Sword & Trowel 2016: Issue 1


 for hours on television and allow- ing themselves to accept and enjoy


godless behaviour. They lose their horror of the plight of sinners and rather identify with their lifestyles. When we see churches adopting the ways of the world and com- promising with worldly culture, we must say – You cannot do that be- cause God will hold you to account. He is the pure and holy One who hates all that is distinctively charac- teristic of rebellious society. When Ezekiel was commissioned (like any young man called to min- ister God’s Word) he was wholly conquered by a sight of the holiness and power of God, and from that moment set aside and apart from the sin-tainted things of this world. Such a man today would re- pudiate any vestigial worldly idolatry, de- stroy all possessions that kept the world in his heart, and be entirely for the Lord. For Ezekiel, that awesome sense of God never left him all his life. If it leaves preach- ers today they are doomed as instru- ments of God. They cannot preach as they should. They cannot maintain the message that calls out of the world. They will in crucial matters be drawn aside. They may


page 32 When God Commissions


Should Christians Drink? by Dr Masters has been translated into Russian by Pastor Georgi Viazovksi in Minsk. (Available in UK from Tabernacle Bookshop.)


continue faithful to doctrines, but their task of keeping a fl ock of God unspotted from the world will no longer be honoured and maintained. Alongside the irresistible realisa- tion of God’s power and holiness, Ezekiel was given a glimpse, a sense, of God’s all-seeing eye. He saw it in the wheels of the living creatures – ‘like unto the colour of a beryl: and they four had one likeness: and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel.’ And they had eyes situated around what we would call the rims, the eyes of the omniscience of God and of the cherubim of justice. The prophet surely needed a vision of the all-seeing knowledge of God, because the judgements to be infl icted upon Judah would threaten to crush his spirit and even his trust. The as- surance that God knew all, and that his sover- eign and perfect plan took account of all events and could never fail, would strengthen and hold the prophet through the darkest times. When he saw his people defeated and scattered, the temple in ruins, and terrible things taking place, he would know this was not the end of the matter. He needed that powerful realisation, as did Jeremiah, and also Daniel, that God’s


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