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Ezekiel Chapter
Twelve
Ezekiel 12
Chapter Contents
The approaching captivity. (1-16) An emblem of the
consternation of the Jews. (17-20) Answers to the objections of scoffers.
(21-28)
Commentary on Ezekiel 12:1-16
(Read Ezekiel 12:1-16)
By the preparation for removal, and his breaking through
the wall of his house at evening, as one desirous to escape from the enemy, the
prophet signified the conduct and fate of Zedekiah. When God has delivered us,
we must glorify him and edify others, by acknowledging our sins. Those who by
afflictions are brought to this, are made to know that God is the Lord, and may
help to bring others to know him.
Commentary on Ezekiel 12:17-20
(Read Ezekiel 12:17-20)
The prophet must eat and drink in care and fear, with
trembling, that he might express the condition of those in Jerusalem during the
siege. When ministers speak of the ruin coming upon sinners, they must speak as
those that know the terrors of the Lord. Afflictions are happy ones, however
grievous to flesh and blood, that improve us in the knowledge of God.
Commentary on Ezekiel 12:21-28
(Read Ezekiel 12:21-28)
From that forbearance of God, which should have led them
to repent, the Jews hardened themselves in sin. It will not serve for an excuse
in speaking evil, to plead that it is a common saying. There is but a step
between us and an awful eternity; therefore it concerns us to get ready for a
future state. No one will be able to put from himself the evil day, unless by
seeking peace with the Lord.
── Matthew Henry《Concise Commentary on Ezekiel》
Ezekiel 12
Verse 2
[2] Son
of man, thou dwellest in the midst of a rebellious house, which have eyes to
see, and see not; they have ears to hear, and hear not: for they are a
rebellious house.
Eyes to see — They
have capacity, if they would, to understand, but they will not understand, what
thou speakest.
Verse 3
[3] Therefore, thou son of man, prepare thee stuff for removing, and remove by
day in their sight; and thou shalt remove from thy place to another place in
their sight: it may be they will consider, though they be a rebellious house.
Stuff —
Vessels or instruments, wherein thou mayest put what is portable.
Verse 4
[4] Then
shalt thou bring forth thy stuff by day in their sight, as stuff for removing:
and thou shalt go forth at even in their sight, as they that go forth into
captivity.
In their sight —
Before 'tis quite night, that they, who should learn by this sign, may see and
consider it.
Verse 5
[5] Dig
thou through the wall in their sight, and carry out thereby.
Dig —
Come not through the door, but as one who knows there is a guard upon the door,
get to some back part of thy house, and dig there thyself, either to make the
greater haste, or to keep all secret; for all will be little enough for them
that must act what thou dost represent.
Carry out —
Through the hole thou hast dug.
Verse 6
[6] In their sight shalt thou bear it upon thy shoulders, and carry it forth
in the twilight: thou shalt cover thy face, that thou see not the ground: for I
have set thee for a sign unto the house of Israel.
Bare it — In
testimony of the servitude they shall be reduced to, who then must do what
servants or beasts were wont to be employed in.
Cover thy face — As
unwilling to be seen or known.
For — I
have set thee for a sign to them, and thou shalt tell them the meaning of these
things in due time.
Verse 7
[7] And
I did so as I was commanded: I brought forth my stuff by day, as stuff for
captivity, and in the even I digged through the wall with mine hand; I brought
it forth in the twilight, and I bare it upon my shoulder in their sight.
I brought forth —
Here is a transposing of his actions, and rehearsal of that in the first place,
which was acted in the second place.
Verse 10
[10] Say
thou unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD; This burden concerneth the prince in
Jerusalem, and all the house of Israel that are among them.
Say —
Though they enquire not, yet tell them what I mean hereby, that this prophecy
is a burden which the kingdom shall groan under.
The prince — Zedekiah.
Verse 11
[11] Say,
I am your sign: like as I have done, so shall it be done unto them: they shall
remove and go into captivity.
I am your sign — My
person is the emblem of yours, and my actions of that you shall do. And the
like shall be done to you, O inhabitants of Jerusalem. We cannot say concerning
our dwelling place, that it is our resting place. For how far we may be tossed
from it before we die, we cannot foresee.
Verse 12
[12] And
the prince that is among them shall bear upon his shoulder in the twilight, and
shall go forth: they shall dig through the wall to carry out thereby: he shall
cover his face, that he see not the ground with his eyes.
The prince —
Zedekiah.
Shall bear —
Disguised, as a servant, in hope to conceal himself, chuses the twilight as the
time that would best favour his design.
They shall dig —
This was fulfilled when they broke down the wall to fly, Jeremiah 39:4.
Cover his face —
Zedekiah did by this aim at concealing himself.
Verse 13
[13] My
net also will I spread upon him, and he shall be taken in my snare: and I will
bring him to Babylon to the land of the Chaldeans; yet shall he not see it,
though he shall die there.
It — Neither the land nor
the city; for his eyes will be put out at Riblah.
