to in this very chapter, the shepherd prophet of older days said, woe to you who desire the day of the Lord. Why would you have the day of the Lord? It is darkness and not light, as if a man fled from a lion and a bear met him, or went into the house and leaned his hand against a wall and a serpent bit him. Is not the day of the Lord darkness and not light, and gloom with no brightness in it?" Amazingly, these three verses strike at the heart of the inviolability of Israel. Due to national pride and religious complacency and dullness, and misinterpretation of scripture, they were actually longing for the day of the Lord. Why? Because just like today with Christians in the second coming, they anticipated a day, that day, as the time of divine vindication and triumph where God would intervene to deliver his people from their enemies and exalt them as his chosen people. But friend, when you are spiritually bankrupt and morally corrupt, there is no reason to think that you will be on the side of righteousness. The Day of the Lord is a theme that begins all the way back in Genesis 3, verse 8, though you might not realize it from the translations. You've heard this verse before, and they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the cool, in the garden, in the cool of the day. You go, how's that, the Day of the Lord? Well, Meredith Klein argues that it should rather be translated something like this. They heard the thunder of Yahweh, his footsteps patrolling the garden in the spirit of the day of judgment. Why would he have that kind of a translation? Well, keep reading the verse. And the man and the wife hid themselves in the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. This was not a jolly saunter of Papa Smurf finishing his countdown and opening his eyes to see where Smurfette and Heidi Smurf were playing hide and go seek. They were terrified. God knew that what they had just done, and they too had a covenant with God, a kind of marriage if you will, and they were about to feel the full effects of a divorce from Him. And they were kicked out of Eden. Their relationship was hardly inviolable. But you can hear from Ezekiel 7 when we go through this, Many repetitions, I hope you caught that when we read it earlier, like the drumbeat of a marching army irresistibly and inevitably marching towards you. This is due to a complex series of many chiasms, there's at least four of them, which are engulfed by a large chiasm that takes up the whole chapter. Their centers, which are showing no pity and showing no pity again, and sin's ruin and God's withdrawal, will reinforce the central theme of the chapter, which is that idolatry and the defilement of the holy places and violence and blood bring the day of the Lord and show that it is inevitable. Israel has been reading the scriptures entirely wrong. God is coming to judge them in this day, and it is inescapable. So, as we go through the passage, I'm gonna highlight the larger chiasm, gonna be the way that we go through it, and I will focus our attention only on the central points of the smaller structures, and I hope to bring out the power of the language so that you might feel just how misguided this whole idea that a group of people could ever be judged for their sins, could never be judged for their sins, just because they were, in some sense, blessed by God. So the oracle begins exactly the way chapter six did, which therefore ties them together. It says, the word of the Lord came to me. Remember what we said about this before. This means that Christ is coming again. He is the word to the prophet in the form of the angel of the Lord. He's the word of God. Never ever divorce in your thinking and always have at the front of your thinking the same person who mediates for mankind in both testaments because Jesus is the tie that binds God's word together. So the word comes to the Son of Man speaking as the Lord God, Adonai Yahweh, to the land of Israel. This is Israel's God, he is Yahweh. But since the Northern Kingdom, which was technically called Israel, has already been destroyed, it's clear that these words are directed at whoever remains in the North or in the South. And this is what it says, an end, the end has come upon the four corners of the land. Verse three, now the end is upon you and I will send my anger upon you. Verse six, an end has come, the end has come, it has awakened against you. This is the apocalyptic scenario that you see people today talking about, isn't it? The famous meme is of some hobo on a street who holds up a sign that says, the end is near, right? And nobody pays attention to the guy. He hasn't showered in weeks. He has no home. He's crazy. I wonder if that's how they viewed Ezekiel after all his maddening sign acts and his refusal to say a word while he did it. There's more language just like this, verse 5. Thus says the Lord God, disaster after disaster, behold, it comes. Again, verse 6, behold, it comes. Even all the way to verse 26, disaster comes upon disaster, which ties the whole chapter together again. There's more language like this in verse seven. Your doom has come to you, O inhabitant of the land. The time has come. And it's repeated yet again at the beginning of our next section in verse 10. Behold, it comes. Your doom has come. And again in verse 12, the time has come. It's something like 10 times in 12 verses. Ezekiel is not playing