Amen. Let us turn to Ezekiel chapter 4. Our working through Ezekiel is going to be always a work in progress, but I think we're gonna jump ahead a little bit after this. But this is part of, we might say, these beginning chapters, laying the foundation, what is the start of Ezekiel's ministry. And this chapter, not the most typical kind of chapter in the Bible, as we shall see, is how Ezekiel's ministry visibly began. Even as, again, I don't think we'll be in Ezekiel 5, I think we'll pass over it, but we know that part of his word whether he said this at the end of this year plus or whether he said this throughout, but part of his word is he does give the word. And so just looking ahead to Ezekiel 5.5 says, from the word of God to the people, thus says the Lord God, this is Jerusalem. And he is standing over his model, his visible prophecy of chapter four when he says that. So this is Jerusalem. And the people had the word to know this is Jerusalem. And this is how Ezekiel's visible ministry begins. And so we will be reading all of, considering all of Ezekiel chapter four this night. And you, son of man, take a brick and lay it before you, and engrave on it a city, even Jerusalem, and put siege works against it, and build a siege wall against it, and cast up a mound against it, set camps also against it, and plant battering rams against it all around. And you take an iron griddle, and place it as an iron wall between you and the city, and set your face toward it, and let it be in a state of siege, and press the siege against it. This is a sign for the house of Israel. Then lie on your left side and place the punishment of the house of Israel upon it. For the number of days that you lie on it, you shall bear their punishment. For I assign to you a number of days, 390 days, equal to the number of the years of their punishment. So long shall you bear the punishment of the house of Israel. And when you have completed these, you shall lie down a second time, but on your right side, and bear the punishment of the house of Judah. Forty days I assign you, a day for each year. And you shall set your face toward the siege of Jerusalem with your arm bared, and you shall prophesy against the city. And behold, I will place cords upon you so that you cannot turn from one side to the other till you have completed the days of your siege. And you take wheat and barley beans and the lentils, millet and emmer, and put them into a single vessel and make your bread from them. during the number of days that you lie on your side, 390 days, you shall eat it. And your food that you eat shall be by weight, 20 shekels a day, from day to day, you shall eat it. And water you shall drink by measure, the sixth part of a hen, from day to day, you shall drink. And you shall eat it as a barley cake baking in it, it in their sight on human dung. And the Lord said, thus shall the people of Israel eat their bread unclean among the nations where I will drive them. Then I said, ah, Lord God, behold, I have never defiled myself from my youth up till now. I have never eaten what died of itself or was torn by beast nor has tainted meat come into my mouth. Then he said to me, see, I assign to you cow's dung instead of human dung on which you may prepare your bread. Moreover, he said to me, son of man, behold, I will break the supply of bread in Jerusalem. They shall eat bread by weight and with anxiety, and they shall drink water by measure and in dismay. And I will do this, that they may lack bread and water and look at one another in dismay and rot away because of their punishment. So far the reading, the grass withers, the flower fades, the word of our Lord endures forever. Dear congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ, a map drawn on a clay brick, a griddle in the face being tied up in ropes and laying on your side day after day for well over a year. During those days, measuring out little bits of food and water day after day. Well, these are some of the principal parts of this first sign act. which God prescribes for Ezekiel and commands Ezekiel to do. Ezekiel does these things around this brick drawn map of Jerusalem. He does it in his small exilic community. We get the impression through the book of many of the neighbors coming in and watching him at one point or another, even as we also get hints throughout the book that Ezekiel's message, this and the messages to follow are essentially not heard. Or in other words, the people come to hear him, but they do not truly listen to what he is saying. As it has been summarized, the general reception of this exilic community to Ezekiel's message is indifference, apathy. Whatever it is that God calls the prophet to do, however visibly he holds out before him the prophetic signs of what God will do, there is this general apathy to his labors. But they are going to his house. We do get that picture. They do at least see and hear what's going on. Commentator Christopher Wright once put it this way, quote, Ezekiel's house must have become a virtual tourist attraction, end of quote. Although he does add a word, guessing that this must have been some dismay to Ezekiel's wife. We don't know that, but it may well be. We can almost imagine the conversation between two neighbors after the first few weeks. Let's pick out two names from the genealogy of Judah in 1 Chronicles 4. Let's just say that there's two neighbors named Ishma and Idbash. Ishma says, have you gone to Ezekiel's house to see his daily routine yet? Idbash says, no, I have not. Does he really weigh out these small bits of food and water each day? To which Ishma says, well, yes, but why don't you go see it for yourself? He's been at it for weeks and he does it every day. Months later, we can imagine the same two neighbors talking again. Now it's Idbash who starts and says, have you been to see Ezekiel again recently? Ishma replies, yes, I was there a few days ago. He's still eating his small bit of food, laying down on his side by that brick map. How