Ezekiel 12–16

0:00 In January of the year 1606, in the yard outside St. Paul's Cathedral in London, a group of condemned men were dragged to the gallows through the middle of town and executed for high treason against King James I. These guys were conspirators in what's come to be known as the gunpowder treason and plot. You may have seen the movie V for Vendetta.

0:31 You may have seen the white mask of Guy Fawkes. You may have heard the little song that people sing. Remember, remember the 5th of November? Well, that's when the thing was supposed to go down, the 5th of November. By the time they caught him and everything else, the execution took place a couple of months later. But they were conspirators in this thing that was a scheme essentially to pack 36 barrels of gunpowder underneath the House of Lords in Parliament and blow the parliament and the king together sky high. They had been captured. The plot didn't actually work.

1:02 They had a trial. The sentence was pronounced a trial. And it was horrible. It was just absolutely ghastly what the sentence was. They were to be hanged by the neck, cut down while still alive, disemboweled, quartered, and the remains sent to the four corners of the kingdom as a warning not to mess with the king. And that is exactly what happened to the letter in full and without hesitation, every single one of them. Through it all, the king was nowhere to be seen.

1:36 He never confronted those who tried to attack him. He watched the trial from behind a screen. Nobody saw him watching it. And he received news of the executions from the safety of his palace, sort of across town. He never talked to the people who tried to kill him. He didn't weep. He didn't wring his hands. He didn't second-guess himself. He knew the sentence was just. The law had been totally fulfilled. The men were dead. And the king just turned his attention to other matters.

2:11 James just did what kings do. Well, we're continuing our series this morning on the book of Ezekiel. It's been kind of a bumpy thing. We've been making our way through Ezekiel, but with quite a lot of breaks in it. So I know that you may have kind of lost the track a little bit. But let me invite you to take a Bible, turn over to Ezekiel chapter 12. We're going to be looking at five chapters of it this morning. And it begins in chapter 12 on page 699. That is if you're using one of these red pew Bibles in front of you.

2:42 If not, you'll have to kind of open your Bible to maybe, I don't know, two-thirds of the way through. and you might hit Ezekiel, but you can find it from there. We're going to be Ezekiel chapter 12. If you're new to this series, or maybe everybody here feels new, because it's been a few weeks since we've been in there, let me give you just a kind of running start on it. Let me try to bring you up to speed. Ezekiel the prophet was a young priest, probably about 25 years old, who was carried off into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon sometime in the year about 600 B.C.

3:12 So we're talking a story that's 2,600 or so years old at this point. He was carried off when Nebuchadnezzar, Nebuchadnezzar was the great king of Babylon, who sort of established the great Babylonian empire that you may have studied in school. Well, Nebuchadnezzar's armies finally got fed up with the stuff that Jerusalem, Israel was doing, and so they invaded Israel two times, actually. Ezekiel was carried off in the first exile of the sort of, you know, men of rank of the city. And because he's going to be a priest, he was one of those men of rank, So he was carried off to Babylon.

3:45 Now, if you've read this book or even been following along through this sermon series, you know by now that it is a bizarre book. Maybe second only to, well, perhaps Revelation and perhaps Daniel. Maybe it's the third most bizarre book in the entire Bible. And Ezekiel was a bizarre guy. One commentator looked at all of these antics of his and calls him the most psychoanalyzed figure in the entire Bible. Here's what he said, quote, The concentration of so many bizarre features in one individual is without precedent.

4:23 There's his muteness, his lying bound and naked, digging holes in walls, emotional paralysis in the face of his wife's death, fascination with feces and blood, wild literary imagination, pornographic imagery. We'll get to that later. And the list goes on and on. And so he psychoanalyzes this guy, and then he wraps it up with this sentence, which I take very personally. In short, he suffered from a paranoid condition common in many spiritual leaders.

5:01 Several of our PCA brothers here for the General Assembly, I bet you I'll take that personally too, huh? Anyway, for all its strangeness, the book has a powerful purpose. The purpose of the book is to deliver a heart-wrenching message of judgment against the people of God. And then, finally, in the end, for that heart-wrenching message of judgment to be wiped away with this astonishing hope that breaks out at the end. Just to tell you a little bit about the book, the book is organized basically around the fall of Jerusalem. So in chapters 1, it's kind of three parts.

