Everyone seems to be winding down around now. It’s the season to take a pause from many activities for a few months ahead, including Precept class. Our Thursday morning Bible study has been in the difficult but rewarding book of Ezekiel for the past eight months. If you don’t keep up, you won’t keep up. I’ve hovered over the book many times but never really landed in it until last September. It has been an eye-opener and a heart-changer!
Ezekiel’s story, like many biblical stories – disrupts us. Makes us think. Makes us feel. At first I wondered how this book could possibly apply to me – today? Well, now as I’m finishing up the last chapters, I have multiple answers to that question.
However, in a book of radical description and twisted images carried out by the priest-prophet to get the attention of the far-away people – I’m more likely to just center in on the middle. The key – that’s what my take-away is. And it’s the repeated phrase that shouts across the pages . .
Then they will know that I am the Lord.
The phrase occurs in 27 of the 48 chapters and secures the reason for the radical and the complicated. And it applies today more than ever, because God is all around us trying to get our attention. We ask, why doesn’t He show that He exists.? He did. He does. He will.
The exiled Ezekiel had everything he knew destroyed. I can’t imagine. He had to be a voice of encouragement in a dry bone lifeless space in time. Which is why God the Father needed watchmen (and watchwomen) on the wall. Then and now, to be the voice.
Ezekiel must have felt he endured a long middle of his story. We can all get to that place where we wrestle with the uncertainty and want to skip to the end where the struggle is behind us. But experience tells me that we can trust Him for more than the paragraph we’re dwelling in.
The middle is not the end. Even the end isn’t the end – there is a glorious finish. Restoration.
He didn’t write our name on His palm with a nail for nothing – there is resurrection and revival.
So you may want to sit down with the good book this summer and read all about you and Ezekiel. In the beginning, you’ll notice how he needed to make it clear that humans need to live up to the law of God, no matter when they live and breathe. It’s all about His passionate desire to offer a new heart and mind – and restore the rubble.
Read the psalms – each one holds the water when the well runs dry. It’s where you’ll notice that restoration is about the environment within us – not around us.
And please don’t miss the middle in the middle — ask yourself how God is working to bring something alive inside of you today. May we feel the Spirit whisper life into our dry bones so that we will know that we know “that He is the Lord.”
If you’ll have time for another summer read, I hope you’ll check out my newest book, Even Now ~ Clinging to Wild Faith in the Middle of Your Story” it tells of the many-middles I’ve encountered personally and how our God has brought me through. You can find it on Amazon/Barnes & Noble. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1734778962
Verna
That was so great. You are a fantastic writer.
Aw thank you for your kind encouragement, Barb — always . . .
Love this, Verna. In the same way Ezekiel called people to The Hope, you have called me to dig into his words. I had just read the Valley of Dry bones. Powerful image of the new life we have in Jesus.
Oh Jeanne – so glad, you’ll be “digging in” — so grateful we have the hope that Ezekiel talks about in those dry-bone chapters because of Jesus!