Sermon on Ezekial 18

There are many voices in the world today.

One does not need to listen hard to hear them, or to sense their number.

Many are those who tell us we are all in this life together and how 'this person' is not at fault and 'that person' is not at fault, but really it is society that is at fault.

Or the government ... or 'big' business ...

And if there is sorrow, these voices say it was their fathers who set their teeth on edge, that our parents are the ones to blame. Or our children are to blame. Or the public is to blame.

And they make the understanding of justice so complex ...

They preach that the path to goodness is a matter of having the right circumstances ... of having the right education, the right resources, the right ideology.

But the God of Israel has determined that our solution is a new heart, and a new spirit.

The voices speak today as they spoke in the time of Ezekiel. They are a chattering of gossipers, a slandering against God, and yet they talk of proverbial wisdom. In their craftiness they accuse God of being unjust.

There's nothing for the criminals to do. They have to turn to crime.
The rich just keep getting richer -and they don't deserve their riches.
People that do good things are punished for them.

Are God's ways unjust? Or are our ways unjust?

Certainly there are occasions when misfortune strikes the just, and God allows His rain to fall on the evil as well as the obedient.

Yet, God assures his people that the soul who sins will die.

A man who appears to do evil seems to succeed, but death is already coming for him.

God is not blind to the cries of the oppressed. We may not see the work he does to protect and to change, and we may not hear clamboring voice drawing the least attention to it, but the one who sins will die.

The word of God is a different voice. One only needs to catch a glimpse of it to see that it is not like the voice of worldly wisdom.

The world never singles out a person and says, "If you hear me and follow my ways you will certainly live." The world only understands probabilities, trivia, and generalities.

'If you steal the sour grapes, someone else will (probably) be punished...'

How great is the depth of the scorn and deceit of the world!

It first sets itself up as a judge to scoff at the criminality of others, when it is clearly one's own life that is at stake. Mixed with the pride in judging these invisible criminals, it begins to envy them and say, 'How much better I am than the evil-doers, and how much I would wish to be like the evil-doers eating the sour grapes!'

The second practice of the world is to join in the acts it condemns. To what can we call the agony of duplicitly holding such opposite intents, but death? We have the assurance of God Himself that death waits for those who sin and do not turn from their evil ways.

How unlike the voices and proverbs of the world, to say everything is left up to the individual! To say that life and death are at hand! To identify the singularity of the moment and say, 'This is when you must decide!'.

To count a man's sins against him no longer!

Very often a worldly man will welcome someone with a tarnished background. He will smile and excuse his acts with societal proverbs about grapes -the very proverbs he excuses his own behavior- and even before the lowly one reluctantly agrees the worldly man is already saying to himself:

What a despicable man, wholly inferior and a reminder of my greatness.

The worldly man is quick to recall the injustices of others, but unable to survey the criminality of his own ways.

The ways of the Lord are set apart. When a wicked man turns from his ways and sets in his heart to obey all the decrees of God's Word, the Lord himself says,

None of the offenses he has committed will be remembered against him.

When a famous person errs, he often gathers the crowds and apologizes. The spectacle draws many, but no one forgets and the condition of the man is the same.

But when a sinner errs and turns to God, it is as though the jabbering of the crowd quiets down and vanishes away. His offences will not be remembered against him, and, behold! He is a different man because he is alive!

In the same way God calls everyone -the ones who have deaf ears as well as the ones with ears that hear- to repent and be saved from the downfall of sin and death.

Teach us, O Lord, to view our sins, and to turn from them that we may find our wrongs forgotten and our hearts full of life.

Ezekiel 18

The word of the Lord came to me: "What do you people mean by quoting this proverb about the land of Israel:

"The fathers eat sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge'?

"As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, you will no longer quote this proverb in Israel. For every living soul belongs to me, the father as well as the son - both alike belong to me. The soul who sins is the one who will die.

