Today I thought we could take a look at the book of Ezekiel. We will be studying chapter 13. But before we begin, I think it would be good to look at a few other verses in the earlier chapters of Ezekiel to kind of set the tone and the context for what we are going to be reading in Ezekiel 13. So in Ezekiel 1:1, it says:
Now it came to pass in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, in the fifth day of the month…
Right away, we have to ask the question, “The thirtieth year from what?” It does not specify. It does not really say, but in Ezekiel 1:2, we read:
In the fifth day of the month, which was the fifth year of king Jehoiachin’s captivity,
From this, we can confirm a date. We know when Ezekiel was writing. It was in the year 593 B.C.
King Jehoiachin was taken captive in the year 598 B.C. He was followed by Zedekiah, who would reign for eleven years from 598 to 587 B.C. when Jerusalem would be destroyed. So the timing is very precise.
We know from the chronology of the kings of Judah that the fifth year of Jehoiachin was 593 B.C., but this fifth year is also the thirtieth year. The thirtieth year goes back. If you go from 593 back in time, it would land on the year 622 B.C., which was the 18th year of King Josiah’s reign.
What event of significance happened then? The Bible tells us that that was the year that they found the Book of the Law. They discovered the Book of the Law. Remember, it was following the discovery of the Book of the Law that they had a very big revival and Josiah became, probably, the greatest king in Judah’s history because he was endeavoring to keep God’s commandments. He cleansed Judah from their idolatry and from much of their wickedness, following the discovery of the Book of the Law. So this was a major event in Judah’s history.
I do not know the full reason why God is telling us that it is the thirtieth year, but for whatever reason, this is the event that was thirty years earlier. For some other reason, I am sure, God is keeping track of the years following this event. As far as I can tell, it seems to be like a loose end; it does not lead anywhere else in the book of Ezekiel. But I am sure that it is just that we have not really studied it out thoroughly and that there is some spiritual significance to this thirtieth year.
Anyway, this is the time that Ezekiel is beginning to write. It is the year 593 B.C, and it is a time when Jeremiah is also prophesying. Jeremiah is in Jerusalem. Ezekiel is going to be a prophet that is carried away. He is carried away to Babylon. If you look at Ezekiel 1:1, it tells us:
…as I was among the captives by the river of Chebar…
So he is a captive. In one sense, he is obedient to God’s command to the nation of Judah to go into captivity. So Ezekiel is going to write from the perspective of being a captive in Babylon.
The context of this book, in other words, is similar to the book of Jeremiah, and Jeremiah is a book that is pointing to our present day. As Israel and Judah were types and figures of the New Testament church, this is pointing, especially, to the end of the New Testament church during the time of Great Tribulation.
Turn to Ezekiel 2. Some other time, we might come back and look more in-depth at some of these chapters, but we read in Ezekiel 2:1:
And he said unto me, Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak unto thee.
Does this sound familiar? Yes, we are becoming familiar with this kind of language because in Revelation 11, the two witnesses were lying dead in the street and after three and a half days, God raised them up and they stood upon their feet.
Let us look at that. We read in Revelation 11:11:
And after three days and an half the Spirit of life from God entered into them, and they stood upon their feet; and great fear fell upon them which saw them.
Some people do not understand what this is talking about and they do not recognize what is in view by this language of standing on your feet. It is the same kind of language that was used of the Apostle Paul, after he saw that vision on the road to Damascus and he was blind for a season and yet God came to him and said that he was to stand upon his feet and that he would be sent to the Gentiles, carrying the Gospel message.
So, on one hand, to stand upon your feet means that, now, you are to go forth with the Word of God to carry the Gospel. Remember, the Bible says, “How beautiful are the feet of them that bring glad tidings of good things!” You stand upon your feet to carry the Word of God to the nations.
On the other hand, here in Ezekiel 2:1-2, we read:
…Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak unto thee. And the spirit entered into me when he spake unto me…
If you have time later, compare the two verses. Look at Revelation 11:11, where it says, “the Spirit of life from God entered into them.” Then look at Ezekiel 2, where it says, “stand upon thy feet…and the Spirit entered into me.” It is very parallel. It is very similar language.
Then it goes on to say in Ezekiel 2:2-3:
…I heard him that spake unto me. And he said unto me, Son of man, I send thee…
Again, this is just like the Apostle Paul in Acts 26, “Stand upon your feet. I send you to the Gentiles.” Here in Ezekiel, “Stand upon your feet.” Yet, he is not sent to the Gentiles. It says in Ezekiel 2:3:
…I send thee to the children of Israel, to a rebellious nation that hath rebelled against me: they and their fathers have transgressed against me, even unto this very day.