5:33 Chapters 1 to 24, you've got judgment, judgment, judgment, judgment, judgment, right? From 24 until 33, at the beginning of 24, the city falls. So Ezekiel has this vision that the city has fallen. And we get this picture of one little fugitive escaping from the fall of the city and starting to make his way north and then east over to Babylon. And as he travels through the various countries, God is dropping judgment on all the countries that have been oppressing Israel. So kind of as he makes his way over.

6:04 So that's happening from 25 until 33. In 33, the fugitive arrives and tells everybody kind of breathlessly, the city has fallen. You've got to remember, there's no CNN, there's no X, there's no, you know, texting. So they don't have any idea what's happened over in Jerusalem until this little guy makes his way over and kind of, you know, falls down and says, the city has fallen, right? And then they know. But as soon as they get that word, the whole book changes because it moves from judgment to now the judgment is over.

6:35 The city is destroyed. And from 33 to the end, you get oracles of hope happening. You get God telling his people that your judgment is finished. The cup is filled up and poured out. And all that's left for you now are new promises about a new covenant and salvation. So that's what you get for the last third of the book. Well, we are still, as we have been for the last few weeks, in the judgment half. So last time in chapters 10 and 11, Ezekiel saw the glory of God lift up out of the holy holies of the temple and make its way east, ultimately, to the mountain range.

7:12 He's watching God depart from the temple, which has been his dwelling place for centuries now, and he leaves his people. It's just a crushing vision of God finally abandoning them and sort of saying there's no way out of this. There's no salvation. You're going to be destroyed. And that tenor continues today as we look at chapters 12 through 16. Now, I'm not going to read all five chapters. That would just take a really long time. But let me show you at least what's in front of you. I'm going to give you kind of a walking tour through Ezekiel 12 to 16. So turn over to Ezekiel, page 699 in the Red Pew Bibles. Look at chapter 12, and I'm going to tell you what's going on. You can sort of look through it. See if you think you agree with me. Chapter 12's got another acted out prophecy. So God tells Ezekiel to pack a bag, dig through a wall, probably of his house, and go on a journey. So he's supposed to, you know, one of those little hobo bags that you see in the cartoons. He's supposed to pack a small bag for a journey like that, little bag on a stick over his shoulder, dig through the wall of his house, and go out on a journey. And it's supposed to symbolize what's about to happen

8:16 to the remaining people of Israel. They're going to be wiped out. They're going to be in exile, away from their homes, and they're not going to have much to carry with them. That's chapter 12. Chapter 13, moving on into 14, God hands down condemnations of false prophets and other sort of diviners, sorceresses, however you want to talk about it, hands down condemnations of these people who are looking at the warnings Ezekiel has given and saying, yeah, that's not going to happen. Peace, peace, in other words, where there is no peace. You may have heard that phrase. That's where this comes from. God's handing down condemnation against these people and against these idolaters who have caused the whole thing in the first place by bringing their idols, he says, into their hearts. Well, in the second half of 14, if you keep going, God drills his promise of judgment down. It starts in verse 12 of chapter 14. He drills it down and basically says, look, I would not spare Jerusalem, even if the holiest men in the whole of history were in it.

9:21 If Noah was in it, if Daniel was in it, if Job was in it, I would not spare this city. That's how bad things have gotten. Chapter 15, you get a relatively short chapter there, but you get this picture of Israel as a fruitless vine. It's good for nothing. It's a vine that's just choking the life out of other plants. And so God says, cut it down and burn it. It's good for absolutely nothing. And then you have this massive chapter 16, which contains a famous and just gut-wrenching allegory of God finding the people of Israel abandoned in a field, like an unwanted baby, still covered in inner blood.

10:01 And then he cares for her and he raises her up and ultimately he marries her. It's a symbol of the covenant, right? Puts his garment over, marries her. And then you get this picture of her absolutely contemptuous, mindless, unfaithfulness to him. And all of that is followed by, I think, one of the most stunning turns in the entire Old Testament. So, you can tell, as I kind of talk through that, that the drumbeat of judgment that's been banging since chapter 4 of this book just continues here.

10:32 It is relentless. And I think the main point that Ezekiel is pressing home to Israel and to us is this. God always keeps his promises. Always. Always. Now, is that comforting to you?

11:05 Or is that terrifying? I mean, here's the thing. We usually hear a sentence like that. God always keeps his promises. Always. And that's comforting to us. We celebrate it. We say amen to it because it makes us excited. He'll never leave me. He'll never forsake me. He's going to work all things for good. And those promises are all true. But for Israel, at this point in the story, the promises that God is keeping without fail are the other half of the covenant that they agreed to and then broke.