"Suppose there is a righteous man who does what is just and right.
He does not eat at the mountain shrines or look to the idols of the house of Israel.
He does not defile his neighbor's wife or lie with a woman during her period.
He does not oppress anyone, but returns what he took in pledge for a loan.
He does not commit robbery but gives his food to the hungry and provides clothing for the naked.
He does not lend at usury or take excessive interest.
He withholds his hand from doing wrong and judges fairly between man and man.
He follows my decrees and faithfully keeps my laws.
That man is righteous; he will surely live,
declares the Sovereign Lord.

Suppose he has a violent son, who sheds blood or does any of these other things (though the father has done none of them):

He eats at teh mountain shrines.
He defiles his neighbor's wife.
He oppresses the poor and needy.
He commits robbery.
He does not return what he took in pledge.
He looks to the idols.
He does detestable things.
He lends at usury and takes excessive interest.

Will such a man live? He will not! Because he has done all these detestable things, he will surely be put to death and his blood will be on his own head.

But suppose this son has a son who sees all the sins his father commits, and though he sees them, he does not do such things:

He does not eat at the mountain shrines or look to the idols of the house of Israel.
He does not defile his neighbor's wife.
He does not oppress anyone or require a pledge for a loan.
He does not commit robbery but gives his food to the hungry and provides clothing for the naked.
He withholds his hand from sin and takes no usury or excessive interest.
He keeps my laws and follows my decrees.

He will not die for his father's sin; he will surely live. But his father will die for his own sin, because he practiced extortion, robbed his brother and did what was wrong among his people.

"Yet you ask, 'Why does the son not share the guilt of his father?' Since teh son has done what is just and right and has been careful to keep all my decrees, he will surely live. The soul who sins is the one who will die. The son will not share the guilt of the father, nor will the father share the guilt of the son. The righteousness of the righteous man will be credited to him, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against him.

"But if a wicked man turns away from all the sins he has committed and keeps all my decrees and does what is just and right, he will surely live; he will not die. None of the offenses he has committed will be remembered against him. Because of the righteous things he has done, he will live. Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked? declares the Sovereign Lord. Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live?

"But if a righteous man turns from his righteousness and commits sin and does the same detestable things the wicked man does, will he live? None of the righteous things he has done will be remembered. Because of the unfaithfulness he is guilty of and because of the sins he has committed, he will die.

"Yet you say, 'The way of the Lord is not just.' Hear, O house of Israel: Is my way unjust? Is it not your ways that are unjust? If a righteous man turns from his righteousness and commits sin, he will die for it; because of the sin he has committed he will die. But if a wicked man turns away from the wickedness he has committed and does what is just and right, he will save hsi life. Because he considers all the offenses he has committed and turns away from them, he will surely live; he will not die. Yet the house of Israel says, 'The way of the Lord is not just.' Are my ways unjust, O house of Israel? Is it not your ways that are unjust?

"Therefore, O house of Israel, I will judge you, each according to his ways, declares the Sovereign Lord. Repent! Turn away from all your offenses; then sin will not be your downfall. Rid yourselves of all the offenses you have committed, and get a new heart and a new spirit. Why will you die, O house of Israel? For I take no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Sovereign Lord. Repent and live!

Ezekiel 18

There are many voices in the world today.

One does not need to listen hard to hear them, or to sense their number.

People in these times preach from the roof tops about how we are all in this life together and how 'this person' is not at fault and 'that person' is not at fault, but really it is society that is at fault.

And if there is sorrow, these voices say it was their fathers who set their teeth on edge, that our parents are the ones to blame. Or our children are to blame. Or the public is to blame.

And they make the understanding of justice so complex ...

They preach that the path to goodness is a matter of having the right circumstances ... of having the right education, the right resources, the right ideology.

But the God of Israel has determined that our solution is a new heart, and a new spirit.