long has this been going on now? Has it almost been a year? You see, God was holding forth through his prophet, day after day after day, truths, prophetic signs of what he would soon do. The people could not say that they were not warned. And they could not say that God was not giving them both depictions of his warnings of what would come and depictions of his grace. We see both clear depicted warnings and a depiction of grace which is now clear as we read it as New Testament people. So without a little bit of a longer introduction, and it may take a little bit longer than our typical sermon length to work through this text, With that, we have our theme for this evening, which is this, to pay attention to God's warnings and to God's grace. And our first point is brick and griddle. Our second point is cords and punishments. Our third point is breads and diets. And we broke that up into two parts, the breads and diets for the siege and for the exile. And I trust that will become clear as we get to that third point. Well, first we begin with this brick and this griddle. And what did these things will look like? And what is just going on here, just in general? So again, it's gonna take us a little bit to work through the sermon tonight. We're going to start with almost a second introduction, and that is just to talk about what is a sign act? What is going on here? Well, it is what is sometimes called a symbolic action, what is sometimes called a sign act. If we were to add one word to that, it would be appropriate to say these are prophetic sign acts. capturing that essence, the Lutheran commentator Horace Hummel, he likes to call them action prophecies. And just a quick overview, we don't have too many of these in the Bible, but we have a number. Probably the most famous one is the Prolonged Sign Act of the prophet Hosea. And it is the sign act of how he is to go to Gomer, this prostitute, and to marry her, and then to continue to be faithful to her, though she will be unfaithful to him. And it's this sign act, which is the prophet Hosea's life, a huge part of his life, that he is to marry this unfaithful woman and to continue to be faithful to her. That's probably the most famous. And if you call that just one big sign act, it's really the only one of Hosea. Maybe the most bizarre is the one recorded in Isaiah chapter 20. It's the only sign act which Isaiah was called to give and that was the time when Isaiah was called to go through the the streets of Israel nearly naked for three years to prophesy the coming of judgment and destitution upon the people of Israel. And then if we just go by count, Jeremiah has about eight sign acts. Ezekiel has about 10. It's sometimes hard to count which one is one and which one is two. Like, is this just one sign act here in Ezekiel 4? But that's That's a very quick overview of these sign acts, prophetic sign acts, action prophecies that God sometimes uses in the Old Testament. And it is appropriate to ask a question related to this because we live in what is more and more becoming a visual culture. We live in a visual time. We're driven by images. And so these sign acts of the Old Testament have been used by some to justify things like watching movies in church or giving elaborate dramas in church. And as we're looking into this, and I don't know, we may look at at least one more sign act as we're working through Ezekiel, let us just say on the outset that That is absolutely not the direction we should go from this. There's two reasons for that. Number one, because these are very specific divinely ordained things prescribed to specific prophets in their time. These are not normative. Isaiah, going nearly naked through the streets for three years is not a normative command. It was a prophetic sign. Hosea marrying Gomer and his faithfulness to her, that's not a normative thing. That's not just a general command for all of us to go out and do. These were very specific prophetic signs. Another thing to say is that they were always associated with and always came with prophetic word so I don't think we're gonna go to Ezekiel 5 next week I think we'll be jumping ahead as we're we're not gonna be working through every chapter of Ezekiel but I'll read again Ezekiel 5 verse 5 thus says the Lord God this is Jerusalem And verse seven may be a hint that Ezekiel is saying messages from God along those lines all through this time. Because in verse seven it says, as you're laying down on your side and you're facing the siege toward Jerusalem with your arm barred, which is part of his laying down position, you shall prophesy against the city. Okay, so it's symbol together with word, It's divinely commanded in a specific way, okay, that does not mean, okay, now we can go and have whatever visual teachings and things that we want in New Testament worship. What does it connect to? What else is divinely appointed, has a symbol, which is always to go with a word as well, and then there's just one difference. it looks backwards instead of making a prophecy of what will happen. Well, maybe now you see what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the sacraments, talking about baptism and the Lord's Supper. That's really the only close parallel we have to the Old Testament prophetic sign acts. But now the few symbols we have, the bread and wine of communion, the water of the Lord's Supper. They're no longer prophetic actions anticipating something coming with God's word from his prophets. They are now the two ordained acts that we've been given that look back on what Jesus Christ has done. Again, we're not going to look at every sign act in the book of Ezekiel, but as we read through our Old Testament, if we think about sign acts and what's the first way that they relate to us in the New Testament church, it's the sacraments. The sacraments is really the only close parallel we have to these sign acts. Well, now our second introduction is done. Again, brothers and sisters, I said we're gonna spend a little bit