Sword & Trowel 2016: Issue 1 


or listening to a sermon, or meditating, and suddenly a realisation came to you – ‘I am a commissioned man, a commissioned woman, to serve the Lord with all my strength until I see his wonderful face. I am called to be his and his alone; to be a servant of the Saviour of the world.’ The thought was overwhelmingly solemn and came as an immovable burden, not an unpleasant or intolerable burden, but something you could not shake off. You were bound to obey, and it fi lled you with love and indebtedness. You were a Christian, but never before had you felt the full responsibility of being a servant of Christ. It is said of Ezekiel, ‘and the hand of the Lord was there upon him.’


The Purposes of the Lord’s Supper and Your Reasonable Service in the Lord’s Work by Dr Masters have been published in Telugu. See also page 26. (Available in UK from Tabernacle Bookshop.)


Such an awareness of our com- mission comes as a very profound experience, and you remember it for years. From that great moment, Ezekiel was profoundly solemn and earnest. A sense of compulsion entered into him. He became a deeply serious man from that time on. We like people who are warm in nature and have a sense of humour. That is uplifting and pleasant. But we do not want people to be shallow and trivial, as so many are in this Twitter age. When the hand of the Lord was upon Ezekiel he became deeply devoted, serious and industrious, the sure marks of a commissioning by God.


page 30 When God Commissions


With the hand of God came (we see it in verse 4) a tremendous sense of God, and certainly Ezekiel would need this, just as we all do in these times of intense unbelief. We are told that he looked – ‘and, behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fi re infolding itself.’ He realised that this depicted (at fi rst) not God, but the Babylo- nian troops, who would attack and bring down Jerusalem. The whirl- wind was an obvious symbol of destruction, terror and alarm, and seven years later Jerusalem was in- deed destroyed. But the vision of the whirlwind immediately turned into a vision of God, to signify that the Babylonians, wicked as they were, were God’s instrument of judgement. The sense of God’s immensity and glory came from the dazzling brightness about the cloud, and from the inward rotation of this great ball


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