The voices spoke today as they spoke in the time of Ezekiel. They are a chattering of gossipers, a slandering against God, and yet they talk of proverbial wisdom. In their craftiness they accuse God of being unjust.

"There's nothing for the criminals to do. They have to turn to crime."
"The rich just keep getting richer -and they don't deserve their riches."
"People that do good things are punished for them."

Are God's ways unjust? Or are our ways unjust?

Certainly there are occasions when misfortune strikes the just, and God allows His rain to fall on the evil as well as the obedient.

Yet, God assures his people that the soul who sins will die.

A man who appears to do evil seems to succeed, but death is already coming for him.

God is not blind to the cries of the oppressed. We may not see the work he does to protect and to change, and we may not hear clamboring voice drawing the least attention to it, but the one who sins will die.

The word of God is a different voice. One only needs to catch a glimpse of it to see that it is not like the voice of worldly wisdom.

The world never singles out a person and says, "If you hear me and follow my ways you will certainly live." The world only understands probabilities, trivia, and generalities.

'If you steal the sour grapes, someone else will (probably) be punished...'

How great is the depth of the scorn and deceit of the world!

It first sets itself up as a judge to scoff at the criminality of others, when it is clearly one's own life that is at stake. Mixed with the pride in judging these invisible criminals, it begins to envy them and say, 'How much better I am than the evil-doers, and how much I would wish to be like the evil-doers eating the sour grapes!'

The second practice of the world is to join in the acts it once condemned. To what can we call the agony of duplicitly holding such opposite intents, but death? And we have the assurance of God Himself that death waits for those who sin and do not turn from their evil ways.

How unlike the voices and proverbs of the world, to say everything is left up to the individual! To say that life and death are at hand! To identify the singularity of the moment and say, 'This is when you must decide!'.

To count a man's sins against him no longer!

Very often a worldly man will welcome someone with a tarnished background. He will smile and excuse his acts with societal proverbs about grapes -the very proverbs he excuses his own behavior with- and even before the lowly one reluctantly agrees the worldly man is already saying to himself:

What a despicable man, wholly inferior and a reminder of my greatness.

The worldly man is quick to recall the injustices of others, but unable to survey the criminality of his own ways.

The ways of the Lord are set apart. When a wicked man turns from his ways and sets in his heart to obey all the decrees of God's Word, the Lord himself says,

None of the offenses he has committed will be remembered against him.

When a famous person errs, he often gathers the crowds and apologizes. The spectacle draws many, but no one forgets and the condition of the man is the same.

But when a sinner errs and turns to God, it is as though the jabbering of the crowd quiets down and vanishes away. His offences will not be remembered against him, and, behold! He is a different man because he is alive!

In the same way God calls everyone -the ones who have deaf ears as well as the ones with ears that hear- to repent and be saved from the downfall of sin and death.

Teach us, O Lord, to view our sins, and to turn from them that we may find our wrongs forgotten and our hearts full of life.

Parable of the Speedy Arrest

A man seated in a glass case is not put to such embarrassment as is a man in his transparency before God. This is the factor of conscience.

By the aid of conscience things are so arranged that the judicial report follows at once upon every fault, and that the guilty one himself must write it. But it is written with sympathetic ink and only becomes thoroughly clear when in eternity it is held up to the light, while eternity holds audit over the consciences.

Substantially everyone arrives in eternity bringing with him and delivering the most accurate account of every least insignificance which he has committed or has left undone. Therefore to hold judgment in eternity is a thing a child could manage; there is really nothing for a third person to do, everything, even to the most insignificant word is counted and in order.

The case of the guilty man who journeys through life to eternity is like that of the murderer who with the speed of the railway train fled from the place where he perpetrated his crime. Alas, just under the railway coach where he sat ran the electric telegraph with its signal and the order for his apprehension at the next station. When he reached the station and alighted from the coach he was arrested. In a way he had himself brought the denunciation with him.