Ezekiel is sent to the house of Israel—to the people of Israel—and how does God describe them? How does He characterize them? He characterizes them as “a rebellious nation.” Actually, if you look in the following verses, at the last part of Ezekiel 2:6:
…nor be dismayed at their looks, though they be a rebellious house.
And the last part of Ezekiel 2:7:
…for they are most rebellious.
Ezekiel 2:8:
…Be not thou rebellious like that rebellious house…
You can see how God is really emphasizing and reemphasizing and stressing and putting His finger on the disobedience of the people of Israel. “They do not keep My commandments. They are rebels. I am the King. I am the Sovereign. I declare. My Word goes forth and all of mankind are bound to keep it.”
We can not argue with the King. We can not say, “Well, I do not like your decree. I do not like what you are telling me.” But actually, this is the nature of man, and this the nature of the unsaved who have infiltrated into Israel of old and into the churches of today. They have gotten into the pews and they have gotten into the pulpits—it is the rebellious nature of those who are within the churches and congregations—and Ezekiel is sent to them, once he stands upon his feet. He is to speak to the children of Israel and he is to tell them that they are under the judgment of God; they are under the wrath of God.
For instance, in continuing to just look at a few snapshots of this book in order to see that this theme is being carried through, turn to Ezekiel 9:5-6. It says:
And to the others he said in mine hearing, Go ye after him through the city, and smite: let not your eye spare, neither have ye pity: slay utterly old and young, both maids, and little children, and women: but come not near any man upon whom is the mark; and begin at my sanctuary…
This relates. It is a commentary. This is an Old Testament way of saying that judgment begins at the house of God, as we read in 1 Peter 4:17. If you read the chapter, this is what it is getting at and looking towards—the time when God’s judgment begins with His people. It begins at the house of God and it then transitions into the final judgment of all men, into the last day.
This is where we are right now today. We are in the judgment of the church. Judgment has begun. The Day of the Lord has gotten underway. It will continue on, and then one day soon, it will transition into the return of the Lord Jesus Christ, the destruction of the world, and all of mankind standing before God to give an account of their sins.
This is another reason why people do not like to hear about the Judgment of the church and the end of the Church Age, because if it is true, then this means that we are right up and next against the very end of the world. It is a red flag that God is waving, which is declaring, the end is near. The end is near!
We are recognizing that the Great Tribulation is now ongoing and not only that, but that we are in the second part of the Great Tribulation. We are not in the early days of the Great Tribulation. We have already moved into another stage, another phase, into the second part. We can see how time is progressing and moving on. It is like a river that is quickly going its way that nothing can stop.
So Ezekiel is commissioned by God to declare, to be a prophet, during the time of terrible tribulation for Judah of that day, but it is pointing to our present time of Great Tribulation that the world has never known.
If we go over to Ezekiel 12:2-4, we read:
Son of man, thou dwellest in the midst of a rebellious house…
Again, it is the same theme. It continues:
…which have eyes to see, and see not; they have ears to hear, and hear not: for they are a rebellious house. 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. 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.
Here is another spiritual picture that God is giving of Ezekiel. He is telling him to pack up his stuff and remove it, take it out of Jerusalem, and take it out of Judah. It is a picture of going into captivity.
Actually, these verses help us to understand that the best way of leaving a church is not to quietly slip away and never return and not say anything. These verses are actually indicating that we should send a letter. A letter is probably the best way, because you can write down all of your thoughts. You can try to put in some verses and tell how you just desire to be obedient to God’s Word. You can send it to them so that they know that you are leaving, right in their very sight. Why would you do this? Well, God says, “it may be they will consider.”
If you just do not return after one Sunday and never come back and they never hear from you again, they would not know why you did not come back. It could be that you just did not like the church atmosphere. They might think of a hundred different reasons why you did not come back.
But if they know, specifically, that you did not return because God commands you to leave and to come out of Babylon and to go out into the world and to worship Him there and continue serving Him there and that you just can not return to church, then it could be a witness to them. Of course, if you have 100 people in the church, 99 of them are just going to think that you are off your rocker, but there could be one that might consider and who might begin to think and dwell on it, and God could use this.
As we are going through Ezekiel, we see that there are many other places where we could just go over it and over it and over it—that this is what God is looking at in this book. Then we come to Ezekiel 13, and here is where I want to read a little bit and look at what God is saying.