of time working through Ezekiel 4. Now let's think about what is this brick and what is this griddle? Well, the brick, first of all, most likely was not at all like the little bricks that we normally think of. It was probably about equal in size to two eight and 11 sheets of paper. And it may have been bigger than that. Bricks were a bigger, they made their bricks bigger in Babylon. And the best guess is that we're probably dealing with something that has the surface area of about two standard sheets of paper. And what is Ezekiel to do with that? He's to engrave on it a map of Jerusalem. So he's drawing in the map, and again, if there's any doubt, the word comes with it, 5 verse 5, this is Jerusalem. But Jerusalem is a distinct enough city with the temple and the palace and its walls that we can assume Ezekiel is able to draw this and make his point clearly enough. And then all of the sign acts that he is to do, they revolve around this brick map of Jerusalem that he engraves that is sitting in his house. And that starts with this fact in verse two, that Ezekiel is to make little models of siege works that surround the brick. So now we have this brick and it's sitting there, it's got the map of Jerusalem on it, and now we have little siege works whether, and it doesn't say how Ezekiel was to do that, but maybe he could have just used some dirt to build up siege mounds up to the level of the brick. He probably could use some little clay things to make little models of other siege warfare machines. God's telling him, verse two, make it clear, make all kinds of siege works and put it all around this little brick city. And so what do we have? We have a Jerusalem surrounded by siege. And then we have a griddle. And here, It would probably be flatter than many of our griddles, but really we can just think of the big cooking griddle in our kitchens. That's basically what we have here. It's a large iron plate used for cooking things and certainly big enough to cover the prophet's face. And as one commentator once said, when Ezekiel first picked up the griddle, Whoever was in the house on that first day probably thought, all right, here we go, let's smash all those siege works. But what does Ezekiel do? He covers his face and he's prophesying. If he didn't say it now, and he, again, verse seven tells us that he's prophesying through this, he's saying words, but if he didn't say it now, he made it clear in Ezekiel seven, verse 22, what he was showing. Ezekiel seven, verse 22, God speaks and says, I will turn my face from them. You see, the prophet, the priest, and Ezekiel is a priest prophet, stands as a mediator between God and man. And so sometimes he is a representation of who God is and what God is doing to the people. And sometimes he's a representation of the people and their relationship to God. When Ezekiel is holding the griddle, he is a picture of God. And the griddle goes before his face between the prophet and the model of besieged Jerusalem, and he's telling the people, God will not hear the cry this time. Right, because if we think about, right, our Ishma and our Ibdash, and they're sitting there and they're trying to think about what's going on, well, probably the first thing they think is, well, you're gonna pick up that griddle and smash the siege works. The next thing they think is, well, it's going to happen one of these days. One of these days we're just going to smash the siege works like when Sennacherib was defeated and God miraculously defeated the army of mighty Sennacherib and sent him away. I mean, Jerusalem's been besieged before. We can handle this. It's all right. God will deliver us again. And this is God giving a clear prophetic sign through his prophet. I will not listen this time. Your sins have been built up and I will not hear. And there is an iron griddle between my face and your cries. God wants his people to pay attention to his warnings. God once had his prophet hold a griddle before his face to picture clearly that this time Jerusalem will be defeated. Now what about the cords and punishments? Verses four to eight. So as part of the sign act, Ezekiel is laying down on his left side 390 days, on his right side 40 days. Now the text doesn't spell this out, but it leaves us with the implication that he's not doing this 24 hours a day. Indeed, it's more than just implied because he at least needs time to prepare his food. And so we should probably picture Ezekiel as doing this some hours of the day. Then maybe when the door is closed and he has some private hours later in the day, he's not laying on his side. But he is laying on his side bound up with cords so that he can't move day after day after day and this is either 390 days or 430 days as our title suggests it could be either because again he's not laying down all 24 hours a day so does he lay down on his left side for part of the day and his right side for part of the day for the last 40 days. The text doesn't say. But either way, it's more than a year that he does this. This laying down on his side. And notice he's got these cords bound on him, verse eight, so that he cannot turn. Now, What are these days? We're gonna take, this is one of those times, this doesn't happen very often, where the interpretation is very difficult, but the application is beautifully straightforward. Okay, so we're gonna talk a little bit about the difficult interpretation, and then we're gonna get to the straightforward application. The interpretation, I should say it's partially difficult, and partially easy. We'll start with the easy part. Now, we don't have exactly his words that he said to do this, but we have God's words explaining exactly what he's doing and we, because of the nature of the sign act, and again, the fact that he's prophesying as he's doing this, verse seven, we can say this word was clearly accompanying this sign. What was the sign? It said he's laying on his side, as a picture of the weight of sin being placed upon himself. We see that in the