Stubborn As a...Well, You Know

 

Thursday, May 12, 2022

Then he said, “Son of man, go to the people of Israel and give them my messages.  I am not sending you to a foreign people whose language you cannot understand.  No, I am not sending you to people with strange and difficult speech.  If I did, they would listen!  But the people of Israel won’t listen to you any more than they listen to me!  For the whole lot of them are hard-hearted and stubborn.  But look, I have made you as obstinate and hard-hearted as they are.  I have made your forehead as hard as the hardest rock!  So don’t be afraid of them or fear their angry looks, even though they are rebels.”  Ezekiel 3:4-9

A dear friend of mine recently said to me right after Sunday’s sermon:  I’d like to say I enjoyed the sermon, but my toes are really sore.  My response was:  When I was preparing that sermon, God’s Word broke MY toes to pieces before it got here to you today.  I’ve had to say that quite a few times over the years.

God gave Ezekiel a message, and, as a throwaway line, the Lord told him He had made the prophet as obstinate and hard-hearted as the people to whom he would preach.  Hmmmm. 

There are two thoughts that always come to my mind when the topic of a congregation’s sore toes comes up:

1.    I’m not sure many in the congregation understand how much it costs a preacher to deliver such a sermon.

2.    I’m not sure many in the pulpit understand how much the thought of how the sermon will alienate them to the congregation causes them to soften the blow, to the point of God’s Word being unrecognizable in Heaven.

These are human factors, indicators of our fallen nature, unwilling and stubborn to hear the corrective of God’s will.  It is the evidence of our pride of life which keeps us alienated from God, instead of that hoped-for intimate communion.

One of the harshest messages I’ve ever read was Jonathan Edwards’ Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.  Here is an excerpt of what he preached in 1741 to the congregation filled with people he loved:

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. It is to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to hell the last night; that you were suffered to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep. And there is no other reason to be given, why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God’s hand has held you up. There is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to hell, since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending his solemn worship. Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell.[1]

For You Today

You may never have pictured your “just deserts” including being held over the flames of hell, roasted like a spider, dangling by a thread.  I’m certain there were those in the congregation that day who rather objected to the very idea.  Yet, historians hold that sermon was the kick-off incident that started the Great Awakening in America, a moral revival and turning to God we could certainly use today.  Words for a people as stubborn as a….well, you know.

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road with Jesus; have a blessed day!  

[1] Title image: Pixabay.com   Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation^©  

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[1] BlueLetterBible.org (Edwards’ sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Enfield, July 8, 1741)