11:44 It's the curses of the covenant that God had promised here. The warnings that they had laughed off, the judgment that they told themselves would never come. God is keeping those promises now to the letter in full and without hesitation. And that's terrifying. so two points to the sermon this morning and we're going to see both edges of this truth number one God keeps his promise to judge always he keeps his promise to judge always but number two God also keeps his promise to forgive those who come to him God also keeps his promise to forgive those who come to him all right let's look at it number one God keeps his promise to judge really we're going to be looking at all of chapters 12 to 15 in this point and then we're going to give some concerted uh attention to chapter 16 but looking at chapters 12 to 15 in this point God keeps his promise to judge so if you look back at chapter 12

12:49 again let's look at it in more detail not not so much a flyover this time chapter 12 opens with Ezekiel acting out the exile one more time. This has been a thing that Ezekiel does. He uses these sort of acted out parables or skits to symbolize what's about to happen to Jerusalem. So you think back to chapter four and chapter five when he had the little brick with the city etched on it and the frying griddle put in front between himself and the city so that the prayers of the city don't get through the iron griddle to God's ears, right? You remember that whole thing? There have in several of those throughout the story of the book. So he does it one more time. He acts out the exile. God tells him to pack a bag, a small one, kind of, you know, hobo's bag on a stick sort of thing, an exile's bag. Tells him to dig a hole through the house and go out through it with his face covered that you may not see the land. There's an interesting detail if you look at it in the first few verses. Put a bag together, dig a hole, go out on a journey with your face covered so that

13:51 you don't see the land. Now, most of those details are not a problem. The little bag means you're not going to have much. The hole in the wall probably means something like either the walls are breached or you're escaping by the skin of your teeth, something like that. Go out into the land means you're being exiled from your home. But what about that little detail? Cover your eyes so that you can't see. What does that mean? Well, look down at chapter 12, verse 10. God says, Ezekiel, say to them, thus says the Lord God, this oracle concerns the prince, the king in Jerusalem and all the house of Israel who are in it. Say, I am a sign, an allegory for you. As I have done, so shall it be done to them. They shall go into exile, into captivity. Okay, that's no problem. That makes sense. And the prince, the king who is among them,

14:56 his name is Zedekiah, the prince who is among them shall lift his baggage upon his shoulder at dusk and shall go out. They shall dig through the wall to bring him out through it. He shall cover his face that he may not see the land with his eyes. Now keep going. And I will spread my net over him and he shall be taken in my snare. He'll be captured by the Babylonians and I will bring him to Babylon, the land of the Chaldeans, yet he shall not see it. I'm going to bring him there, but he will not see it and he shall die there. What on earth does that mean? How do you get captured taken to the land of Babylon and die there and yet never see it well let me read you just a bit about what was about to happen in about 15 years from the time

15:58 Ezekiel said this 15 years later what was about to happen to the king who was reigning when Babylon finally invaded. Here's what 2 Kings records. In the ninth year of his reign, in the tenth month, on the tenth day of the month, Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, came with all his army against Jerusalem and laid siege to it. They built siege works all around it, so the city was besieged till the eleventh year of King Zedekiah of Jerusalem. On the ninth day of the fourth month, the famine was so severe in the city that there was no food for the people. Then a breach was made in the city and all the men of war fled by night by the way of the gate between the two walls by the king's garden and the chaldeans had the city surrounded the men went in the direction of the south but the army of the chaldeans pursued the king to the south and overtook him in the plains of jericho and all his army was scattered from him then they captured the king and brought him up to the king of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, at a place called Reblah, and they passed sentence on

17:02 him. They slaughtered the sons of Zedekiah before his eyes and then put out the eyes of Zedekiah and bound him in chains and took him to Babylon. See the point? How do you go into a land and die in it and yet never see it? It's because the Babylonians have put out your eyes right after slaughtering your sons.