Verse 16
[16] But
I will leave a few men of them from the sword, from the famine, and from the
pestilence; that they may declare all their abominations among the heathen
whither they come; and they shall know that I am the LORD.
Declare — By
relating those sins, for which God was justly angry, and for which he punished
them, though they were his own people.
Thy —
The Chaldeans. See how God brings good out of evil! The dispersion of sinners,
who had done God much dishonour and disservice in their own country, proves the
dispersion of penitents, who shall do him much honour and service in other
countries!
Verse 19
[19] And
say unto the people of the land, Thus saith the Lord GOD of the inhabitants of
Jerusalem, and of the land of Israel; They shall eat their bread with
carefulness, and drink their water with astonishment, that her land may be
desolate from all that is therein, because of the violence of all them that
dwell therein.
The people —
Thy fellow captives.
And of the land —
Those that dwell in the countries round about Jerusalem.
Her land —
Jerusalem's land, so called because it was the head city thereof.
Desolate —
Because it shortly shall be laid waste, emptied of inhabitants, wealth and
plenty.
Violence —
Injustice, oppression and tyranny of the Jews toward one another.
Verse 22
[22] Son
of man, what is that proverb that ye have in the land of Israel, saying, The
days are prolonged, and every vision faileth?
That proverb —
That short saying commonly used.
Days — Of
wrath and vengeance, are to come a great while hence.
Every vision —
Threatening vision, which Jeremiah and Ezekiel would fright us with, comes to
nothing.
Verse 25
[25] For
I am the LORD: I will speak, and the word that I shall speak shall come to
pass; it shall be no more prolonged: for in your days, O rebellious house, will
I say the word, and will perform it, saith the Lord GOD.
I will speak —
There has been and shall be a succession of God's ministers, by whom he will
speak, to the end of the world. Even in the worst times, God left not himself
without witness, but raised up men that spoke for him, and spoke from him.
── John Wesley《Explanatory Notes on Ezekiel》
12 Chapter 12
Verses 1-15
Verse 2
Son of man, thou dwellest in the midst of a rebellious house,
which have eyes to see and see not.
The disuse of spiritual faculties
Eyes and ears are for many reasons the most important and valuable
organs of the human body, the chief “gates”--to use the language of Bunyan--to
the famous town of Mansoul. The one brings us into contact with form, the other
with sound; the one has relation to space, the other to time. No part in the
human frame is so wonderful in their execution as these. “The eye,” says one,
“by its admirable combination of coats and humours and lenses, produces on the
retina, or expansion of nerve at the back of the socket or bony cavity, in
which it is so securely lodged, a distinct picture of the minutest or largest
object; so that, on a space that is less than an inch in diameter, a landscape
of miles in extent, with all its variety of scenery, is depicted with perfect
exactness of relative proportion in all its parts.” Nor is the ear less wonderful.
“It is a complicated mechanism lying wholly within the body, showing only the
wide outer porch through which the sound enters. It conveys the sound through
various chambers to the inmost extremities of those nerves which bear the
messages to the brain. So delicate is this organ, that it catches the softest
whispers, and conveys them to the soul, and so strong that it hears the roll of
the loudest thunder in the chamber of its mistress.” Now, the text--as well as
other parts of Scripture--teaches that man’s spiritual nature has organs
answering to those organs of the body. The text calls us to notice the
spiritual disuse of these faculties.
I. It involves the
greatest deprivation.
1. The disuse shuts out the grandest realities of existence. What are
the immutable principles of rectitude, what is the great spiritual universe,
what is God Himself, to the man who is morally blind and deaf?
2. The disuse shuts out the sublimest joys of existence. What are the
charms of physical to moral beauty, the beauty of holiness and God? What are
the charms of physical harmony to those of that great moral anthem that fills
the spiritual universe with rapture and delights the ear of God Himself? How
great then the deprivation of the spiritually blind and deaf! God is with them,
His pure, happy heavens lie about them, and they know it not.
3. The disuse deteriorates the faculties themselves. Unused organs
often die out.
II. It involves the
greatest wickedness.
1. It is an abuse of talent. All the powers we possess, we possess as
trustees, not as proprietors; they are entrusted to us for a specific purpose.
2. It is an abuse of the greatest talents. These spiritual faculties
are the highest we have--higher than bodily power, higher than intellectual
ability, higher than natural genius.
Conclusion--
1. The sad condition of the unregenerate world.
2. The deeply needed mission of Christ. (Homilist.)
Rebelliousness means loss of faculty
You cannot commit sin and be as clear-minded as you were before
you committed it. The obscurity of mind may not be immediately evident; but let
a man allow one bad thought to pass through his brain, and the brain has lost
quality, a tremendous injury has been inflicted on that sensitive organ; by and
by, after a succession of such passages, there will be no brain to injure. Sin
tears down whatever it touches. Your habit is bringing you to imbecility, if it
is a bad habit. You must name it; preachers may not speak distinctly and
definitely, but they create a standard by which men may judge themselves, and
by which preachers may also judge their own aspirations and purposes. You are
losing your eyesight by your sin; you are becoming deaf because you are
becoming worse in thought and desire and purpose; you are not the business man
you were a quarter of a century ago, when you were a disciplinarian, a Spartan,
a self-critic, when you held yourself in a leash, and would not allow yourself
to go an inch faster than your judgment approved; since then you have loosened
the reins, you have allowed the steeds to go at their own will, and the
consequence is that you miss one-half of what is spoken to you, and you fail to
see God’s morning and God’s sunset; they are but commonplaces to you, mayhap
but broad vulgarities. Men should be good if they wish to keep their genius.