Kierkegaard, Soren. The Sickness Unto Death. p. 255
Parables of Kierkegaard. p. 37

This passage has been on my mind lately. A number of people are having intellectual difficulty accepting the existence of a literal hell.

I have no interest in defending the doctrines of hell, or citing evidence to confirm it, or discussing (philosophically) what hell is. I think my behavior before knowing Christ has suffeciently demonstrated the existence of a literal hell.

I am drawn to this passage in Kierkegaard particularly because modernity has no understanding of what inner anguish is. And it has no interest in it. It just understands physical suffering regardless of who deserves it, and it is totally indifferent to the quality of their faith.

The difficulty for the critics of hell is that every person holds sway over an invisible court with which they are continually condemned over and over. They didn't learn this from the noisy Baptist preachers or any "third person" as Kierkegaard says.

The matter is just that many, many people carry the weight of their imperfect actions on their shoulders and it is slowly killing them. The reality of this weight has nothing to do with what can be shown on the outside (microscopes, reporters, opinion polls). It has everything to do with what is going on inside.

Jesus once said everyone who sins is a slave to sin. A man can live his entire life on the surface and never breath a word of his hidden guilt, but this does nothing to negate the guilt inside the man. This does not make his suffering any less real, for he is truly a slave.

Laughing With The Joker

"It is the minor characters that make up the cast of life -for they are life."
Bob Kane

Somewhere in Gotham city a business man is driving home on the freeway.

He's in a hurry to get home because he's had a long day. He wants to relax before he has to eat his wife's meat loaf. He's had a long day at work and he has no patience for bad drivers.

Suddenly a car cuts him off.

The business man lowers his window and shouts, 'Hey who do you think you are, buddy?!'

The other car changes lanes and slows down. Its window lowers and there behind the wheel is the white and green smile of the Joker.

And he laughs.

...


What a coincidence. This man thinks he is thoroughly bad and tough - or atleast enough to learn the identity of the man who cut him off. And this man discovers the smile of the Joker. He is an extreme character, but I don't think it is hard to laugh with the Joker. I think we laugh with him all the time.

This businessman thinks that if he can make it home a little sooner, if people treat him a little more fair, if he can eat roast beef for dinner, his life will be meaningful.

Ha!

With every laugh the Joker seems to say, "Someone forgot to tell this outstanding fellow just how meaningless this all is."

And it is meaningless. At least Solomon says so.

"'Meaningless, meaningless,' Says the preacher, 'Everything is meaningless.'"

The businessman tries to apologize on the road, but, again, the Joker is an extreme character and his stylized extremeness is also his greatness. The Joker stalks the man into a park and places a gun to his head.

"No," The man says, "Don't kill me ... I'll do anything!"

The Joker's curiousity is aroused. "Anything?" He asks.

To kill the man or not is a meaningless choice -or atleast it is as much to the Joker. But experimenting with a man's boundaries ... testing the limits of his sanity ... well, somehow the novelty of such an opportunity is somehow ... meaningful.

The Joker begins to question Solomon. He wonders, 'Maybe there is something new under the sun'. Something new to laugh at ...

So the Joker sets up the business man to be an accomplice in one of his criminal acts to embarass the commissioner.

Of course Batman is not far from the scene, and he exposes the facade of the Joker for what it is: petty human infatuation with appearances. The Joker wants to be seen as a fearsome and terrible person -a person he could care less about actually becoming.

Batman is the true glimpse of an extreme lifestyle. The promises of the world: to be admired by the crowd, the allure of the opposite sex (particularly catwoman), the luxuries of the millionare lifestyle ... all are meaningless to him. He finds them so meaningless he becomes an ethical superhero -an alien to the rest of the world.

One person to catch such a glimpse is the business man.

Batman breaks in on the Joker's plans to ruin the commissioner's party. The exploding birthday cake is removed just in time. The Joker and his female assistant, Harlequin, escape. The businessman runs away.

As the business man runs he catches the attention of the Joker.

