Friday, May 7, 2010

Ezekiel 8

3 comments:

Unknown said...

"and all the idols of the people of Israel, carved on the wall all around." v10 Ugh. What would my idols be if they were to be carved on the wall? I know what they would be and they repulse me. Lord, may they repulse me enough that I would deny them and squelch them and in their void be filled with You.

"Have you seen what the older leaders of Israel are doing in the dark? Have you seen each man in the room of his own idol?" v12

Isn't it funny how humanity has this tendency to create "rooms". Like we can have "room" in our life to worship God, and "room" to worship mammon? Something that really stood out to me in something I heard recently is that worship is not lip service, it is what we choose to submit to and serve in our lives. It is true that we can not serve both God and Mammon. The latter will rob from the first, and the first will require us to die to the second.

"With their backs turned to the temple of the Lord, they faced east and were worshipping the sun." v16

My heart gets jealous for the Lord when I see people turning their backs on His temple to head in a different direction (hockey games, run a race, volleyball tournies, meet people for brunch, the list could go on). I know that we can worship God wherever we are and whatever we do but I can't help but believe He would desire us not to turn our backs on His temple for these pursuits. I know this kind of thinking would be scoffed at by many, with the whole teaching that church is not a building, and God is everywhere and can be worshipped wherever we are, and even that God would rather we be "out mingling" with the world than holed up in our own christian communities but it's still a concept I wrestle with based on passages like this.

Interesting little sidenote, looked up "Tammuz" in my Bible Dictionary (the god that the Israelite women were mourning at the North Gate of the Temple. How disturbing! Said to be a predeluvian Sumerian shepherd who married the Babylonian goddess Ishtar. When he died and was taken to the underworld she went after him, kind of like the story of Persephone in Greek mythology and all things stopped growing (autumn), and there is a month named after him in the Babylonian and Hebraic year.

Wiki says; The festival for the deity Tammuz was held throughout the month of Tammuz in midsummer, and celebrated his death and resurrection.[3] The first day of the month of Tammuz was the day of the new moon of the summer solstice.[4] On the second day of the month, there was lamentation over the death of Tammuz, on the 9th, 16th and 17th days torchlit processions, and on the last three days, an image of Tammuz was buried.

Jude said...

God sees all our sins...those we hide away in little rooms, those we do in public and do not even recognize as sin, or sins of unbelief and of defiance. It all also makes me think of my sins and what I (try to) hide from God.
v18:"Therefore I will deal with them in anger; I will not look on them with pity or spare them. Although they shout in my ears, I will not listen to them." That is not where I want to be ....or our society to be...

Jude said...
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