17:35 That's how. See what's going on with Ezekiel's prophecy? He's prophesying what's about to happen to King Zedekiah. So all of it, the secret flight down to the south, the capture, every piece of this prophecy is being fulfilled exactly as God said it would be but here's what I want you to see the point Ezekiel is making here is not just about one king's fate it's about a much bigger principle the reason God gives detail in the prophecies like this is so he can say things like he says in 12 25 for I am the Lord I will speak the word that I will speak and it will be performed it will no longer be delayed you see that God gives the detail because his word will be fulfilled down to the letter no more delay that's what these chapters are driving at that's the bigger principle that you're supposed to see not just oh look God got it right in a fortune

18:36 cookie kind of way that's not it it's that God makes those plans he puts those providences in place and he carries them out to the letter and of course the people don't believe it you look at chapter 12 verse 22 they have this little saying the days grow long and every vision comes to nothing you see what they're saying it's it's it's something like this in other words yeah yeah yeah whatever the prophets keep warning they keep talking about destruction Ezekiel keeps doing all this weird stuff, but nothing ever happens.

19:13 So let's not worry about it. In chapter 13, you get a picture of where all this false confidence is coming from. It's coming from false prophets. It's coming from people claiming to speak for God, but actually just saying what people want to hear. And look at 1310. 1310. They have misled my people. saying, peace, when there is no peace. In other words, this is what the Lord says about it.

19:44 They're whitewashing a flimsy wall. They're painting it so that it looks strong when actually it's rotten from the inside. Look, that little thing that the prophets say in 1310, peace, when there is no peace, the little ditty that they sing, the days grow long and every vision comes to nothing. Those things right there are the most dangerous lie in the history of the world. It's the lie that Satan used to start this whole thing off in the first place.

20:16 It's not. The biggest lie in the universe, the most dangerous lie in the universe, is not that God doesn't exist. The most dangerous lie is that he won't follow through on his promises. He won't do what he said. That's what Satan used. you will not surely die. God won't do it. It's a lie that God's warnings are just theoretical or rhetorical.

20:47 The judgment is for somebody else that you have more time. Friends, the false prophets of chapter 13 are alive and well in our day. And their message is everywhere. God is love. He would never judge. Everyone ends up okay in the end. In other words, it's all peace. Peace when there is no peace. Well, all that continues in chapter 14 when certain elders of the people come to Ezekiel and sit down in front of them.

21:22 You can see that at the beginning of 14. And the Lord just hands down a withering verdict on them. Look at verse 1 of chapter 14. Certain of the elders of Israel came to me and sat before me. The word of the Lord came to me, son of man, these men have taken their idols into their hearts and set the stumbling block of their iniquity before their faces. Should I indeed let myself be consulted by them? I want you to notice that phrase, they have taken their idols into their hearts. It's just a devastating phrase. And it's one that's used a couple of times in this chapter and nowhere else in the Old Testament.

21:58 This is a turn of phrase that the Lord gives to Ezekiel that's unique to him. Taking idols into your heart. You can see what that means, right? I don't even have to explain it to you. It's when the things that we worship, the things that we pursue, the things that we want so badly out of this life, the things we find satisfaction in once we get them, or that drive us to despair when we don't get them, it's when those idols are not just out there in front of you anymore. When they're not just a temptation, when they're not just something you play with occasionally, but when they have become dear to you, when you love them.

22:37 Friends, take care that there's nothing like that in your life. Is there something like that, some thing that you pursue, that you've taken into your heart? Think about it. Maybe it's just some thing that you once just thought of as, well, that's just my dream. That's just my ambition. That's just my goal. That's just the little sin that I play with when life gets tough. Just a little trinket. But now you've taken it into your heart and it's dear to you.

23:14 Be careful that you don't take your idols into your heart. In the second half of chapter 14, God brings the hammer down. If you look at verse 12 of chapter 14, the word of the Lord came to me, son of man, when a land sins against me by acting faithlessly and I stretch out my hand against it and break its supply of bread and send famine upon it and cut off from it man and beast, even if these three holy men, Noah, Daniel, and Job were in it, they would deliver only their own lives by their righteousness, declares the Lord.

23:53 And then if you look at those paragraphs there, starting in 15, 17, 19, you can see the things that are going to happen to this faithless land. Wild beasts, sword, pestilence, judgment, right? And then you get in 21 the summation of it all. For thus says the Lord God, how much more when I send upon Jerusalem my four disastrous acts of judgment, sword, famine, wild beasts, and pestilence to cut off from it man and beast. Now, it's interesting to me that those are so formulaic, right? He goes through them first, wild beasts, sword, pestilence, and he wraps them all up and calls them, gives them a title, my four disastrous acts of judgment, sword, famine, wild beasts, and pestilence. Why is it so formulaic? Why does God act as if they should be aware that these things were coming. Because if you just look at them, they seem kind of random, right? And why isn't it hail? Why isn't it, you know? But it's four things that they were

24:55 aware of. Well, I'll tell you why. I'll tell you why he packages it like that. It's because they were aware of it. And if you look back at Deuteronomy 28, Leviticus 26, these four things are the very four curses that Israel agreed to when they took the covenant on themselves. If you're crying out loud, they sprinkled blood on themselves and said, yes, Lord, if we break this covenant, let these four disastrous acts fall on us. God is executing precisely what he promised and what they signed up for.

