It was bazar actually. God tells Ezekiel to make a mock-up of Jerusalem with siege works, battering rams and all things that would destroy it. Then an iron place was to be placed between the city and Ezekiel symbolizing that there would be no intervention of God coming in to save them.
Next God instructed Ezekiel to lay on his left side for 390 days to bear the iniquity of Israel, and on his right side for 40 days for Judah. During that time he we was make bread with a mixture of grain and that bread would be small. He was to cook over human excrement. And he was to drink very little water.
Ezekiel pleaded with God for mercy about eating bread cooked over human excrement so the LORD relented and instructed him to use cow dung. But the rest was the same.
God was making a point. Many points actually. And was doing so in dramatic, symbolic fashion through Ezekiel. He was saying
- Jerusalem will be destroyed
- I will not be intervening
- The reason is the years of your sin (390 was the years from evil king Jeroboam to return from exile, 40 years perhaps something to do with Manasseh until the exile)
- There will be little food and rationing of water
- The food that will be available will be unclean and defiled
When would Israel/Judah wake up? When would they take God seriously and heed his warnings? When would they repent?
No matter how shocking the symbolism, nothing seemed to wake people up.
Recently I was reading a book that was written back in the 70’s maybe. It was talking about how evil the times had become. Then last year I remember seeing a Facebook flashback that had someone from 2016 talking about how dark the world had become and people were so unkind.
I just wanted to say, ‘you haven’t seen nothing yet.’. We would love to go back to the morality of the 70’s or even of 2016 where men could not get pregnant, top national leaders could still define what a woman was, people who competed in women’s sports events were women, kids were for the most part taught reading, writing and arithmetic and not highly sexualized content, that kids weren’t asking each other what they identified as or what sexual variant they were. Or eggs that could still be purchased at a reasonable price.
What will it take to wake up? What will it take before we fall on our faces individually and as nations in repentance? Or will it take God handing us over to our own ways? Where food is scarce and water is dangerously rationed? Where people kill and are killed?