in riddles. He's perfectly clear and easy to understand. Like the prophets of old, he calls it the day. Verse seven, the day is near. Verse 10, behold the day. Verse 12, the day has arrived. He calls it the day of tumult and not of joyful shouting on the mountains in verse seven. Now in the central axis of the whole chapter, it's the day of the wrath of the Lord. And now I will soon pour out my wrath upon you and spin my anger upon you, he says. In the next section, verse 12, the wrath is upon all their multitude. And again in verse 14, my wrath is upon all their multitude. When you say wrath, God, this is not a topic that we hear about in today's church. God is love, we are told. And yes, God is love. But the attributes of God are one and they are indivisible. God is not composed of parts and that means that God's love and his wrath are equally essential to what it means to be God. He pours out his love through covenant. But when the covenant is violated, he must, because he is holy and just, carry out wrath. Justice demands punishment and wrath is God's hostility and animosity and anger being exercised. But friend, this is no capricious God like Zeus who just throws down lightning bolts on his subjects because he finds it amusing and funny. God's love is indivisible from his wrath. In fact, it's because God truly loves and loves truly that his wrath is actually displayed. If he did not show wrath, it would mean that he did not love because he wouldn't care less. And not caring isn't love, it's ambivalence. And yet his wrath comes because something terrible has occurred in the covenant. And this is where we have to read this carefully. Why does the day come? Why is it a day of doom? Why is it a day of wrath? Let's go through the remaining parts of the first nine verses. I will judge you according to your ways. I will punish you for all your abominations, verse three. You hear that? This is not God judging basically good people. Their ways are abominations, verse 4. I will punish you for your ways while your abominations are in your midst. These abominations are not in the past. They continue on right now to this very moment. It's like someone saying with the recent legal documents released by D&I Gabbard that there's a statute of limitations that those who have committed treason against a sitting president cannot be tried in a court of law because it was years ago, even though the conspiracy continues to this very day. Their sins are still there. They haven't gone anywhere. And we'll see how that plays out. Again, in verse eight, God will judge you according to your ways. I will punish you for all your abominations. Again, verse nine, I will punish you according to your ways while your abominations are in your midst. It's the same thing over and over and over like a broken record. The repetition is like the constant drip of a Chinese water torture. You may not feel it the first couple times, but after enough time, you'll get the point loud and clear and you will cry out for it to stop. Verses one through nine form the first of five component parts of the large chiasm of chapter seven, but inside of these verses are contained the first two smaller units, and amazingly, they both have the same central idea. In fact, it's identical. Verse four, and my eye will not spare you, I will have no pity. And again, in verse nine, and my eye will not spare, nor will I have pity. Let's think about pity for a moment. Our word derives from the Latin word, pietem, it means piety, loyalty, or duty. What is pity? Pity is a feeling of sympathy and compassion aroused by sorrow or suffering of somebody else. It's a disposition to have mercy, a kindness and generosity of spirit. But God is the one who's going to bring this disaster and he is bringing it because these people are so dull, so senseless, so steeped in their own sin that they can no longer tell right from wrong. They put good for evil and evil for good. They twist every possible thing about God's law. forming perverted wraiths and zombies out of the living word of God, kidding themselves that they're moral and upright when they are actually depraved and a crooked generation, hell-bent on justifying their own corruption with ear-tickling words. And like those taking the blue pill and the matrix, they're completely oblivious to the reality that's going on all around them and inside of them. that has been made crystal clear in the book of Moses. There's one more point that's made twice each time after the central pitilessness from the God who will not spare even a single ounce of his wrath until it's totally spent on his people. This is not done out of malice and cruelty, but rather, verse four, so that you will know that I am the Lord. That's why he does it. Again, verse nine, then you will know that I am the Lord who strikes. They do not think that God could ever do such a thing. How could he? How could he destroy his temple? What about the eternal promise of the Davidic covenant to have a king sit on the throne forever? All those promises given to the patriarchs. No, they have forgotten who they are dealing with. They've created God in their own image and he is not their buddy. He's not a genie, he is the Lord God Almighty. They've forgotten that God never promised unconditional protection. But rather, in the very law of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, there are expanded