The bad man goes down. His descent may not be palpable today or tomorrow, but
the process is not the less certain and tremendous because it is sometimes
imperceptible. (J. Parker, D. D.)
Verses 3-7
Prepare thee stuff for removing.
A drama of exile
I. The vision in
its historical fulfilment.
II. The vision in
its practical lessons for the present.
1. The consequence of sin is moral exile. All evil, not only in act,
but in thought and in wish, involves in greater or less degree a going away
from the holy--is a self-exileship, not perhaps, as in the vision, from a holy
place, but from the holy God.
2. This moral exile is awfully sad.
3. This moral exile is stealthy. Not through a gate, but by a hole
dug through the wall; not at noon, but at night, the exile gets away from the
holy city. So with the beginnings of all sin. The excuses, the concealments,
the artifices of the selfish, the impure, the mean, breathe the stealthy spirit
of the father of lies. Evil chooses the dark first, and then gets blinded.
4. This moral exile is shameful. The exile, ashamed to look on the
ground, is a true type of those who, first with blush of shame, and whitened
lip, and trembling voice or hand, do wrong; and who at last “will wake to shame
and everlasting contempt.” (Urijah R. Thomas.)
It may be they will
consider.--
The Divine expectation
I. The subject to
which this expectation refers.
1. Men do not consider that they are sinful creatures.
2. Nor that they are dying creatures.
3. Nor that they are immortal creatures.
II. The means
employed for bringing about the expectation which is here expressed.
1. The Divine forbearance.
2. The afflictive dispensations of Divine Providence.
3. The ministry of the Gospel. (J. C. Gray.)
Verse 6
I have set thee for a sign unto the house of Israel.
Men and ministers
Ideas may be communicated quite as effectively through the eye as
through the ear, by visible signs as by audible words. Thus our cemeteries
display a profusion of emblems which eloquently, though silently, express the
sentiments both of grief and of hope. Thus our sacraments of baptism and the
Lord’s Supper express the fundamental ideas of purification, brotherhood, and
life through Christ, by symbols, or signs, as a visible Gospel. In like manner,
a truth may be embodied, as it were in a person, who stands before his fellow
men as the representative sign of an idea. This is the function of the
Christian ministry today. The words applied to Ezekiel may be applied to every
individual member of the Christian ministry: “I have set thee for a sign unto
the house of Israel.”
I. A sign of what?
To answer, we must analyse the convictions generally entertained as to the
duties of the Christian ministry. These convictions, so far as reasonable, are
the judgment of the conscience of the community in concurrence with the
teaching of the Scriptures.
1. In purity, he must be the man above suspicion, pure even to the
verge of being puritanical, forbidding himself some things in which his fellow
Church members indulge themselves without rebuke.
2. In unselfishness, he must be the man who never spares himself in
doing good, never discriminating between rich and poor in an all-serving
helpfulness; patient under provocation, conciliating in speech and in temper,
the first to deny himself, a liberal giver, a prompt, unstinting paymaster,
owing no man anything but unlimited love.
3. In truth, he must be the mirror of sincerity, both in private
study and in public speech and action, aiming ever at the reality of things,
not the paid advocate of a creed, not the hired mouthpiece of a church or
denomination, not the echo of other men’s voices, not a professionalist in any
way, but transparently representing the real and conscientiously formed
convictions which he cherishes in his own heart and mind.
4. In courage, he must be no time server, or flatterer, never failing
to ask, Is it right? before asking, Is it safe?--as bold for an unpopular truth
as for a popular one, as plain spoken to rich sinners as to poor ones, willing,
if need be, to lose a place by doing a duty, just as ready to be counted in a
minority as in a majority, if only on the side of truth and right.
5. In piety is required the Christian minister’s central and vital
characteristic. Together with every other required quality, men will insist on
that peculiar quality in a Christian minister which is called “spirituality,”
and which I may call other-worldliness--an unaffected recognition of interests
that lie beyond the grave, and of the Being in whom we must trust for the
hereafter.
II. But why does
the general conscience require this purity, unselfishness, truth, courage,
piety, in the Christian minister? Certainly not by reason of any contract
between him and his brethren. He has simply contracted to be their teacher. He
has not contracted to furnish a model of all the virtues at so much a year.
