God used the prophet Ezekiel to speak to His people during a time of defeat and subsequent captivity in Babylon. Ezekiel was an effective spokesman for God as he himself was a captive. People tend to listen more carefully in their times of trouble when spoken to by someone who also faces the trouble.
Israel prior to captivity was truly a blessed nation, the land of milk and honey spoken of by God in Exodus. God had used various leaders to move his people from a time of starvation to Egyptian slavery, to wilderness wandering to eventually that promised land.
Israel, prior to the Babylonian Captivity was truly a bounteous place to live. The people, following God’s chosen leaders, Joseph, Moses, Aaron, Joshua and others were blessed in that land of milk and honey, the land of promise. They followed Gods leaders and His directions and contentedly lived in that fruitful land.
But as it tends to happen in stories involving our human condition, there was a problem. Among the Israelites there were those who did not like God and his direction. They did not like His leaders and they worked against them, thinking their own way better.
Over a period of years they came to control the nation.
Following these leaders and their human wisdom, the land was soon no longer one of milk and honey but one of rubble, destruction and captivity. There was no life of ease, no life of plenty. There was a life of starvation and death.
Ezekiel, a participant in these changed circumstances eloquently describes the fall from a life of ease to a life of want.
As I was reading Ezekiel’s words with my friend Matthew Henry this morning, it occurred to me that he could be writing about us. We are a God ordained and were at one time a God led nation founded by those simply seeking the freedom they saw in God’s word to worship accordingly.
From this grew a great nation of plenty. But then human wisdom started taking control. Look around at the problems confronting us.
I thought Matthew put it well this morning, as he commented on a Ezekiel Chapter Four.
“The plenty was abused to luxury and excess, which were therefore thus justly punished with famine. It is a righteous thing with God to deprive us of those enjoyments which we have made the food and fuel of our lusts. Let us see what reason we have to bless God for plenty, not only for the fruits of the earth, but for the freedom of commerce, that the husbandman can have money for his bread and the tradesman bread for his money, that there is abundance not only in the field, but in the market, that those who live in cities and great towns, though they sow not, neither do they reap, are yet fed from day to day with food convenient.”
We should have been more thankful.
Have a great day.