devastating curses that are promised for idolatry and disloyalty. Expanding upon chapter 6, God is not bound by your human assumptions about one-sided attributes such as love and mercy. that cause you to become complacent in your sin and create a God in your own image, a God who doesn't care, a God who's far off, a God who doesn't take sin seriously. That's what this chapter is confronting. Coming in the second of the five sections, verses 10 through 18, we note that we've already briefly looked at a few of these verses. They're gonna expand this theme of judgment, focusing especially on the economic and psychological devastation that is coming to the people. It begins with beholding the day, for it comes, quote, your doom. It speaks of this doom as a rod that has blossomed, a rod that's become a rod of pride that is butted Now there's two interesting things to think about here. First, our word doom is found only here and in Isaiah 28 5. And in that verse, it's actually translated as a diadem of beauty. Translations are all over the map with this word. The Septuagint has a tribe instead of doom. The Targum has the kingdom. I think both likely refer to Babylon. Older English translations like the King James and Geneva Bible translate it as the morning, likely referring to the moment the enemy comes. Robert Alter has the gyre playing off the root of the Hebrew word which means a wreath or to encircle. A gyre is a spiral or cycle closely related to the coming of a new morning. Daniel Block has it as a leash. Mike Heiser has it as a chain, a kind of play on the coming bondage of captivity that also plays on the word diadem, which were headdresses of royalty sometimes constructed as linked segments or chains of metal that would encircle the head as a symbol of glory and royalty. This is the opposite of that kind of a diadem. The second idea is that there's a budding rod. When you hear that, what do you think of? Probably Aaron's rod, his staff that blossoms into a virtual tree of life, but not here. The staff is budding, is a staff of pride, the very thing that caused our first parents to eat, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, not the tree of life. Come to verse 11, pride gives way to violence that has grown up into a rod of wickedness. Because pride never stays hidden for long, and it usually works its way out in the form of terrible sins. In this case, Israel has become full of violence, like unruly mobs in the streets of our own cities, that our own police forces have been told they must do nothing to stop. It all starts at the top, and that institutionalized governmental evil that brought about the idolatry in Ezekiel 6. The oracle takes us straight to the economic impact in verse 11. None of them shall remain, nor their abundance, nor their wealth. Neither shall there be preeminence among them. Everybody's going to be on a level playing field here. But who is the none of them? Verse 12. The time has come, the day has arrived. Let not the buyer rejoice, nor the seller mourn, for wrath is upon all their multitude. It's a buyer and seller. It's language that reminds me of Revelation where the people will not be able to buy or sell unless they have the mark of the beast. Here we see that the Babylonians will have no problem buying or selling because they're the givers rather than the receivers of the doom. It's God's people who will find their entire economic system collapsed. For the seller shall not return to what he has sold while they live, it says. When it says that he will not return what he has sold, it's actually a cryptic reference to the year of Jubilee, when everything was supposed to be returned to the original owner. God is saying there will be no coming Jubilee. It's going to be canceled. God is putting it into the whole thing. It goes on, for the vision concerns all their multitude, it shall not turn back, and because of his iniquity, none can maintain his life. This is the center of the third smaller unit. It's because of sin, Israel's own iniquity that the doom, the chain, the kingdom, the mourning, the Gaia is coming. Who will be able to survive it? Block summarizes it really well. He says, the collapse of the economy will be total, rendering all business transactions futile. Buying and selling, celebrating and mourning business deals will be irrelevant in the environment where the economic infrastructure has totally collapsed. The people will fall victim to their own iniquity with all their props knocked out from under them. The wrath of Yahweh will prove the great equalizer when God is through the entire population, people and priests, servant and master, maid and mistress, buyer and seller, lender and borrower, creditor and debtor, will have been reduced to the lowest common denominator." Happy times, right? Verse 14 is a fascinating verse to ponder. They have blown the trumpet and made everything ready, but none goes to battle for my wrath is upon their multitude. I want you to think about this verse. Why are they unwilling to fight? Is it because they're too afraid and they simply faint at the sight of the coming onslaught that they can't overcome? Is it because they still don't actually believe the day is actually coming and they refuse to put on their battle gear? Those are very opposite ideas. In Romans 1, remember, God's wrath comes to people in the form of giving them over to their own