Neither is it by virtue of any profession he has made as a Christian man. The
profession that every Christian man makes is a profession of a purpose and
endeavour--rather than of an actual attainment--and whatever any man professes
or does not profess in the way of good endeavour, to that good endeavour he is
bound whether professing it or not. Why, then, this demand of the public
conscience upon the Christian minister, except that, simply as a man teaching
men, he in his position must be what every man in any position should be; must
stand as a sign of the character that God requires of all? I ask you, then, my
friends, to exalt your requirements of character in Christian ministers to the
very highest, insisting only on those real excellences, which are displayed in
that one only pattern of a perfect human life which God has given us in Jesus
Christ. When you have done it, and formed a true and high ideal of the
character that the Christian ministry should possess, then you have simply
figured to yourself what a true man should be among men, independently of any
contract, or profession, or endeavour after consistency. And the minister whom
you expect to live up to that ideal is set to be God’s sign to you for your own
living. Whatever would spot his skirts in God’s sight, will spot yours.
Whatever you would be sorry to see him do, you should be sorry to see yourself
do.
III. Further
suggestions.
1. The danger of the clerical profession to society. What this danger
is, may be illustrated by the answer which I dare say many a person would give,
if asked why a Christian minister should pray, “Why, it is his business to.”
The subtle fallacy in that word, “his business,” is no small drawback to a
minister’s influence for good, and the only way he can offset it is by that
high personal character which the most unspiritual men must admit to be
everybody’s business.
2. The Divine end in the institution of the Christian ministry is the
formation of right character. What we need most is to take our grand and
beautiful and vital truths out of showcases, and put them on as everyday
clothing. Let us insist that those shall do this whose privilege it is to make
these truths their especial study, and to exhibit them to others. But remember,
that in so doing they are but a sign of that which is required of all.
3. The alleged decline of the influence of the Christian ministry is
a real gain be its influence on character. A fallacy has gone out and a truth
has come in. When the Christian minister has been brought down from his former
fictitious elevation to his proper level of a man among men, then the spiritual
rule by which he is judged is brought down to be the rule for all. This is a
solid gain for the power of conscience, when the high expectations which the
congregation press upon their minister are perceived to declare the obligations
which press equally upon every one of them as the servant of God. (J. M.
Whiten, Ph. D.)
Sign making lost among modern prophets
He was to be performing a very singular act, and to be so
constantly doing it that people would say, What is he doing now? He is moving
things: what is the madman after today? Watch him:--he brings forth his stuff
in their sight; he goes forth at even in their sight; he digs through the wall
in their sight; in their sight he bears the burden upon his shoulders and
carries it forth in the twilight (i.e. in the dark)
; he covers his face that he may not see the ground. The Lord makes this use of
the man that by an act singular, absurd, irrational, unaccountable, he may
attract attention, so that the people may say, What is it? It is thus the
preachers would do if they dare. The preacher has lost his power of sign
making, and he has taken now to sentence making. The preacher should always be
doing something that attracts the religious attention of mankind. He should be
praying so unexpectedly and vehemently as to cause people to say, What is this?
But he dare not. Quietness has been patented, and indifference has been
gazetted respectable. They are right who beat drums, sound trumpets, fly flags,
tramp the streets like soldiers taking a fortress, so that people shall say,
looking out of high windows and round the street corners, What is this? what
are these men doing now? “It may be,” saith the Lord,--“it may be they will
consider.” But they can only be brought to consideration by sign and token, by
madness on the part of the Church. Trust the Church for going mad today! The
Church now locks up its premises six days out of seven, and blesses the man who
occupies it as little as possible on the seventh day. Rebelliousness overfloods
the fading energy and zeal of the Church. (J. Parker.)
Verses 22-25
The days are prolonged,
and every vision faileth.
Prophecy a living force
Right in the midst of the
history of Israel, when Divine purposes of the highest moral and spiritual
importance were being wrought out in her, in the very centre of one of her
grandest outbursts of revealing thought upon the principles and power of
religion, this sceptical proverb took its rise and possessed a certain
plausibility, and had its seeming justification in the circumstances of the
time: “The days are prolonged, and every vision faileth.”
I. The proverb and
its meaning. The saying may be held to express relief or disappointment. There
were doubtless many Israelites who were glad to escape from the consciousness
of the ceaseless vigilance of the Keeper of Israel. There are always some minds
to whom the thought that “Thou God seest me” is an oppression and a nightmare.
Others, however, were bitterly disappointed at what seemed to them the neglect
and failure of Jehovah to redeem His promises to His people (Lamentations 3:1-66). But our proverb is more probably the outcome of a shallow
materialism than of either relief or disappointment. The materialist belongs to
all ages and peoples, and is always ready to say that visions have nothing in
them. Indeed, there had been, as Ezekiel tells us in verse 24, “vain visions”
and “flattering divinations within the house of Israel.” And because the true
visions had been contingent, conditional on their effect upon the character of
the people, they had very often seemed to fail. The desert can never rejoice
and blossom as the rose, except for a people who have learnt the joy of
unselfish sacrifice and long adorned themselves with the beauty of holiness.