This is the chapter where they are later on going to be building a wall, and God is warning them about the type of wall that they are building. This wall has to do with the Kingdom of God and the wall of salvation that the Bible talks about. We will probably look at this at another time, as we get further into the chapter. But here in Ezekiel 13:2, it says:
Son of man, prophesy against the prophets of Israel that prophesy, and say thou unto them that prophesy out of their own hearts, Hear ye the word of the LORD;
In that day, there were prophets, but not like today, even though today there are still prophets. I do not know if you are aware of this or not, but God says in Acts 2, “I will pour out of My Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy.”
This is for the New Testament Age, as we share the Truths from the Bible. As we share the Word of God with anyone, as we hand someone a tract, we are performing the role of a prophet who just simply declares the Word of God. We are declaring what the Bible says.
But once the Bible was completed, then there would be no prophets like the people in the days of Ezekiel knew there to be prophets. In those days, God could come to someone in a dream. He could come to someone in a vision. He could speak directly to a person. He came in various ways and it was revelation from God. It was God’s Word that He was bringing to a prophet, and the prophet had to speak the Word.
We see this with Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel, with all of the prophets of old. Remember what 2 Peter says? I always get this verse wrong. Holy men of old? I got it wrong again. 2 Peter 1:21 says:
For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.
I just mess that verse up every time. “Holy men of God spake as they were moved.” It came not by the will of man, and that is the difference. But the problem is, how could you tell? If someone was saying that they had a dream and that this was what God had told them in a dream, how could you know?
First of all, even the prophet himself could be deceived. He could be mistaken because we all dream. We all dream and sometimes a dream seems very real and very dramatic. So we could have a dream.
Did you ever wake up and feel like you had a strange dream, something unusual, a type of dream that you never had before? Well, so could prophets of that day. They could have a dream and just be deceived in their own selves and think that the dream was from God.
So the prophet himself would honestly think—well, not honestly—he would think that it was from God, yet it was not from God. This is why prophets in that day really had to prove themselves. They had to know themselves and test among their own selves, “Is this from God? Is this word that I am being given from God?”
Remember what God said in Deuteronomy 13:1-3:
If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and giveth thee a sign or a wonder, and the sign or the wonder come to pass, whereof he spake unto thee, saying, Let us go after other gods, which thou hast not known, and let us serve them; thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams: for the LORD your God proveth you, to know whether ye love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul.
It was a test. As the prophet would declare something, it was a test for the people. “Is this from God, or is it from man? Is it God’s Spirit or man’s spirit?” How are you going to know?
This is why God says in the New Testament these very important instructions for each one of us, especially in our day. In 1 John 4:1, we read:
Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits…
Because some people would come with their own spirit, as we read in Ezekiel 13. They came with their own spirit. They were not coming with God’s Spirit because they had not been moved by God in the olden times.
Even today, in our day, if someone is sharing what they think to be Bible truth, if they think that this is what the Bible teaches but the Bible does not teach it, then it is from their own mind. It is from man’s understanding, not from God’s Mind. It is not from the Bible itself.
Again, 1 John 4:1 says:
Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.
Not a few; there are not a few. Who can give testimony to this as we look at what is going on in the spiritual realm in the churches and congregations or on the TV set, as we are hearing these ministers who are preaching on TV and even in some places on the radio? If you go on the internet, it is all over the place.
You will find many false teachers and many false prophets who are declaring things that God has not said. God has not spoken them. It is not the Word of God.
Where are they getting it? They are getting it from their own hearts. Can there be any more dangerous place than a man’s heart to be receiving something?
When we say that the Bible teaches this, we are saying that it is coming from God. We are saying that God has said this, and God is Infinite, He is Holy, He is Righteous, He is Pure, and He is Perfect. So we are saying that this is something that a person can trust and lean upon and rest their very life on, for all eternity. We are saying that this is what the Bible says.
Yet when many men are teaching out of their own hearts, it is coming from a finite, corruptible man, who is fallen into sin, whose heart is a heart of stone, and who has a deceitful heart that is desperately wicked. It is a heart that has severe limitations and is really about as untrustworthy as anything can be.
You would not want to trust anything to something that comes out of man’s own heart, yet this is the case in Israel and in Judah, and it is the case today. Many people trust whatever the pastor says and whatever their church says and whatever their denomination says and whatever the confession says and whatever the creed says.