dullness and sin. These are opposite ideas, but I think both of them will actually be found in coming verses. The prophet sees the future next, the sword is without, pestilence and famine are within. He who is in the field dies by the sword and him who is in the city, famine and pestilence devour. It doesn't matter if you try to seek refuge inside the safe confines of the walled off Jerusalem or flee outside to the hill country. You will either be pursued by the invader who will kill you with a sword if you try to escape or Your other option is to starve to death and be hunted down by pestilence if you stay in the city. I say hunted down because while the pestilence certainly refers to some kind of plague like dysentery or typhus, pestilence can also refer to evil that accompanies the gods of the ancient Near East. We actually saw this a couple of sermons ago. The Deaver, that's the word here throughout the Old Testament, the ancient Near East, is personified as a demonic entity that accompanies the God. This supernatural evil, of course, here is at the beck and call of the Lord, like the evil spirit that's sent out to being a lying spirit in the mouth of the prophets and first kings. If the sword doesn't get the survivors, or the famine, or the dysentery, then the psychological damage will. PTSD has been around for a very long time. Verse 16, if any of the survivors escape, they will be on the mountains, like doves of the valley, all of them moaning each one over his iniquity. Ever been around a flock of doves just cooing? This isn't necessarily a bad thing, of course. Kind of hints at the center of chapter six where the people actually repent of their sin when they finally come face to face with how God truly views it. Maybe this is why they have the dove imagery, a bird that just coos senselessly over and over and over nonstop. Verse 17 is another of the crasser images. We will find these throughout Ezekiel. It further reinforces the psychological damage of the coming invasion. All hands are feeble and all knees turn to water. What does it mean that knees turn to water? Well, this is a polite Victorian way of saying that they pee their pants. That only happens in the most extreme moments of terror where the bowels become uncontrollable, much like they do at the moment of death when everything just comes pouring out. It's a horrific image of the shock and awe of the coming judgment. Even as this section concludes, they put on sackcloth and horror covers them. Shame is on all their faces and baldness on their heads. Sackcloth and horror, shame and baldness, they symbolize utter despair with no reset for this generation. Life will never return to normal for them. The middle and the center, verses 19 through 24, In it, we appropriately move to the spiritual failure of Israel as we turn to the theme of the previous oracle and idolatry. As the center, this is also the focal point of the entire chapter. Verse 19, they cast their silver into streets. Their gold is like an unclean thing. Their silver and gold are not able to deliver them in the day of the wrath of the Lord. They cannot satisfy their hunger or fill their stomachs with it, for it was a stumbling block of their iniquity. So it talks here about silver and gold. These are precious metals. They were used in the construction of idols, and thus they are as unclean as a vulture eating a dead carcass here. Because they made their idols, they thought that these gods were powerful, and this became a stumbling block that caused them to sin. Now, curiously, the same word for a stumbling block here is used of God being a stumbling block in Isaiah 8. which the New Testament tells us is Christ. In both instances, the stumbling block is spiritual. In both, it relates to divine beings. Sadly, the Jews will not have learned their lesson from this day of doom, as they will later reject their Messiah, an even greater sin than fashioning idols. But here, the idols cause them to sin by committing adultery against the Lord, the God of their covenant. On the day of judgment, they will look at their idols and they will realize that they are unclean, unable to deliver them, unable to fill their bellies with food as they starve to death in the siege of Jerusalem surrounded by the idols they've made. Verse 20 seems to continue the idea. His beautiful ornament they used for pride and they made their abominable images and their detestable things of it. Therefore, I make an unclean thing of them. The beautiful ornament is oblique and it might refer to the wealth of the temple that was used for idols. Imagine taking the treasure of the temple that God commanded you to make and melting it down and turning it into idols. Heizer actually speculates it might refer to the Ark of Covenant being melted for idols. While it's uncertain if the Ark was actually destroyed or not, Jeremiah 3.16 may suggest that it would be. It says, when you have multiplied and been fruitful in the land in those days, declares the Lord, there shall no more say the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord. It shall not come to mind or be remembered or missed. It shall not be made again. Now, Heizer doesn't say much more about it, and it seems to me that the Ark, if it was destroyed, probably would have been destroyed by the Babylonians, not the Jews. Nevertheless, the idea of the Jews melting the Ark of the Covenant to make an