Sword & Trowel 2016: Issue 1


a prisoner settlement, scratching a living from the earth. Also, after five years the prophet knew the sins and failings of the people, their attitudes and their ex- cuses. He knew well their refusal to accept the chastisement of God, and their foolish belief that fallen Egypt would come to their aid. Their trust was in earthly solutions to their suf- ferings, not in their glorious God. When God called Ezekiel, he called a proven man who had learned to work and who had stood the testing of faith. Today there is often no proving of the would-be preacher. He may have never won a soul, persisted faithfully in youth or Sunday School work, or even spent time in secular employment. He may have never learned to work hard and may have no idea how people generally think or reason. Sometimes he has never been


recognised by his church for his service to Christ, and never properly assessed or approved by them. He has gone upon his own whim to seminary and in due course another unproved man will proceed unscrip- turally into pastoral charge. How far we have drifted from the way the Lord acts in the precedents of the Word!


Privileged but wicked times We notice also that several of


the ‘greater’ prophets ministered as contemporaries. Jeremiah and Daniel lived at the same time, and we might conclude these were great days, privileged times. But they were dreadful days of rebellion and unbe- lief. It is of comfort to us to know


that some of God’s greatest instru- ments exercised their long ministries (Ezekiel’s lasting at least 22 years) in times when both church and society at large lived in utmost unbelief and wickedness.


Ezekiel’s vision came from above,


from God, and this applies to us also. There would never be great waywardness in churches or foolish innovations if every believer had at some time been struck with a deep conviction that everything we know or do in the spiritual realm must come from God’s Word, and never from the imagination of mere men. So much has entered church life in the last fifty years which comes not from Heaven, from God’s Word, but from the ideas of fallen men. Endless authoritative directives and proposals flow from charismatic teachers, and very many of them eventually get into sounder churches. It is so bad in these last days that even reformed pastors are unashamed to say they are ‘progressive’, which means they adopt and promote the ideas of men and support worldliness in churches. Ezekiel, being overwhelmed by rev- elation, would cleave to the Word of God alone. We read that, ‘the word of the


Lord came expressly unto Ezekiel’ (Ezekiel 1.3), and this is a way of translating the Hebrew sense which indicates that the word came to him in a very personal way, and also that it came with great certainty that God had spoken to him. It was a very commanding call, and it came with a burden of responsibility. Have readers ever experienced this? You were reading your Bible


When God Commissions page 29


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