25:38 It's not arbitrary. In chapter 15, drives it all home with this last image. Israel's a vine. That's an image that's used of her throughout the Old Testament. But she's a fruitless one, right? She's a vine that's supposed to produce grapes or wood at least or something. But this vine just produces nothing. It's good for nothing productive. Can't even be used as wood. All it's good for is burning. And God says that's exactly what's coming, burning.

26:13 So friends, what do we do with this? See, in this meticulous keeping of promises, this meticulous carrying out of the promises of judgment that God had made, what are we supposed to do with that? Well, I'll tell you what you should do with it. You should hear and take and act on the warning that Israel would not hear and take and act on. That's what you should do. You should hear these words that God will judge.

26:47 And you should take it as a warning that changes your life. God will, without a doubt, he will judge sin. Look, I know that this is a point where a whole lot of people's eyes just kind of glaze over because you assume this is for someone else. This is too much fire and brimstone. I don't like the tone of this, whatever it is. But friend, I'm begging you, I'm begging you this morning not to do exactly what the nation of Israel was doing in these chapters. They shut their ears.

27:19 And if you're saying you don't want to hear this or it's not the right tone or whatever, friend, you're doing exactly the same thing. Don't do that. Look, maybe you're not a Christian. Maybe you've never given them this Christianity thing very much thought at all. Maybe you're just not a believer. And you've basically told yourself that God, if he even exists, has to be basically fine with you. You're a good person. You're not hurting anybody. You're not as bad as some other people in history you could think of.

27:51 And whatever judgment there might be out there, whatever promises God might make to judge, surely it's for those really bad people. Not for normal people like me. But friend, you've got to see, you've got to see, you've got to see that that mental defense you've built against the judgment of God is just that whitewashed wall from chapter 13. It may look and seem sturdy to you, but you walk up to it and press it with a finger, it'll pop right through. Because it's made out of sand, not stone.

28:26 It's peace. Peace. When there is no peace, it's sleep soundly. There's no reason to sleep soundly. God has made promises about your sin. And he always keeps his promises. Always. For those of you who are Christians, who take on the name of Christian, who call yourselves the people of God, What you need to realize from this is that what he's talking about through this whole thing is a people who are the people of God in name only.

29:19 And you see it everywhere. There's the prophets who claim to speak in his name but have never heard his voice. They never say anything true about him. There's the vine that takes on that image of the fruitful vine of Israel, but it produces no fruit. There's the bride, we'll talk about her in a little bit, in chapter 16, who takes her husband's gifts and then spits in his face. Then there's that image in 14 of leaders, of God's people, who have taken idols into their hearts. Do you see what all those images are saying? Do you see the picture that they're all painting together? What you have there is outward beauty.

29:53 Outwardly, everything looks right, but inside it's all occupied by wickedness. Inside, there's nothing but death. Whitewashed tombs. God hates that. There's so many of us that think we're safe so long as we're just playing with our idols. Give them just this much purpose in my life.

30:24 I can stop them from coming in. I'll give them that much purpose. I'll just give them a little foothold. We think we're expert idol managers. And all the while, all the while, we're taking them little by little into our hearts. Look, Christian, the idols are never going to leave you alone. They just won't. You're never going to get to a point in your life where you don't have idols screaming at you to worship them or whispering to you to give yourself over to them.

30:55 You'll never be at that point. They will always, always compete for your attention and your worship. I mean, the difference between being a Christian and being a non-Christian, it's not that when you're a non-Christian, there are all these idols yelling at you, and then as soon as you become a Christian, they all go quiet. If anything, it's exactly the opposite. Christians don't get to sit in this kind of serene, calm, without temptation to worship other things. We don't get to do that. That's not the difference between us and a non-Christian. The difference is that a Christian struggles against that.