idol is a pretty powerful image of the lengths that people go to to desecrate the holy things of God, even turning the temple's gold and silver into idols. It's pretty incredible what Ezekiel's saying here. Their desecration and adultery, God says, will deserve this. It says, I will give you into the hands of foreigners for prey and to the wicked of the earth for spoil and they shall profane it. The temple in which they have placed all their trust, even while defiling it, is not going to save them. Because God could care less about an earthly home, even if he is the one who gave instructions for how to build it and promised he would come to live in it. Because God is omnipresent. He does not dwell in houses made by man. Heaven is his throne. Earth is his footstool. So what becomes the center of the third smaller structure, it says, I will turn my face from them. God will not look upon them with favor. He will not answer their prayers. He will not have mercy. He will look away like a husband who has just caught his wife in the act of adultery. And then all the way this late, we finally come to the central point of the whole chapter. Right before it, it says robbers shall enter and profane it, meaning the temple. Foreigners, Babylonians are coming in. He says, forge a chain. It's a prophetic command that takes us back to the chain and the doom. Captivity is coming. The decree has gone out. There's nothing that can stop it. And then suddenly the arrow points at the heart immediately after these words. This is the very center of the chapter. For the land is full of bloody crimes and the city is full of violence. We've already seen this, but now it comes as the tip of the spear, the arrow pointed right at the heart of the nation. He's telling them that this is happening because you, dear people, are full of blood and violence. This is your fault. It's coming because of your sin. Don't blame God because you've become so vile and evil that you're shedding innocent blood in the streets and God is coming to make it right. The central section completes the spiritual focus by turning from the house of God to the houses of Judah. It says, I will bring the worst of the nations to take possession of their houses. This is an amazing verse. God isn't using some morally pristine people to carry out his vengeance. That's what you might think he would do. No. He's using Babylon. He calls Babylon the worst of the nations. It's an empire that came to power through ruthless terror as it enslaved people after people. Theirs was not the spreading of freedom through democratic republics and free elections where people govern themselves and are ruled by constitutions and transcendent moral laws. No, this is totalitarian imperialism, bent on world domination of megalomaniacal kings that want to rule every single man, woman, child on the face of the earth. And they went to any and every conceivable length to do it, including siege warfare and starvation, mass destruction and looting, mass deportation and exile, execution and enslavement, cultural suppression and profaning of anything sacred that they wanted. Now this was deeply offensive to all Jews, including some of the prophets. How could God use such vile people to bring justice upon his own people? Well, that's part of the horror of it. If God would use the worst of peoples to carry out his vengeance, then what must he have thought about the sins of his own people? That's one to contemplate long and hard. The last two sections are much shorter. They bring us back to the beginning of the chapter. I will put an end to the pride of the strong, and their holy places shall be profaned. When anguish comes, they will seek peace, but there shall be none. Disaster comes upon disaster. Rumor follows rumor. They seek a vision from the prophet, while the law perishes from the priest and counsel from the elders. And we've seen how the horror of the enemy at the gates was so great that it would cause grown men to pee their pants, which helps us see that for some of these people, they would not fight because they were faint of heart and they had given in to the fear, something that came upon them at the decree of God. But here we see that there are still many people who even at this late of a time, Babylon's coming in just a year or two, We see that there are still people who are seeking visions from the prophets, counsel from the elders, who might give them some word of what they should do, maybe being able to forestall the doom for a few more years like Josiah did, or maybe even to tell them that Ezekiel is a false prophet and that no harm will come to them. And they do it while the law perishes in their midst. It's a classic attitude that people have even into our own day is they're unable to assess their own times objectively because they just can't believe that there could be people that could be so evil. For example, from the Georgia Guidestones that openly and brazenly spoke about getting the world's population down to only a half a billion people. And if you do the math, that means they want seven and a half billion people dead. These things were actually destroyed by a rocket on American soil that to this day no one has dared to investigate. From things like that to people like Bill Gates openly saying he wants to depopulate the world through vaccines, to the World Economic Forum and so many others all singing