Moreover, many of the truest visions never will and never can be realised in
such a world as this, because they have in them an element of idealism. Now,
the man who lives in a world governed entirely by material standards of value,
cannot stand this kind of thing at all. He calls upon his gods--upon actuality,
upon reality and common sense--to deliver him out of it; just as many of the
exiled Israelites were, at this very time, thinking of abjuring their nation
and religion, and becoming the servants of the gods of Babylon. Babylon, at any
rate, was no vision. Babylon commanded the big battalions, the scarlet-coated
legions which had never known defeat, the mighty engines of war, the
inexhaustible resources of the valley of the Euphrates; she had the mastery of
all the rich trade routes between East and West; and possessed, in her own
queenly magnificence, her towers, her palaces and temples, her wharves and
markets, her civilisation and unrivalled power, the assurances of what seemed
eternal prosperity. What folly to set up the visions of prophets over against
the great heathen power which dominated the world! It is not wonderful if today
also there are those who feel orphaned, desolate, forlorn, as though God had
left us. “No voices and no visions now! no direct Divine message! no obvious
Divine interposition!”--this is the thought that lies behind very much of our
public action and private conduct--this is the thought most to be dreaded; for
its influence tends in national politics to a hard, cynical selfishness in
place of any lofty enthusiasm for liberty and philanthropy. It is equally fatal
in private life; for if God is really silent to us, if He has left us to our
own devices, the times are indeed dull and joyless, and there is nothing for it
but for each of us to do the best he can for himself, and, according to the
wicked old worldly proverb, let the devil take the hindmost.
II. But no!
Prophecy is a living force. The Babylon of today is materialism--the
materialistic view of the world and of life, in the laboratory of the chemist,
the counting house of the merchant, and the abodes of society. Where are the
prophets and where the spiritual influences which we can set over against this
mighty tyranny? Some people talk of this as a materialistic or prosaic
century--feel it to be so--because they themselves lead prosaic and
materialistic lives. Yet our age has been blessed with a bright succession of
true prophets, or at least prophetic souls--great teachers of the essential
spirituality of the universe--men who have spoken, not only words of wisdom,
but of wisdom weighted with the power of deep and passionate conviction. It is
a question whether the Church of God has ever been blessed with a grander
succession of true preachers than in our own day; whilst the authority of the
great names outside the Church--of the Carlyles, Ruskins, Tennysons--has been
essentially a moral and spiritual authority. Materialism only represents one
tendency, one phase, of the life of the age; whilst great fields of life and
influence have been occupied by men who have been seekers after God in the
temper and spirit of old Hebrew piety, which ever cried, “Oh that I knew where
I might find Him, that I might even come into His presence!” Such men have
wrought in many minds an increased seriousness of thought, a deepened power of
feeling, a wider sympathy, a truer spiritual insight. Then, again, the great
influences which come from science are now being recognised as not necessarily
materialistic. The eternal power and Godhead are more clearly, not less
clearly, seen today than ever, in the majestic order of creation as revealed by
the telescope and the microscope. The God of the infinitely great and
infinitely little, the God who presides over the slow development of human
society, from whom come the influences which form character and which move the
world forward age by age, from whom comes the unconquerable tendency in things
which makes for righteousness, never was, to the seeing heart and eye, more
manifestly present than in the thought and life of our time. The silent,
ceaseless activities of a Deity whose being is everywhere, who crowds the
waters of a stagnant pool with myriads upon myriads of tiny inhabitants, and
fills the vast spaces of the heavens above us with stars, suns, systems
innumerable, are being recognised as still more impressive than the ancient
manifestations; whilst, as our science begins to hear in many directions the
“Thus far shalt thou go and no further” which limits discovery, a sense of awe
in presence of the encompassing mysteries of our lot gathers about us; and signs
are not wanting--the very nature of some of the more recent discoveries
warrants the impression--that science herself will come to be our teacher of
reverence, and her text books, which conduct us to the limits of the known,
will become more and more suggestive of awe and wonder in presence of the
unknown. The great Master of the unseen, the eternal, now, as ever, is Christ.
Who can doubt that He has ruled the thought of the nineteenth century as of the
first, or that His majestic figure will dominate the twentieth? As to the
Babylon of our day, He is but waiting to smite it down. For us, at ally rate,
to know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His
sufferings, that surely is enough to banish materialism out of our life forever,
to save us utterly from the dull and joyless inability to see life’s greater
meanings. (W. Burkitt Dalby.)