31:28 He goes to war against that. So here's the question. How's the war going? Maybe even more pointedly, is there even a war going? Or have you just given up? Have you just opened the gates of your heart and invited those suckers in? friend if there's no war if there's no smoke of battle if you have made peace with your idols then wake up wake up or you may one day hear God saying to you you really looked good on the outside it. But I never knew you. God keeps his promises. Every word of judgment handed down here was absolutely 100% deserved. Every curse that God promised was fulfilled. Every warning that he gave

32:33 the people was completely vindicated. And in fact, if the passage ended right there, if the whole Bible ended right there, nobody could say a word against it. You couldn't say God was unrighteous. you couldn't say he was unjust, he'd just point to the record. But praise God, none of it ends here. Because the same God who keeps his promise to judge also keeps his promise to save. And that's the second point. Number two, God also keeps his promise to forgive. Chapter 16. So chapter 16 is really, really long. It's basically an allegory. And it's one of the most devastating passages in the whole Old Testament. Just a gut-wrenching story that analogizes itself to the history of Israel. So let me take you through it. God tells the story of Israel's entire history basically as a story of a marriage between him and a woman who represents Israel. It begins with this amazing act of compassion to her when she was totally helpless

33:36 and ends in total betrayal. That's where it's going. So let's look at it. God tells Ezekiel to first confront Jerusalem with her origins. He wants it known to Jerusalem where she came from. So look at verses 4 and 5. As for your birth, O Israel, this is chapter 16, verse 4. As for your birth, Israel, on the day you were born, your cord, your umbilical cord, was not cut. You were not washed with water to cleanse you. You were not rubbed with salt nor wrapped in swaddling clothes. No, I pitied you to do any of these things to you out of compassion for you, but you were cast out on the open field.

34:12 You were abhorred on the day that you were born. It's awful, right? It's just, you see this baby that's born. They don't even cut the umbilical cord. They just maybe, who knows? But the baby just goes out into a field. Nobody washes it. Nobody hugs her. Nobody does anything. You just throw her out in the field and leave her to die. She was unwanted. She was unloved. So he's just left to perish out in that field. And then look at verse 6. It's just an amazing verse, verse 6.

34:44 When I passed by you and saw you wallowing in your blood, I said to you in your blood, live. I said to you in your blood, live. I don't know if there's a better just little encapsulation of what God did for you if you're a Christian in the entire Bible. I said to you as you were laying there in your blood, live! And you lived. Oh friends, that's what, that's what happened to you. Hopeless, unloved, cast out, hell bound, and God looked at you in your blood and said, live. It's incredible.

35:31 Well, the baby grows up, and God finally enters into a covenant with her. That's what's happening in verse 8. So I spread the corner of my garment over you. That's a kind of marriage act, right? That's how they would do it in ancient days. Spread the corner of the garment over you. I made my vow to you, declares the Lord God, and you became mine. So that's marriage language. He doesn't just rescue her. He could have just rescued her and thrown her in an orphanage, right? But he doesn't. He raises her, and then he binds himself to her in a marriage covenant. So this is an allegory. again. God's not saying, I married Israel. That's not the point. The point is that it's an allegory of God putting himself in a different kind of covenant with Israel. And then just like he did with the nation, he lavishes everything on her over the next few verses. So just look over verses 10 to 13. Fine linen, silk, embroidered cloth, gold and silver jewelry. She's got the finest food. She's got fine flour and honey and oil. Everything's great. 13 says she advances to royalty.

36:30 Now look at verse 14. Your renown went forth among the nations because of your beauty. For your beauty was perfect through the splendor that I bestowed on you, declares the Lord God. It's not just that she was a natural beauty. That's not the point. You see where her beauty came from? Her beauty came from the splendor that I bestowed on you. Even the beauty was his gift to her.

37:02 Everything she had, everything she had, everything she was, came from his hand. She wasn't beautiful. She wasn't rich. She wasn't glamorous on her own. She was beautiful because he made her beautiful. It all came from him. But then look at verse 15. But you trusted in your beauty and played the whore because of your renown and lavished your whorings on any passerby.

37:36 Your beauty became his. You took some of your garments and made for yourself colorful shrines and on them played the whore the like that's never been seen nor ever shall be. She took those gifts that he had given her, and she used them against him. Look at 17. You also took your beautiful jewels of my gold and my silver, which I gave you, and you made yourself images of men, and with them you played the whore.