the same tune in concert and then literally seeking to carry it out before the watchful eyes of the world, people just refuse to believe it. and instead call you a conspiracy theorist for quoting their own words because they just can't find the will to believe the ramifications of all this would and already does mean. They close their eyes to it. I can't deal with it. And that's why even though the trumpet is blown and everything is made ready, no one goes to battle. And God makes it very clear that at least in Israel's case, it's because his wrath prevents them from even lifting a finger to help themselves. The people have been totally given over, and all they can do is watch the enemy come down upon them like a ravenous bear mauling its prey. Israel isn't exempt because it's in covenant, because God gave promises of a king, because this was his land, or because there is a temple there. God isn't going to save Israel. They are finished. The last verse of the chapter brings it full circle and shows the true horrors that now face God's people. It says, the king mourns, the prince is wrapped in despair, and the hands of the people of the land are paralyzed by terror. According to their way, I will do to them, and according to their judgments, I will judge them, and they shall know that I am the Lord. These words are so final, so resolute, so stamped in cement, so simple to understand that I feel like commenting any more on them would only blunt the sharp edge. The people need to hear the word of the Lord. Now as we wrap up this very sobering look at Ezekiel 7, let's circle back to where we started, which is that stubborn idea from Psalm 46's misapplication, misinterpretation about the inviolability of Israel. The priests in 723 and again in 590 assured the people, God is our refuge. He dwells here in Jerusalem, no harm can come to us. We're his chosen, his temple stands here and his promises endure. They twisted the scripture to say God could never do anything bad to his people no matter what they did. But Ezekiel 7 shatters this illusion. The day of the Lord isn't a day of vindication for the complacent. It's darkness, doom and wrath for the unrepentant. For Israel in Ezekiel's day, this myth crumbled under the weight of their own sins. They clung to the covenants. They clung to Sinai's law, to David's throne, to the land's inheritance, to Jerusalem's temple as unbreakable shields. But as Bloch noted, their official orthodoxy ignored the conditions or obedience of faithfulness and holiness. In their place, idolatry, violence, and bloodshed profaned everything sacred. God didn't owe them protection. What he owed them was justice to his own holiness. And so he turned his face away. He sent the worst of the nations and brought the end that they never thought possible. The temple fell. The king mourned. The people scattered. Their theology was bad. Their inviolability was a lie. They reaped what they sowed, learning the hard way. You shall know that I am the Lord who strikes. So let's fast forward to Israel in our own day. Whatever the origins of the modern state are and how good or bad those might be, many Christians, echoing John Hagee, treat it as untouchable. This was very popular only a month ago. To hear people quoting Genesis 12.3, God blesses those who bless Israel and curses those who curse her. They say, no matter what Israel does, policies, conflicts, or even rejecting Christ, it's God's chosen land, it's inviolable. But Ezekiel warns us, national identity or borders do not guarantee divine favor. If ancient Israel faced judgment for abominations, why assume modern Israel is exempt, or anyone else for that matter? It seems like an obscenely dismissive view of history to me. God's promises to Abraham are not about geopolitics today, they are fulfilled in Christ. Blind support ignores sin on all sides and risks idolizing a nation over the gospel. The day of the Lord still looms for unrepentant hearts, whether they're Jewish or Gentile. So what about America? From the Puritan roots and the Mayflower compact, we have nursed this notion of a covenant nation in a city on a hill, a phrase that Jesus actually used for the church. And I'm not saying it was even a bad thing to make such a covenant, nor that God hasn't in fact blessed us in amazing ways as a nation. Of course he has. But today, we wave flags in churches, invite political pundits into our pulpits from both sides of the political aisle, and assume God blesses us no matter what, even in the midst of endless wars and moral decay and cultural idolatry. But Ezekiel asks, what if our abominations invite wrath, violence in the streets, bloodshed of the unborn, gay pride, deeply corrupt institutions? Sound familiar? If God judged his ancient covenant people, why think America's exceptionalism makes us inviolable? And don't change your view on this every time a new president comes into power that you either like or despise. America is clearly unique among the nations of the world, but we are not the new Israel. Complacency could easily bring down our own day of doom with economic collapse, societal paralysis, and invaders at the gates, literal or cultural. All people sin, including our nation, and they must repent or face the chain of judgment. And we will see this much more in later chapters when Ezekiel goes after the nations, not just Israel. And finally, church, we must not exempt