Tag: Ezekiel

The Stories I Don’t Cover REPRINT

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Christ Pantokrator–Ruler of All

From February 27, 2018

There are stories floating around out there today that I just can’t bring myself to cover. There’s a limit to how much I can subject myself or my readers. Great evil and great madness are afoot, much of which borders on what H.P. Lovecraft called “the perfection of the hideous”–and I suspect a lot of this stuff would be too hideous even for him.

I reached that decision after encountering a report that “many men,” instructed mostly by pornography, “now prefer sex-bots to real women.” And that’s real good for us, says the guy who sells them. If he plays his cards right, he might get a seat on the World Happiness Council.

We need to cling to this: that God sees everything, and that He sees also the things that we can’t see. And does things that we can’t see Him doing. His enemies march boldly back and forth upon the earth, bragging about all the things they’re going to do, just you wait, it’s gonna be great…

If this were a chess game I was watching, I would be dismayed.

But in the end God says “Checkmate!” and one by one, and two by two, the enemy’s pawns and pieces vanish from the board, never to be seen again. Game over. God wins.

We are to be as watchmen, says Ezekiel. We are to report what we see; it may be some people will listen, and remove themselves from the path to disaster. But there are times when we needn’t dwell on the unedifying details.

God the Father will put all things under Jesus Christ, His Son, as king of kings and lord of lords, the only potentate whose right it is to rule.

Hang on to that.

What Did Ezekiel See?

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Esoteric-Exoteric Mystical Vision (Ezekiel 1) (Shavuot) | jewish ...

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read through the Bible. This morning I came again to Ezekiel Chapter 1; and again I shake my head and wonder, “What was that?”

I’ve never seen an illustration that does it justice. To me it reads like some poor guy who’s burst into a local police station, trying to tell the cops about some incredible thing he’s seen, and he can’t get the words to make any sense.

We can be reasonably sure that Ezekiel’s description of his vision made more sense to his contemporary audience than it does to us. But are we sure we have to think it through? Are we sure we have to decipher it? I mean, who says so? Is it not enough to understand that this whole thing is about being in the presence of God–and of course it’s going to sound like crazy-talk when we try to describe it.

How are we, being flesh, to make sense of spiritual things? How are we, being earthly, to speak of heavenly things? Of course it’s going to come out weird. A lesser man than a prophet would’ve fainted dead away. Ezekiel, both a prophet and a priest, certainly seems to be having a hard enough time just keeping his head from falling off.

If the vision made perfect sense to us… it’d probably be fake.

But at least we can get this meaning from it: God is–and is He ever!

Never Surrender

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Solon never stopped speaking the truth–and it worked!

This week I’ve been getting more than the usual number of doom-and-gloom messages from readers. “We’re cooked, we’re finished, bad guys win–game over, man!”

Meanwhile, I am sometimes told that my outlook is not exactly peachy.

In Revelation, the devil, the Beast, the False Prophet, and all their gang, get thrown into the lake of fire and that’s the end of them. They don’t get to come back, ever. This is what God has told us. This is what we must believe.

Only thing is, we don’t know His timetable. The coming of the Lord may be another thousand years from now. Meanwhile, it’s a rough ride (and He warned us that it would be).

So what do we do? Win or lose, we fight. Sun Tzu tells us there are times when you can do nothing else: “On death ground, fight,” he says. And J.R.R. Tolkien used to quote an ancient Anglo-Saxon poem: “Will shall be sterner, heart the bolder, spirit the greater as our strength lessens” (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/548454-hige-sceal-pe-heardra-heorte-pe-cenre-mod-sceal-pe).

If God’s grace be with me, and for as long as He gives me strength, I’ll fight: never to surrender to the social and political fads, the wicked nonsense of this world, which is handed up from Hell to its servants on the earth–from spiritual wickedness in high places. I will not be browbeaten into saying yeah, sure, I’m all for the whole sexual anarchy bit, transgender included. I will not support abortion. I will not say things are true when I know them to be false, because some tyrant threatens me.

Those of us who are “old” have an advantage.

When Solon the lawgiver was an old man, the Athenians threw out the wise and just laws he’d given them and fell under the hand of a tyrant, Pisistratus. Everyone became very small and quiet–everyone but Solon, who never passed up an opportunity to criticize Pisistratus and his policies. His friends were horrified: they knew what happens to people who diss tyrants. “Solon,” they wondered, “what gives you the courage to stand up to the tyrant?” And he answered, “My old age.”

The rest of the story: as tyrants go, Pisistratus was pretty much top-of-the-line. He came to admire Solon, began to listen to him, and wound up canceling or amending many of his worst public actions because Solon had made him see how wrong they were. Who knows what might have happened, had Solon lived longer?

The rest of the rest of the story: Pisistratus’ successors were made of shabbier stuff than he, and finally had to be assassinated. Should’ve listened to Solon.

So we ought to speak the truth, even if it feels like we’re only shouting into the wind. We cannot know who’ll hear us. We often can’t know how God will use us. He has placed us as watchmen on the walls. As He told Ezekiel, He will hold us responsible for sounding the alarm; but He will not hold us responsible for whoever chooses not to hear it.