38:12 It's awful. Every gift, food, wealth, beauty, worship, all of it had come from him. And every single one of those gifts, she deliberately turned back against him. If anything, this chapter is the weeping, the uncontrolled weeping of a husband who's watched his wife take off the wedding ring, pawn it off, and use the money to buy gifts for other lovers. his gold, his silver, everything, everything that was his.

38:52 She took to her lover's beds, even though it still belonged to him. It gets worse. Look at 34. So you were different from other women in your whorings. Worse. Because no one solicited you. No one paid you to play the whore. You gave payment. And no payment was given to you. Therefore, you were different, worse. The corruption is total, it's perverse, and it's personal.

39:27 So by the time you get to verse 35, there's no doubt that God's right to judge her is absolute. Therefore, O prostitute, hear the word of the Lord, thus says the Lord God. And then he goes on and says, I'm going to destroy you. And his right to do so was total. She'd agreed to the covenant. She received everything from his hand, and she turned it all against him. So look at 1659. Turn the page, look at 1659. Kind of the conclusion of the matter.

40:05 For thus says the Lord God, I will deal with you as you have done. you who have despised the oath in breaking the covenant. It sounds final, doesn't it? It sounds like the end. It's justice in full to the letter without hesitation, just like a good king would do.

40:39 But then you get verse 60. yet, I will remember my covenant with you in the days of your youth, and I will establish for you an everlasting covenant. What? I mean, you see that? Yet. It's just, it's absolutely mind-blowing after all of this. I mean, think back to what we've been talking about, and then God drops the sentence, I'm going to destroy you, and then the very next thing, it's not even a period, it's a comma, yet, the whole of eternity rests on that word.

41:15 The fact that God could look at what his people did to him and then say, yet, is your whole hope of eternity. It's not, that's not a rational word. You realize that, right? It's not a logical word. It's not a word that comes from considered argument or a cost-benefit analysis of whether Israel is worth saving or how much glory will I get from this as opposed to that. This is the word of a husband who has every single right to walk away from her and doesn't. He looks at everything.

41:47 He looks at what she's done. He looks at what she's become and he says, yet I love her. Even while the betrayal is ongoing, even when the covenant is in shreds, God remembers and grace and love erupt in a flood that crushes logic and reason. That's how the gospel works. I mean look at these words here too in this paragraph about what gets remembered and by whom because it's fascinating. So God says there in 60 that he remembers his covenant with his people.

42:19 You see that? No. That doesn't, when God says he remembers that covenant, it doesn't mean that the old covenant is going to be re-established. It's not. The old covenant, the mosaic covenant that they've broken and it's caused all this trouble to begin with, it's gone. It is broken beyond all repair. But he remembers that old covenant. He remembers his promises. He remembers his love for his people. He remembers his commitment to them. And it's clear in 61 too. He's not going to make this new everlasting covenant on account of that old one. He's very clear about that. He's under no obligation to do anything. There are no covenant responsibilities left on God after it's broken.

42:55 But he remembers it. He longs for it. He loves them. And so he determines, in his wisdom and in his grace, to establish a new one. This time one that won't be broken. An everlasting one. How? How on earth is he going to do that? Because you look at the situation right now, all we've got is this yawning chasm of broken covenant. And the promise that judgment has to fall because of that broken covenant. And God can't just wipe it away.

43:27 He can't just say, no, I'm not going to execute the covenant. His reputation is at stake. The God of all the earth will do right. Always. Judgment has to be poured out. And yet somehow he's going to give his people grace and make another covenant with them. How does that happen? Well, that's the thing. You read the rest of the story of the Bible and you realize that the judgment that we deserve for our sin is never wiped away. It's never waived. It's never canceled.

43:58 It just gets moved. The judgment gets moved. God does keep his promise to judge. Every curse that we earned in Eden, every death sentence pronounced against us because of our sin and rebellion against him, the full weight of his wrath, every drop of it, he pours out to the letter in full without hesitation. It's just that he pours it out on his son instead of us. see that that yawning chasm that yawning chasm between the holy god of the universe and us doesn't get papered over it gets crossed because at the cross the judgment we had earned falls on jesus instead of us and and that dig a little deeper here that's how the yet out of nowhere that's how the yet is possible that's how a holy God that rules the universe can look on a people who carried his gold and his

45:01 silver away to another man's bed and still say over them live it's not because he's waving the sin away it's because the son of God carried that sin in his body and died because of it and you see right you see what's happening here at the cross God is keeping both these promises in the same breath in the same instant he keeps his promise to judge by pouring out his wrath on Jesus and he keeps his promise to forgive and he never once stops being the judge of all the earth who does right the wrath was real it was deserved and it fell it just didn't fall on us it fell on him. Look at verse 63 too. It's interesting. It's not just God in this paragraph who remembers.

