Devotionals

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Reading Ezekiel it’s impossible to ignore God’s attitude towards iniquity (sin). God’s holiness, righteousness can neither ignore it, nor turn blinded eyes towards it. Nor can one ignore the LORD’s concern for the sinner. Always God sends a voice imparting His own words of warning. Why? Because He loves the sinner as much as He abhors and must judge sin.

Therefore you, O son of man, say ....If our transgressions and our sins be upon us, and we pine away in them, how can we then live? Say to them: ‘As I live’, says the LORD God, ‘I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live. Turn, turn from your evil ways. For why should you die?’ (Ez. 33:10-11)

I love how God does not leave us in question of His heart. More and more as I’ve read the prophets these past many weeks, the Father-Heart of God becomes clearer and clearer – at least to me. Like any parent who truly loves his child, discipline isn’t pleasurable, even though necessary. God doesn’t take discipline, or its need, lightly. He is faithful in warning, in sending warning voices. God’s words to the son of man are sobering, for each of us:

I have made you a watchman … When I say to the wicked, ‘O wicked man, you shall surely die!’ and you do not speak to warn the wicked for his way, that wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood I will require at your hand. Nevertheless if you warn the wicked to turn from his way, and he does not turn from his way, he shall die in his iniquity but you have delivered your soul. (Ez. 33:10-11)

It puts me in mind of Jonah, and suddenly the great fish, truly his redemption … truly the love of God towards Jonah … not temporally, but eternally. Jonah, commissioned to give warning, would have carried the blood of each Ninevehite who perished.

It also puts me in mind of me. I think of all the disasters marking the face of our world these past few years, and I can’t ignore the countless numbers who perished … in their iniquity … and I wonder at the blood on my own hands. Though the LORD hasn’t called me to foreign fields, nonetheless His provision He entrusted to my care. His words spoken to me, to each of us, clearly speak His will, Seek ye first the kingdom of God!

When I consider God’s provision, when I reflect on what I’ve done with it, where does that leave the balance hanging? I fear it weighs heavily on the scale of the temporal, with the eternal grievously wanting. Even those expenditures I can justify as being on ‘godly’ things, if I am honest, aren’t they for my own benefit … lining the shelves of my own library, feeding my own need of soul-food?

I can’t shake God’s words, this morning, penned so convictingly by Jeremiah’s pen.

The righteousness of the righteous man shall not deliver him in the day of his transgression … When I say to the righteous that he shall surely live, but he trusts in his own righteousness and commits iniquity, none of his righteous works shall be remembered … Yet the children of your people say, ‘The way of the LORD is not fair.’ But it is their way which is not fair! When the righteous turns from his righteousness and commits iniquity, he shall die because of it. But when the wicked turns from his wickedness and does what is right … he shall surley live … I have made you a watchman …

How thankful I am for the Son of Man, who spoke the words of His Father so faithfully. How thankful I am for the Grace that imputes His righteousness to me. How diligently I need the Spirit of God to work in me, in order to be that watchman He calls me to … over my own house … and in faithfulness to those still lost in darkness.

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