Then he added, Son of man, let all my words sink deep into your own heart first. Listen to them carefully for yourself. Then go to your people in exile and say to them, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says!’ Do this whether they listen to you or not.’ (Ezekiel 3:10-11))
Let all that I am praise the Lord. (Psalm 104:1)These two verses were in my Bible reading today and I realized they were talking about the same thing.
When the Lord gave Ezekiel the message he wanted him to give to God’s people, he gave it to him in the form of a scroll and he told him to eat it, in fact, to fill his stomach with it. When Ezekiel did so, he said it was sweet as honey.
Then the Lord said, let all my words sink deep into your own heart. In other words, make what I have to give you not only fill your stomach, but also fill you life. When people see you, they will see me. When people hear you, they will hear me. When you speak, I speak.
And when he gives that message, he will be filled with the absolute power of God. It will be like Psalm 104 says: everything he is will praise the Lord.
That’s hard. It is hard to live your life in such a way that when people see you, they see God. It is hard to live your life with God so in charge that when people hear you speak, they hear God speak.
Ezekiel had a vital message for the people of God. His message was that God wanted them back. And if they came back to him, he would take them back just as he had before.
God’s people were in exile, as a conquered people. They had disobeyed God so much, had turned to idol-worship, to immorality, to everything in fact but God. Now they were a broken people, nobody, no longer a nation as such, just a ragtag bunch of vagabonds living in exile.
And God still loved them. He used Ezekiel to say, Come back home. Come back home to me, to your home with me. You are still welcome. I still love you.
He knew that within them was still his praise, that they were still his people even though they had turned from him.
But before Ezekiel could tell them all this, first he himself had to be filled with God’s message. First he had to be the incarnate praise of God himself, full of the Spirit, full of grace, full of love, full of God.
When he was, and only then, could he really tell them what God had to say. After all, how can you preach what you do not know? How can you tell what you do not understand.
We are his praise when we live our lives for him. And when we tell others about him, we show them that praise.
But first that praise has to sink deep into our own hearts. And then we tell.
The sad footnote, however, is that they will not listen. God knew it and Ezekiel knew it. But he went anyway.
So do we. After all, God loves us. And it is deep in our hearts.
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