The Joker holds him at gun point, but the business man asserts he is no longer afraid of what the Joker can do to him. The business man's appearance does nothing to intimidate the Joker, but he catches a glimpse of the businessman's willingness to lose everything and not care.

The Joker's psychological curiousity -crafted for the sake of a comic effect- detects the contours of something great and unmovable. Perhaps he is reminded of someone.

Batman watches from behind.

The Joker fumbles and the gun drops. "Don't hurt me!" He shouts out. "You! You're going to let him hurt me?!".

"Who's the one afraid now?" The business man asks.

The Joker is taken to Arkham Asylum and the businessman returns home. One person stays the same, but the other person is different.

"He's crazy!" The Joker shouts -pointing at the businessman- as they take him away.

Suddenly the prospect of eating his wife's meatloaf doesn't seem so bad after all. The business man has learned something about the tenuousness of existence ... the futility of choosing between roast beef and meat loaf ... and in a meaningless world he has found something meaningful: gratitude.

The Joker is an extreme character, or presents himself as such, but easy to laugh with. Who can understand the businessman?

Can you?

Do Not Conform

I recently found a poster at an online store. The poster displayed a barcode running horizontally through the center. Below the barcode were the words: "Do Not Conform".

The poster resonated with me, but I wasn't sure why. Eventually I remembered the passage in Romans 12.

"Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is -his good, pleasing, and perfect will."

A lingering theme of both the Old and the New Testament is the message that God wants His people to be set apart.

"Be holy, because I am holy."

Holiness is a measure of how 'set apart' a thing is.

Certainly there are a number of ways a person can be set apart. In one way of looking at it a person could stand out by doing evil deeds. People throughout history have taken this position, the most noteworthy is probably Niechtze who said in order to stand out one must in effect become a criminal.

On the same side with a different message, Charles Dickens' novels often critiqued those who were set apart because he considered it unusual to see a truly evil person such as Ebeneezer Scrooge. C.S. Lewis' ethics in Mere Christianity follow a similar pattern.

Sometimes I wonder about the world Lewis, Niechtze, and Dickens discribe. It sounds in many ways like an almost-heaven: where most people are angels, think good thoughts about each other, where people give themselves and others the benefit of the doubt, where they do not merely conceptualize standards but actually live them. It sounds like quite a place!

But the Scriptures teach that everyone has sinned -that no one is righteous -that if anyone says he is without sin he is a liar.

To glimpse of just how set apart God wants His servants to be, consider the fact that Christ commanded his disciples to be perfect. When I reflect on my attitudes, my ingratitude, my double-mindedness and recall that Christ has called me to be literally perfect, my obligations seem to be very set apart.

In one sense the command to be "set apart" means to not behave as the world behaves with its lusts and boasts and cravings. In another sense it means to not base our priorities on the choices of the people around us.

If a person is to truly have a relationship with God, he must not seek that relationship because his parents were Christians or because he wants to win the approval of others or because it seems to be what "everyone is doing".

And this is precisely what God is looking for when he searches the hearts of men: mere devotion. Devotion comes from the word "devoted". The more devoted a person is in regard to something, the more his interest in the pursuit becomes independent of everything else going on around him.

For example Shadrach, Meshach, and Abindigo's devotion meant their love for God was independent of what the King of Persia decreed. In this way Christ commands his followers to be independent in regard to obeying God. When the crowds bowed before Nebaudchunezzar they were the only ones standing and they were set apart.

Often in periods of trial and during the good times it becomes desirable to have a companion. To this extent Christ has given believers his body, the Church. But this is not to say our obligation to be set apart grows and shrinks on the basis of the people who claim to be in the Church.

Certainly Shadrach was glad and proud of his God that his companions did not bow to the Persian leader, but this is not to say he was only willing to obey God as long as his companions obeyed. And it doesn't mean that if they bowed he was excused from the task given to him by heaven ... the task to remain set apart.