Ungodly proverbs
Jeremiah has been talking
about this upbreaking of the kingdom, and Ezekiel is talking about it; and when
the prophecies were delivered to Zedekiah he said they did not sufficiently
coincide to confirm one another; for he looked for those literal coincidences
which bewilder so many people and which can only satisfy pedantry; he did not
see that coincidence is in the purpose, in the substance of the message. So
there came up a proverb in Israel, “The days are prolonged,” then came a laugh
suggestive; and “Every vision faileth,” then the laugh was prolonged. We have
fallen into the mockery of proverb making. In English we say, “Words are but
wind.” How foolishly we have lived to believe that: whereas words are the only
real life. In the beginning the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and
the word is the man, the soul if he be other than a profane person. We
ourselves say in English, “In space comes grace”: God does not mean to kill us,
or He would not have given us such space for what is called repentance and
amendment. We ourselves say, “Every man for himself, and God for us all”: a
singular mixture of mammon and spirituality, of selfishness and
pseudo-religion. Let us not be victimised by our own wit. See to it that we do
not slip into hell through the trapdoor of an epigram. There is only one word
about this business that is true, namely, “Now is the accepted time, now is the
day of salvation.” The Lord says His patience will give way, His long-suffering
will come to an end,--“There shall be no more any vain vision nor flattering
divination within the house of Israel. For I am the Lord: I will speak, and the
word that I shall speak shall come to pass; it shall be no more prolonged: for
in your days, O rebellious house, will I say the word, and will perform it,
saith the Lord God.” Better believe this. All the ages have testified to it;
all philosophies point in this direction. “He that being often reproved
hardeneth his neck, shall suddenly be destroyed, and that without remedy.” (J.
C. Parker.)
The days are at hand.--
Death and eternity at hand
I. The tidings
here announced to the Jews. Similar tidings to you, but you have disregarded
them as the Jews of old; set the days are at hand.
II. The sign by
which they were confirmed. Apply--
1. It may be that some of you will consider;
2. But the great mass of you will not. (C. Simeon, M. A.)
Verse 24-25
It shall be no more prolonged: for in your days, O rebellious
house, will I say the word, and will perform it, saith the Lord God.
Critical moments
Do not enter a fool’s paradise; do not enter upon vain
imaginations, saying, As it was yesterday, so it will be tomorrow,--for there
is a moment which changes all things. Study the action of time, and you will
see how many critical moments there are. It is only a moment that separates the
night from the day, the day from the not-day, the positive from the
negative--an almost incalculable line, so minute, so infinitesimal. God can
work wonders in a moment. He may take eternity for some works, but in many a
moment He strikes men blind, and turns men into perdition. There is but a step
between thee and death. Thy breath is in thy nostrils: a puncture in the right
place, and life is gone. One touch, and the balance is lost, and he who was
strong an hour since will be buried next week. Seizing these realities,
grasping them with the whole mind and heart, the Church ought not to be other
than in dead earnest. (J. Parker, D. D.)
God’s warnings to be heeded
“You see that buoy, sir, moored in the bay?” said the captain of
the steamship in which we visited the Orlmeys. “Yes,” I replied, after
carefully picking out in the twilight the well-known danger signal. “Well,
there is a reef of rocks, that, starting from the shore, runs to a point within
ten yards of the buoy. The worst tiring about it is that there is no indication
of the reef; even at low water it is covered with water, and woe be to the ship
that should strike on that dangerous reef. In the dark nights that buoy is an
object of deep interest to me. Anxiously do I look out for it, and we steer
with care until it is found.” The reef was never seen by the captain, but
marked on his chart. He believed his chart to be true. So must we, as believers
and Christians, trust in the testimony of the Word of God, and heed its
warnings. (J. Ellis.)
God’s reckonings sometimes long delayed
An ungodly farmer one day met his Christian neighbour, also a
farmer, and began to taunt him. “Why, my corn grows as well as yours. What
difference does it make, all your prayers and talking about God’s blessing? I
don’t see any good you’ll get by it.” The Christian neighbour looked the man
full in the face, and replied, “Friend, God does not pay every week, but He
does pay in the end.”
Verse 27
The vision that he seeth is for many days to come, and he
prophesieth of the times that are far off.
Now
(a sermon for young men and young women):--One would have thought
that if the glorious Lord condescended to send His servants to speak to men of
the way of salvation, all mankind would delight to hear the message. But, alas!
it has not been so. Man’s opposition to God is too deep, too stubborn for that.
Men display great ingenuity in making excuses for rejecting the message of
God’s love. The evil argument which is mentioned in the text has been used from
Ezekiel’s day right down to the present moment, and it has served Satan’s turn
in ten thousand cases. The sons of men, when they hear of the great atonement
made upon the cross by the Lord Jesus, and are bidden to lay hold upon eternal
life in Him, still say concerning the Gospel, “The vision that he seeth is for
many days to come, and he prophesieth of times that are far off.” That is to
say, they pretend that the matters whereof we speak are not of immediate importance,
and may safely be postponed. They meet our pressing invitation, “All things are
now ready, come ye to the supper,” with the reply, “Religion is meant to
prepare us for eternity, but we are far off from it as yet, and are still in
the hey-day of our being; there is plenty of time for those dreary preparations
for death.” They put off the day of conversion, as if it were a day of tempest
and terror, and not, as it really is, a day most calm, most bright, the bridal
of the soul with heaven.