But what if it is not true? What if it is not right? You have to try the spirits. You have to examine them. You have to use the Bible, comparing Scripture with Scripture, and then the Holy Ghost, or the Spirit, teacheth. Then we know that we have the Spirit of God. This is a very ancient problem that is continuing and has worsened in our day.
Then in Ezekiel 13:3, it says:
Thus saith the Lord GOD; Woe unto the foolish prophets…
With this language, God is identifying them as being unsaved. Anyone who is a “fool” is not saved. God breaks up the human race into the wise and the foolish. People are wise because they have Christ within them, because Jesus is the personification of wisdom. If you possess Christ, you possess Wisdom. If you do not have Christ, then you are a fool in God’s sight.
Ezekiel 13:3-4:
…Woe unto the foolish prophets, that follow their own spirit, and have seen nothing! O Israel, thy prophets are like the foxes in the deserts.
God is making a comparison. He is likening the prophets to foxes. We have all seen foxes running around in the field. Normally, they are chasing rabbits or they are in pursuit somehow of some other small field animal.
In the Bible, God uses the fox to typify a false prophet. You can follow this all of the way through the Bible. When Jesus said of Herod, “Go ye, and tell that fox,” He was likening Herod to a false prophet. Or when Jesus said, “The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay His head,” He was indicating that within national Israel, there were many Pharisees and Sadducees that were false teachers. They had a home and they had a place, but here comes the Son of Man speaking the perfect truth of the Word of God and He is cast out as someone who has Beelzebub. So the idea of a fox is pointing to a false prophet.
If we go to Lamentations, the book right before Ezekiel, in Lamentations 5:18, it says:
Because of the mountain of Zion, which is desolate, the foxes walk upon it.
We would have to read the whole chapter to really get the feel of this, but Mt. Zion is speaking of Jerusalem or a type of the church that is desolate. Lamentations, again, is another book of the Bible that points to the judgment of God upon His people, and the foxes have free reign. They can walk all over it; they can go forth upon Zion.
Go back to the Song of Solomon, which is right before Isaiah. In Song of Solomon 2:15, we read:
Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes.
I did a little research on foxes. I just wanted to find out if they do like grapes, because I do not know too much about them myself. They do.
In Aesop’s Fables, he wrote about a fox that was trying to get some grapes. He made a few attempts and then he could not reach the grapes, so he walked away and said, “Oh, they are probably sour anyway.” This is in Aesop’s Fables, and this is where we get the expression of “sour grapes.”
Actually, foxes are scavengers. They like any type of food. There are some grapes that are wild grapes that are called “fox grapes” because foxes enjoy them. They do spoil the vines. This is a fact.
Yet, what does the vine represent in the Bible? The vine points to the vineyard or the house of God, as we find in Isaiah 5 where God speaks of Israel as being a vine. Well the foxes spoil the vine because you have those who are teaching falsely who are false prophets. They are destroying what God was building up. They ruin the Gospel. They pervert the Gospel. They ruin souls.
Another verse that is very familiar is found in Judges 15. I know that everyone is very familiar with this. We read in Judges 15:3:
And Samson said concerning them, Now shall I be more blameless than the Philistines, though I do them a displeasure.
This was when Samson’s wife, Timnath, had married another.
Judges 15:4:
And Samson went and caught three hundred foxes, and took firebrands, and turned tail to tail, and put a firebrand in the midst between two tails.
God does not do anything in the Bible without a purpose and without a design. Everything fits together. Everything harmonizes and teaches a Gospel truth.
Here with the foxes, there are 300 of them. Why 300? Why not 299 or 301, or some other number? Because God is teaching that it is His complete purpose (the number 10 in 100 and purpose in the number three) that the foxes will ruin the crop of the Philistines and that they will ruin the vineyard. Look at verse 5. We read in Judges 15:5:
And when he had set the brands on fire, he let them go into the standing corn of the Philistines, and burnt up both the shocks, and also the standing corn, with the vineyards and olives.
The foxes spoil the vine. The foxes are ruining the vine, which is the house of Israel and which relates to the churches and congregations. They are picturing false teachers and those who come and say, “God has said,” when God has not said. Even the tail where they are turned “tail to tail,” the tail represents what? What does the tail represent?
Turn to Isaiah 9:15:
The ancient and honourable, he is the head; and the prophet that teacheth lies, he is the tail.
So here is a further confirmation, a further locking in that those foxes, which in themselves represent false prophets, are tied tail-to-tail, and their tails represent false prophets. Then they are set on fire because the tongue is a “little member” but it brings about a “world of iniquity” and “is set on fire of Hell.” That is the tongue of the prophet, just moving his mouth and opening his lips to declare that God has said this or that, and it burns up the souls of the people of the congregation because they believe it. They believe it.
