Day 240—We are in the eighth month of Bible reading, with more of Israel’s history and prophecy from Ezekiel.

    Day 240 – Ezekiel 5 – 8 (More symbolic acts by Ezekiel, God’s severe judgments, the temple desecrated)

(Remember, this part of Ezekiel is BEFORE the final siege and conquest of Jerusalem by Babylon that we read about in Jeremiah.)

Ezekiel 5. God tells Ezekiel to take a sword and cut off all his hair and beard. Then, divide the hair into three piles. One pile was to be thrown into the fire, symbolizing Jerusalem to be burned after the siege was done.

Another pile of hair was to be taken around and cut in pieces with the sword, symbolizing the people killed by invaders. The last pile was to be scattered to the wind showing how God would scatter the people among the nations, chasing them with His sword. 

Ezekiel was to save a small bit of hair and put it in his pocket, symbolizing the remnant God would save.

You can feel God’s heart breaking as he tells how He set Jerusalem in the center of the nations and how she rebelled, disobeyed, and rejected Him.  Now He tells her, “Behold, I, even I, am against you.”  “And because of all your abominations, I will do to you what I have never yet done, and the like of which I will never do again.”  And you will KNOW that I am the LORD.

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Ezekiel 6. Next, God tells Ezekiel to prophesy against the mountains of Israel because it was on these “high places” where the people set up alters and idols and worshiped false gods.  God promises to destroy these high places and the people who worshiped there, spreading their dead bodies before the idols and their bones on the altars….so that they “will KNOW that I am the LORD.”

And yet, God will leave some of them alive to be scattered through the countries, and those who escape will “remember me among the nations where they are carried captive.” They will remember how His heart was broken over their idolatry. And they will see themselves as “loathsome” for all the evil they committed. And they will “know that I am the LORD.”

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Ezekiel 7. God then puts these terrible words in Ezekiel’s mouth that he is to say to Israel, “An end! The end has come upon the four corners of the land. Now the end is upon you, and I will send my anger upon you: I will judge you according to your ways, and I will punish you for all your abominations.” “An end has come; the end has come; it has awakened against you. Behold, it comes. Your doom has come to you, O inhabitant of the land. The time has come; the day is near, a day of tumult and not of joyful shouting on the mountains. Now I will soon pour out my wrath upon you, and spend my anger against you, and judge you according to your ways, and I will punish you for all your abominations. ” “Then you will KNOW that I am the LORD, who strikes.”

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Ezekiel 8. Six months later, while Ezekiel sat among the elders in his house in Babylon, the “hand of the LORD GOD fell upon me.” He saw again that blazing, shining figure who appeared “like a man.” This appearance of a man took Ezekiel by the hair (some must have grown out by now!) and lifted him up. The Spirit lifted him between heaven and earth and brought him “in visions of God” to Jerusalem to the inner court gate of the Temple.

There, Ezekiel “saw” with his own eyes all the vile abominations that Israel was committing in God’s sanctuary: carved images of every form of creeping things and loathsome beasts; idols in the sanctuary with 70 “priests” burning incense to them; other elders doing evil in the dark, each in his room of pictures; women in the court worshiping a fertility god; men in the outer court worshiping the sun. (No wonder God’s glorious, flaming Presence left the Temple and went to Babylon!!)