I. Granted for a
moment that the message ww bring to you has most to do with the future state,
yet even then the day is not far off, neither is there so great a distance
between now and then, that you can afford to wait. You, perhaps, think seventy
years a long period, but those who are seventy, in looking back, will tell you
that their age is an hand’s breadth. Man is short-lived compared with his
surroundings; he comes into the world and goes out of it, as a meteor flashes
through yonder skies which have remained the same for ages. Look at yonder
venerable oak, which has for five hundred years battled with the winds, and
what an infant one seems when reclining beneath its shade! Stand by some giant
rock, which has confronted the tempests of the ages, and you feel like the
insect of an hour. Therefore do not say, “These things are for a far-off time”;
for even if we could guarantee to you the whole length of human existence, it
is but a span. But there comes upon the heels of this a reflection never to be
forgotten--that not one man among us can promise himself, with anything like
certainty, that he shall ever see threescore years and ten. Nay more, we cannot
promise that we shall see half that length of time. Let me check myself! What
am I talking of? You cannot be certain that you will see this year out, and
hear the bells ring in a new year. Ay, and this very night, when you close your
eyes and rest your head upon your pillow, reckon not too surely that you shall
ever again look on that familiar chamber, or go forth from it to the pursuits
of life. It is clear, then, that the things which make for your peace are not
matters for a far-off time, the frailty of life makes them necessities of this
very hour.
II. Our message
really deals with the present. For observe, first, we are sent to plead with
you, young men and young women, and tenderly to remind you that you are at this
hour acting unjustly and unkindly towards your God. He made you, and you do not
serve Him; He has kept you alive, and you are not obedient to Him, “Will a man
rob God?” You would not rob your employer. You would not like to be thought
unfaithful or dishonest towards man; and yet your God, your God, your God--is
He to be treated so basely, notwithstanding all His goodness? Again, our
message has to do with the present, for we would affectionately remind you that
you are now at enmity with your best friend--the Friend to whose love you owe
everything. I have to remind you, however, of much more than this, namely, that
you are this night in danger. Are you content to abide for a single hour in
peril of eternal punishment? Many other reasons tend to make this weighty
matter exceedingly pressing; and among them is this, that there is a disease in
your heart, the disease of sin, and it needs immediate cure. Surely a sick mar
can never be cured too soon? The gospel which we preach to you will also bring
you present blessings. In addition to present pardon and present justification,
it will give you present regeneration, present adoption, present sanctification,
present access to God, present peace through believing, and present help in
time of trouble, and it will make you even for this life doubly happy. It will
be wisdom for your way, strength for your conflict, and comfort for your
sorrow.
III. I shall not
deny, but I shall glory rather in admitting, that the Gospel has to do with the
future. The Gospel of Jesus Christ has to do with the whole of a young man’s
life. Dear young friends, if you are saved while yet you are young, you will
find religion to be a great preventive of sin. What a blessing it is not to
have been daubed with the slime of Sodom, never to have had our bones broken by
actual vice. Prevention is better than cure, and grace gives both. Grace will
also act as a preservative as well as a preventive. The good thing which God
will put in you will keep you. Whosoever believeth in Him has passed from death
unto life; he shall not live in sin, but he shall be preserved in holiness even
to the end. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
The far-off looks insignificant
“Look at the stars, those vast globes of light, by reason of the
distance between us and them, do seem but as so many spangles; so we have but a
weak sight of things which are set at a great distance, and their operation
upon us is usually but small.”--Manton. A far-off hell is the dread of no man,
and a far-off heaven is scarce desired by anyone. God Himself, while thought of
as far away, is not feared or reverenced as He should be. If we did but use our
thoughts upon the matter, we should soon see that a mere span of time divides
us from the eternal world, while the Lord our God is nearer to us than our
souls are to our bodies. Strange that the brief time which intervenes between
us and eternity should appear to be so important, while eternity itself they
regard as a trifling matter. Men use the microscope to magnify the small
concerns of time. Oh, that they would use the telescope upon the vast matters
of eternity! (C. H. Spurgeon.)
A common mistake and lame excuse
I. The saying of
my text, in the application which I now want to make of it, is a truth, but it
is only half a truth. The neglect of God’s solemn message by a great many
people is based, more or less consciously, upon the notion that the message of
Christianity--or, if you like to call it so, of the Gospel; or, if you like to
call it more vaguely, religion--has to do mainly with blessings and woes beyond
the grave. So there is plenty of time to attend to it when we get near the end.
Now, is it true that “he prophesies of times that are far off”? Yes! and No!