Turn to Jeremiah 5:30-31:
A wonderful and horrible thing is committed in the land; the prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their means; and my people love to have it so: and what will ye do in the end thereof?
We do like to blame the pastors, it seems, because the Bible has so much to say about the pastors who lead the people astray, but it is not just them. The ones out there in the pews “love to have it so.” Their ears are tickled. They are hearing pleasant and “smooth things” and flattering things and things that they want to hear. They do not want to hear anything differently, yet it is going to be for their destruction because it is leading them to Hell. It is leading them down into the pit.
Going back to Ezekiel 13:5, we read:
Ye have not gone up into the gaps, neither made up the hedge for the house of Israel to stand in the battle in the day of the LORD.
This is one of those verses that we read and, at least as I read it, I do not understand it at the surface reading of it.
Ye have not gone up into the gaps, neither made up the hedge for the house of Israel…
This is a situation when it is a great blessing that we have a Concordance because then we will look up the words and God will begin to define the words as we go to other places in the Bible.
Two of these same words, the “gap” and “hedge,” are found a little further in Ezekiel 22:29-30:
The people of the land have used oppression, and exercised robbery, and have vexed the poor and needy: yea, they have oppressed the stranger wrongfully. And I sought for a man among them, that should make up the hedge, and stand in the gap before me for the land, that I should not destroy it: but I found none.
You see, this is very similar to Ezekiel 13. They should “make up the hedge, and stand in the gap.”
The word “gap” is also the word that is translated most often as “breach.” Remember when they were transporting the Ark of the Lord on a new cart and we read about Uzza and his brother, sons of Abinadab, where the Ark was kept for awhile. The oxen stumbled and that tilted the cart and Uzza put forth his hand to steady the cart. Immediately, God struck him dead. The Bible tells us that “the LORD had made a breach upon Uzza.” This is the same word as “gap.”
What God has in view is that He gives His Word. He gives His commandments and whenever someone transgresses and breaks one of God’s commandments, it is like a dam. It is like a dyke. It is like a perfect wall. It is the perfect standard of God’s Word. You put one hole in the dyke, one little breach in the dam, and the water is going to just burst it open eventually and the whole river is going to come through that little hole.
This is what God says about His Word, “For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all.” So we need Someone to “stand in the gap.” We need Someone to be a “repairer of the breach.” That is the language of the Bible. We need Someone to hold back the ferocious wrath of God that is going to completely destroy us in Hell.
If we go over to Psalm 106, I think that we will get a pretty good idea of what it means to “stand in the gap.” We read in Psalm 106:19-23:
They made a calf in Horeb, and worshipped the molten image. Thus they changed their glory into the similitude of an ox that eateth grass. They forgat God their saviour, which had done great things in Egypt; wondrous works in the land of Ham, and terrible things by the Red sea. Therefore he said that he would destroy them, had not Moses his chosen stood before him in the breach, to turn away his wrath, lest he should destroy them.
So Israel was transgressing left and right. They were murmuring. They were building golden calves to worship. Time and again, Moses would intercede as a type of Christ, and God would not destroy the people of Israel during their wilderness sojourn because he stood in the breach. A breach is any one transgression of the Law of God.
Uzza, who steadied the cart, broke the Law of God, because Levites only were to transport the Ark. Levites only were to be the ones who should have been there to steady the Ark cart. Because Uzza was not a Levite, God struck him dead; there was a breach. In his case, there was no one to “stand in the gap.”
God is indicating in Ezekiel 13, and especially in Ezekiel 22, that He looked for a man. He looked for a man. This is referring to Jerusalem and Judah. We read in Ezekiel 22:30:
And I sought for a man among them, that should make up the hedge, and stand in the gap before me for the land, that I should not destroy it: but I found none.
The only Man who is qualified to “stand in the gap,” to be a “repairer of the breach,” is Jesus Himself. God is indicating within Judah, the people of God who were the blood descendants of Abraham, that there was no Spirit of God in their midst.
And this points to the church of our day, the New Testament churches and congregations of the Great Tribulation. And why is God going to judge the church? Well, for their sins, for their “high places,” for their idolatrous practices.
Did they not have them a hundred years ago? Did they not have them back in the twelfth century and the fifth century, throughout the age of the church? They had them. There were sins throughout the New Testament Church Age, but there was always a Man to “stand in the gap,” which was the Lord Jesus who was in the midst of the candlesticks. He was in the midst of the churches.
