I have been teaching (on Sundays) from the book of Ezekiel for the last two months.  This is the Old Testament book that I said I was never going to be able to read because it was too hard.  I tried it last year and gave up.  I couldn't make heads or tails of it.  But wouldn't you know, the powers that be in high places decided that this was what we would study from our summer quarterlies.  Go figure.

So I buckled down, got a simple translation, took it a little at a time and eventually it made sense.

Ezekiel was a priest of the Levitical tribe, thirty years old when God spoke to him and said "Stand up, son of dust, and I will talk to you."  God told him to warn the Israelites that if they didn't repent that they were going to be destroyed.   Things went downhill after that.   The people didn't repent and their temple was destroyed.  They had no place to go and speak to God, no place to find him.  God had promised that he would meet them in the temple and now it was gone.

Ezekiel lost his country, his church, his health, his wife, his freedom.  He was taken as a slave.  All the children left in Jerusalem  were killed or taken as slaves.  He ended up in Babylon with nothing.  And yet God continued to call on Ezekiel to prophesy to the people.  They were scattered everywhere with no place to return to.  Nothing was left.  They had put their trust in the assumption that since they had the temple of God, that God would always be there for them.  But God had enough of their sins.  He gave up on them.

What a terrible thing to happen to a person--God gives up on you.  And yet we see people who continue in their wrongdoing and because nothing happens immediately, they think nothing will.  Wrong.  Back in the 1800's, Billy Sunday preached a powerful sermon called "Payday Someday".

 Ezekiel 22:30 "And I sought for a man among them, that should make up the hedge, and stand in the gap before me for the land, that I should not destroy it: but I found none."   We need Christians to stand in the gap.  If we don't, who will?  Our country needs our witness.

If we do not study history, we are doomed to repeat it.