Yes! it is true, and it is the great glory of Christianity, that it shifts the
centre of gravity, so to speak, from this poor, transient, contemptible
present, and sets it away out yonder in an august and infinite future. But is
that all that you have to say about Christianity? I want you to remember that
all that prophesying of times that are far off has the closest bearing upon
this transient, throbbing moment, because, for one thing, the characteristic of
the Christian revelation about the future is that my eternity and yours is the
child of time; and that just as the child is father of the man, so the man here
is the progenitor and determiner of all the infinite spaces that lie beyond the
grave. Therefore, when Christian truth prophesies of times that are afar off,
it is prophesying of present time, between which and the most distant eternity
there is an iron nexus: a band which cannot be broken. Igor is that all. Not
only is the truth in my text but a half truth, if it is supposed that the main
business of the Gospel is to talk to us about heaven and hell, and not about
the earth by which we secure and procure the one or the other, but also it is a
half truth, because, large and transcendent, eternal in their duration, and
blessed beyond all thought in their sweetness as are the possibilities, the
certainties that are opened by the risen and ascended Christ, and tremendous
beyond all words that men can speak as are the alternative possibilities, yet
these are not all the contents of the Gospel message; but those blessings and
penalties, joys and miseries, exaltations and degradations, which attend upon
righteousness and sin, godliness and irreligion today are a large part of its
theme and of its effects.
II. So, then, my
text gives a very good reason for prizing and attending to the prophecy. People
do not usually kick over their telescopes and neglect to look through them,
because they are so powerful that they show them the craters in the moon and
turn faint specks into blazing suns. People do not usually neglect a word of
warning or guidance in reference to the ordering of their earthly lives,
because it is so comprehensive, and covers so large a ground, and is so certain
and absolutely true. Surely there can be no greater sign of Divine loving
kindness, of a Saviour’s tenderness and care for us, than that He should come
to each of us, as He does come, and say to each of us, “Thou art to live
forever; and if thou wilt take Me for thy light thou shalt live forever,
blessed, calm, and pure.” And we listen, and say, “He prophesies of times that
are far off.” Oh! is that not rather a reason for coming very close to, and for
grappling to our hearts, and living always by the power of, that great
revelation? Surely to announce the consequences of evil, and to announce them
so long beforehand that there is plenty of time to avoid them, and to falsify
the prediction, is the token of love.
III. It is a very
common and a very bad reason for neglecting. It does operate as a reason for
giving little heed to the prophet, as I have been saying. In the old
men-of-war, when an engagement was impending, they used to bring up the
hammocks from the bunks and stick them into the nettings at the side of the
ship, to defend it from boarders and bullets. And then, after these had served
the purpose of repelling, they were taken down again and the crew went to sleep
upon them. That is exactly what some of my friends do with that misconception
of the genius of Christianity, that it is concerned mainly with another world. They
put it up as a screen between them and God, between them and what you know to
be their duty--namely, the acceptance of Christ as their Saviour. It is your
hammock that you put between the bullets and yourself; and many a good sleep
you get upon it! Now, that strange capacity that men have of ignoring a certain
future is seen at work all round about us in every region of life. The peasants
on the slopes of Vesuvius live very merry lives, and they have their little
vineyards and their olives. Yes, and every morning, when they come out, they
can look up and see the thin wreath of smoke going up in the dazzling blue, and
they know that some time or other there will he a roar and a rush, and down
will come the lava. But “a short life and a merry one” is the creed of a good
many of us, though we do not like to confess it. Some of you will remember the
strange way in which ordinary habits survived in prisons in the dreadful times
of the French Revolution, and how ladies and gentlemen, who were going to have
their heads chopped off next morning, danced and flirted, and sat at
entertainments, just as if there was no such thing in the world as the public
prosecutor and the tumbril, and the gaoler going about with a bit of chalk to
mark each door where the condemned were for next day. The same strange power of
ignoring a known future, which works so widely and so disastrously round about
us, is especially manifested in regard to religion. Surely it is not wise for a
man to ignore a future that is certain simply because it is distant. So long as
it is certain, what, in the name of common sense, has the time when it begins
to be a present to do with our wisdom in regard to it? Surely it is not wise to
ignore a future which is so incomparably greater than this present, and which
also is so connected with this present as that life here is only intelligible
as the vestibule and preparation for that great world beyond? Surely it is not
wise to ignore a future because you fancy it is far away, when it may burst
upon you at any time? What would you think of the crew and passengers of some
ship lying in harbour, waiting for its sailing orders, who had got leave on
shore, and did not know but that at any moment the blue peter might be flying
at the fore--the signal to weigh anchor--if they behaved themselves in the port
as if they were never going to embark, and made no preparations for the voyage?
Let me beseech you to rid yourselves of that most unreasonable of all reasons
for neglecting the Gospel, that its most solemn revelations refer to the
eternity beyond the grave. (A. Maclaren, D. D.)
God’s predictions will be fulfilled
Those who receive intelligence from the almanac that the tide is
to turn at a given moment, never think of doubting the prediction. Those who
read in the kindling page of night that an eclipse will occur at a particular
moment are as sure of it as if it had already taken place. “On 9th August
1869,” says one, “at four o’clock in the afternoon, I stood at the door, smoked
glass in hand, waiting. When a boy, I had read of this very eclipse, and of the
moment when it should begin; it did begin at the precise second predicted forty
years ago.” What we read in God’s own handwriting makes the student able to
determine the path of the star, the point of an eclipse, to the fraction of a
second; and is His word to be less trusted in the sphere of grace than in the
sphere of nature’s operations? (R. Venting.)
──《The Biblical Illustrator》