So God looked and He saw Christ and He said, “I will stay My hand.” He would not destroy them. But judgment begins at the house of God with the loosing of Satan to bring about vengeance of God upon the disobedient churches, upon a “rebellious house.” Now there is no Man within the church to prevent God from destroying them and to prevent God from seeing their sins.
The corporate church never stood by grace. Individual believers stand by grace. Each child of God is saved by grace, but the corporate church was bound by the Law of God to be obedient. If they were disobedient, God could have cut off an individual congregation at any time. They had to keep the Law of God.
Today we have churches that are doing their own thing. They are prophesying out of their own mind, out of their own spirit, and they think that they are standing by grace. No, they are not, because no congregation stands that way. It is a matter of keeping God’s commandments, if a church is to be counted faithful.
Let us go back to Ezekiel 13:6-9:
They have seen vanity and lying divination, saying, The LORD saith: and the LORD hath not sent them: and they have made others to hope that they would confirm the word. Have ye not seen a vain vision, and have ye not spoken a lying divination, whereas ye say, The LORD saith it; albeit I have not spoken? Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD; Because ye have spoken vanity, and seen lies, therefore, behold, I am against you, saith the Lord GOD. And mine hand shall be upon the prophets that see vanity, and that divine lies: they shall not be in the assembly of my people…
This is referring to the eternal Church of God; they will not be counted. They can still profess to be Christians and they can still have membership in their local assembly, but they will not be in the assembly of God which is eternal.
…neither shall they be written in the writing of the house of Israel…
And that is the Lamb’s Book of Life. That is where God has written down the names of His elect that He intends to save. He is indicating that these men are unsaved, ungodly; they are not doing His will or keeping His commandments. The reason is because none of them are chosen “from the foundation of the world.” None of them have been predestinated unto salvation.
…and that divine lies: they shall not be in the assembly of my people, neither shall they be written in the writing of the house of Israel, neither shall they enter into the land of Israel; and ye shall know that I am the Lord GOD.
The “land of Israel” is pointing to the Kingdom of God. The promise to Abraham was that God would give him an everlasting possession. The “land of Israel” is a phrase that we have to read carefully when we read it in the Bible. Sometimes it points to the nation of Israel, the physical land. Sometimes it has a spiritual meaning pointing to eternal things, like the Kingdom of God in Heaven. For instance, in a verse in Ezekiel 37 that is talking about the dry bones, we see in Ezekiel 37:11-12:
Then he said unto me, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel: behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off for our parts. Therefore prophesy and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel.
This is not talking about the land over there in the Middle East. This is a reference to the Kingdom of God, the New Jerusalem. Where is Jerusalem? In Israel. It is talking about Heaven itself. When God will save His people, He will bring them into the “land of Israel.”
In Ezekiel 13, God is telling the false prophets, and this is a very serious matter, an extremely serious thing, “Because you are not prophesying truly and faithfully, you will not come into the Kingdom of Heaven. You will be cast out. You will not enter into the Promised Land.” Ultimately, the Promised Land of Canaan has always pointed to living with God forevermore in the new heavens and the new earth. So they will be kept at bay. They will not be brought into His Kingdom.
This is a very sad and terrible thing, a horrible thing that God says in Jeremiah that is going on in the land, in the churches of our day. It is tragic that so many are deceived by their own minds and their own thoughts and their own spirits into thinking that they are serving God, and yet they are far, far from being pleasing to Him in the least bit.
Let us stop and have a word of prayer. Dear Father, we do thank You for Your mercy, and we thank you for the day that we are living in, in one sense, even though it is awful to think that so many are worshipping You today yet believe in their own minds that they are serving You and are pleasing to You. But we do thank You, Father, that there is a “great multitude” outside of the churches that You do intend to save, and that there is tremendous blessing and fellowship for Your people, for Your children, who are going to by busy, occupying themselves, getting the Gospel out to these people. Father we pray, as we have this Sunday before us, we pray that You would help us to keep this as Your Holy Day, to be busy in spiritual things. We ask that You would guide us in this and that You would help us to remove our foot from evil, to remove our foot from doing our own pleasure upon Your Holy Day. Help us to pray, to read the Bible, to do whatever it is that might be spiritual in nature, and we ask for your wisdom and guidance in this. We pray that You would be with our fellowship time as we have lunch, and we just ask that You would help us to keep our thoughts on things above. We pray these things in Christ’s Name. Amen.