October 03, 2024 | Be God's Light
Ezekiel Lies on His Side Symbolizing Siege
Scripture: Ezekiel 4(NIV)
1 “Now, son of man, take a block of clay, put it in front of you and draw the city of Jerusalem on it. 2 Then lay siege to it: Erect siege works against it, build a ramp up to it, set up camps against it and put battering rams around it. 3 Then take an iron pan, place it as an iron wall between you and the city and turn your face toward it. It will be under siege, and you shall besiege it. This will be a sign to the people of Israel.
4 “Then lie on your left side and put the sin of the people of Israel upon yourself. You are to bear their sin for the number of days you lie on your side. 5 I have assigned you the same number of days as the years of their sin. So for 390 days you will bear the sin of the people of Israel.
6 “After you have finished this, lie down again, this time on your right side, and bear the sin of the people of Judah. I have assigned you 40 days, a day for each year. 7 Turn your face toward the siege of Jerusalem and with bared arm prophesy against her. 8 I will tie you up with ropes so that you cannot turn from one side to the other until you have finished the days of your siege.
9 “Take wheat and barley, beans and lentils, millet and spelt; put them in a storage jar and use them to make bread for yourself. You are to eat it during the 390 days you lie on your side. 10 Weigh out twenty shekels of food to eat each day and eat it at set times. 11 Also measure out a sixth of a hin of water and drink it at set times. 12 Eat the food as you would a loaf of barley bread; bake it in the sight of the people, using human excrement for fuel.” 13 The Lord said, “In this way the people of Israel will eat defiled food among the nations where I will drive them.”
14 Then I said, “Not so, Sovereign Lord! I have never defiled myself. From my youth until now I have never eaten anything found dead or torn by wild animals. No impure meat has ever entered my mouth.”
15 “Very well,” he said, “I will let you bake your bread over cow dung instead of human excrement.”
16 He then said to me: “Son of man, I am about to cut off the food supply in Jerusalem. The people will eat rationed food in anxiety and drink rationed water in despair, 17 for food and water will be scarce. They will be appalled at the sight of each other and will waste away because of their sin.
Devotional
When my brother Dave and I were kids, we had hundreds of gray and green plastic army men. We would reenact WWII, setting up the troops on the opposite side of the family room, constructing walls and barriers from Legos and Lincoln Logs. Then with the excess Legos, we would launch missiles at the enemy. The room was a snowstorm of flying plastic.
Ezekiel’s dramatic demonstration was much more than boyhood games. Recall that the Babylonian empire attacked Judah and took exiles from there back to Babylon in three waves over more than twenty years. This enduring illustration took place before the final siege of Jerusalem by the Babylonians.
The people of Jerusalem were being dramatically warned. The coming siege would be inevitable. The long decades of exile would be inescapable. The food and water rations would be intolerable. The final sentence says it all: “They will be appalled at the sight of each other and will waste away because of their sin.”
Søren Kierkegaard said, "Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” It’s easy to look at the people of Jerusalem and ask why they didn’t listen to all these warnings from God and His prophets. But we are looking at their situation through the backwards lens of history.
We ourselves live in the present, with a history that has brought us to today. But we must live our lives forwards, one step at a time, one day at a time. If God were to send a prophet to do a dramatic presentation of your future, what might that look like? What warnings would the Lord give you? What would the person sent to demonstrate it do or say?
More importantly, how would you respond? Would you change? Will you?
Poem
O, The Strange Way Of Prophets
You see him there, playing with mud and with clay
A stick imprinting pictures on brick?
Now laying on ground for great number of days?
And this is the one God has picked?
Now he’s tied up in knots lying on his right side
With tears crying for our great city?
O, the strange way of prophets who live in our land
Are they not the ones whom we should pity?
And now he’s concocting a very strange flour?
And now he is baking some bread?
He’s eating while lying there down on the ground
And speaking strong words of great dread!
O, the strange way of prophets God sends to our land
God’s foolishness full on display!
Until all of the truth which they speak comes to pass—
When God’s wrath is released in our day