ourselves. This hits home the hardest, or at least it should. Many believe their congregations are untouchable. But look around. Churches profane God's laws, they worship other gods like success or politics, or literally they worship Mother Earth in the churches. They redefine adultery, murder, and gender to fit cultural whims. We twist scripture like those priests, assuming grace covers deliberate rebellion. But Ezekiel's oracle screams that churches are not inviolable. In fact, all three of these modern applications, it is the church that comes the closest to ancient Israel, because the church is the one in covenant with God today. God removes lamps from unfaithful stands. He tells you that in Revelation. If a church harbors abominations, they can expect the day of the Lord. No peace, no vision, law perishing from priests. Surrendering to invaders such as false teachers or cultural pressures may very well cause God to turn his face away. This is our sharp wake-up. Repent or mourn like the king. But you've got to have some good news in a sermon. Praise God this isn't the end. Even Ezekiel 7 isn't hopeless. God's promises in the new covenant are not unconditional national pacts. They are a progressive unfolding in Christ, the one who has kept the covenant perfectly and taken God's wrath upon himself willingly for us. The disaster that befell Jerusalem always had the coming of Christ in mind. This is why it is absolutely vital that Jesus is active in his active and passive obedience to God's law in his life, in his death, needs to be the center of every church's and every individual's life. Because in Christ, the wrath of God that we see in this chapter is taken away. In him, there is no remembrance of sins. And in him, by his spirit, he puts those abominable desires to forsake God to death. He gives us new hearts that willingly desire to follow him. He is the only true inviolability. It's not based on ethnicity or land or works, but on God's sovereign grace in Christ. Jesus, the stumbling block, became the offense, and Jews stumbled over him as the Messiah. We all stumble if we trust in our own works and self-righteousness, but for believers, he is the cornerstone. In this covenant, God writes his law on our hearts, forgives our sins completely, and gives his spirit, ensuring our perseverance. Faith in Christ alone receives this truth, and I have to ask you if it's yours. Have you believed it? Because if you haven't, Ezekiel 7 is all you have left to hope for. The good news is that the day of the Lord's vengeance came first at the cross. God's wrath was poured out on Jesus, not on us. He bore the doom, He took the chain, the violence, our abominations, so that we know Him not as the Lord who strikes, but as our Savior who saves. America, Israel, and even churches might fall, but Christ's people are secure so long as they keep their eyes on Jesus. Dear people, do not cling to the myths of inviolability. Cling to Christ alone. Repent of your sins, trust in his finished work once for all, and live as New Covenant people, the antithesis of the Israelites of old, who pridefully rebelled against their Redeemer and tried to kid themselves they were doing the opposite. The ultimate day is approaching, as Peter and Paul and Thessalonians talked about. It's a day of darkness for the lost, but of light for those in Christ. Be still and know He is God, as Psalm 46.10 said, exalted through the gospel of Jesus Christ. Amen. Lord, we would ask that you would help us to hear these words of the prophet. God, this is not something that we talk about in our pulpits much at all. I don't know if I've ever heard anybody talk about it like this. We don't preach the prophets. We don't preach what happened in the past. We don't preach its application to ourselves today. And we're, I think, facing the consequences of that in our churches and in our country and in our world. Your law continues. It is forever. It is eternal. There are things that are right and wrong that are always there before us, and we need to hear about those, and we need to turn from them. We need to do that corporately, and we also need to do that individually, and I would pray, Lord, that you would cause each person in this room that has heard these words to think about Ezekiel seven and that it's not just a nation that's falling, but it's individuals within the nation that are coming to an end in ruin and horror and death and famine and plague and that is what we deserve. And yet Jesus took that wrath upon himself on the cross so that we might be given grace even though we don't deserve it. It's only the good news that will turn a people and cause them not to continue to act the way that Israel did. And some of them turned in repentance. And I pray that you might do that for everybody who's hearing these words before your great day comes that we pray for that you would hasten it. The day of the Lord Jesus, the day of his second coming, the day of reckoning, the day of justice, and the day of our salvation. I don't want anybody to be left outside of that day and I pray your spirit might work because he's the only one capable of causing us to see the truth that's before us because there is a veil that is over our eyes unless it's taken off in the work, in the mercy, and the grace of Christ. Hear our prayer this morning and answer it according to your will, we pray in Jesus' name, amen.