45:55 He remembers his covenant, promises to make a new one, but it's not just God who remembers. He says, you also will remember and be confounded and never open your mouth again because of your shame. Interesting point, right? Interesting thing to throw in there at the very end when everything's supposed to be glorious. But it's true. And being in the new covenant doesn't mean you forget what you've done. It doesn't mean you forget what you've been saved from.

46:28 You know, the Bible says God forgets it in the sense that he atones for it. It's propitiated. It's dealt with. It's thrown as far as the east is from the west. It's sunk to the bottom of the ocean. But you and I, no, we don't forget. We never do. We remember, and we're confounded and ashamed of what we had to be saved from. You know, there's a cartoon kind of picture, not an actual one, but just in people's heads. Cartoon picture of Christianity out there where people think that Christianity has this story going on where it's as if sin never happened when Jesus saves us.

47:08 As if we just kind of glibly whistle past it. But no, the reality of it is way grittier than that. We remember our sin and we look the cost of it square in the eye. We know, we know when we look at our sin, that Jesus died for those sins. You realize when Jesus got up from the dead in his glorified body, the scars were there. And they will be there for all eternity. My friends, we remember our sin. But then at the end, in Revelation, there's that picture right at the end where God wipes every tear from our eyes.

47:56 How does that work? Because I assume that means the tears of shame also. See, I don't think, even in heaven, we'll forget. Jesus' scars will still be there. I don't think we'll forget. But I do think that on that day, our shame will be resurrected as gratitude.

48:30 You know, I think if you think about it, there are really two responses to sin that you can see in these five chapters. Back in 14, you got people who take their idols into their hearts. Here in 16, 63, you got people who remember their sin and grieve because of it and look forward to the resurrection. Both sides remember, right? They both think about their sin. But one side clutches the sin. Another side mourns it. And that makes all the difference in the world. So which are you this morning?

49:03 Are you clutching your sin? You're the kind of person who knows exactly what your idols are, but you have no intention of letting go because you've told yourself you can't have both. You can, sorry, that you can have both. I can have God and my idol. I can have the covenant and the sin. Friend, you can't. You can't. That's the whole point. You can't. On the other hand, maybe you're here this morning and you're grieving. You know what you've done and it horrifies you.

49:34 You barely look at yourself. Well, if that's you, I want you to hear me. I want you to hear me well. The grief that you feel is not the problem. The grief is the new covenant at work before we get to the new heavens and the new earth. God is using that to change you and bring you closer to him. Well, King James, 1606, did what any king would do, didn't he?

50:10 He pronounced the sentence, he had it carried out to the letter in full without hesitation, and then he just turned to other kingly matters. The case was really simple. They did it. The law was fulfilled. And James just did what any king would do. But see, that's the thing. God did what no king would do. He looked at the wife who had taken his gold and his silver to some lover's bed who hadn't even considered where the gifts came from in the first place, and he said, yet I love her.

50:50 He remembered his covenant when she had done everything possible to destroy it. And instead of executing the sentence on her, he himself walked to the scaffold. James watched the whole thing from behind a screen. God walked into the courtroom. James demanded the sinner's blood. God gave his own so the sinner could live. It's not that James was wrong.

51:21 He wasn't. He was perfectly right. It's just that God is infinitely, gloriously better. God always keeps his promises. Always. And this morning, that's either the most terrifying truth you've ever confronted or it's the most comforting. And that depends entirely on where you're standing with God. If you're standing in your sin, if you're standing in your rebellion, you need to come to him right now where there's still time for a yet to be spoken over your life.

51:58 But if you're in covenant with Jesus Christ, if you've put your faith in him and repented of your sins, if you're in the new covenant sealed by his blood, then yes, remember your sin and be stunned that he forgave it. Let's pray. Our Lord, we thank you that you are the great savior of sinners. You're the one who takes the wreck of our lives that we've made and over it all, you say, Yet, Lord, you are the God of new life.

52:39 You're the God of regeneration, of new birth. And so, Lord, we pray that there would not be a single person here, Christian or non-Christian, who's hearing these words today, in whose heart you do not press that truth. But, Lord, help us all to worship you and praise you because of what you've done. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.