end of verse four, you shall bear their punishment. And so think of all your weight being on one side, and then the cores being balanced, you can't turn, This is the clear part of the interpretation. Sin is being born. Again, remember who the prophet, the priest, is. He's a mediator between God and man. So he can either picture God, like when he's holding the griddle, or he can picture man and man's relationship to God. And here is Ezekiel picturing the people and their relationship to God and this weight of sin that is upon him. Now the more difficult part of the interpretation is what's up with the 390 days, what's up with the 40 days? Because the text doesn't say, it's very possible that Ezekiel spelled it out to the people through God's command for prophecy, but Ezekiel is God, God didn't see the need for us to have that detail spelled out. Almost certainly the 40 days are a picture of 40 years for the exile and they represent the exile. The 390, there's all kinds of different ideas almost by process of elimination because hardly anything else makes sense. We say it's probably a representation of the 390 years from the time of Solomon to the time of Ezekiel. And there's one clue that may point us in this way. Notice the 390 years are tied to the house of Israel, the end of verse five. And the 40 days, the relationship between 40 days and 40 years and that this can be symbolic. Remember the 40 years in the wilderness? Numbers chapter 14 tells us they were in the wilderness for 40 years because for one year for each day, the 40 days that the spies went into the land, right? So this days for years, that's something the Hebrews would be familiar with, okay? So days for years, most likely what's going on here. And the 390 days is the house of Israel, verse five. The 40 days is the house of Judah, verse six. And so it may well be that he's saying for 390 years, going all the way back to when you were the United Kingdom of all of Israel, all the way back to the days of Solomon already, you were straying from me. And you have been building up guilt for all those years, symbolized by all these days that my prophet will lay on his side. And you are still guilty, even though now you are only, verse six, the house of Judah. And so in your exile, you continue to build up guilt. The text doesn't tell us exactly. 390 days, maybe for something else. But probably, this is what it is. But now we go from, I said the interpretation was difficult, but the application today is beautiful. And let's simply say it this way, brothers and sisters, for the first people to see this, especially as they had the accompanying prophetic word, they knew what Ezekiel was doing. But the picture of grace was not as clear yet because Jesus Christ had not yet come. Today, we come to Ezekiel 4 and we say, well, there's some difficult questions, like what is this 390? What is this 40? It's not spelled out. We can only make a good guess. There's something that's not as clear there. But we know that Jesus Christ has come. And so we have something clearer than they did. Because who bears guilt? Who takes guilt upon himself? Who was bound for our transgressions? Who suffered and had the weight of sin placed upon him? You see, this picture of the fact that grace could, or that by God's grace, guilt could be placed upon another, that was an anticipation of the one who could actually take that guilt, just as all of the sacrifices were. What are all of the sacrifices? They are a symbol that there must be your guilt placed upon another. And so usually that was done through the animal sacrifices and the shedding of the blood of the animals. But sometimes God would have his prophets symbolize that in different ways as well. Like when he had his prophet lay on his side for more than a year, as a picture of the weight of the people's sin over many years being placed upon himself. And the very fact that God pictures the reality that sin can be transferred, well, that is God's grace already here to the first hearers. But while they had the 40 days and the 390 days clear, but they could only see how this was pointing to grace, we have the application and we have the picture of grace beautifully made clear. because all of the pictures of weight being placed upon the sacrificial animals and of the weight of sin being placed upon the prophets, like in this unusual chapter, they are all pointing to the one who will actually be able to take and pay for sins. Because, I mean, the weight of the people's sins being placed upon Ezekiel, that's not going to stop the exile. He is an imperfect prophet. He's willing to suffer for his people. He's willing to do all that God calls him to do, to hold before them the warning. And oh, that they would have heeded that warning, and even pleaded with the family members back in Jerusalem to get out of there before this happens. And so that too is God's grace. but he could not actually take those sins upon himself. Because he too was a sinner, just like all the animals were just animals and they could not actually take the sin upon himself. And so this is all part of the many ways that God's grace is saying, you need my son. You need the one who will really be able to take the weight, not only of a whole nation over 390 years, but the weight of all of my people over all of my creation who repent of their sins and come to me, all of that weight is going to be placed upon Jesus Christ and he's going to effectually carry it such that the guilt is wiped away. Or to put it very simply, 390 40, what's going on? Bearing the weight of sin? Who takes the weight of sin? Jesus Christ. The interpretation is difficult. The application is beautifully straightforward. It's another picture that brings us to our Savior. Before we move to our third point, which is going to get a little bit technical again, but we'll be able to move through it faster than this. I wanna put our first two points together because that picture of the griddle in the face, that is a picture of God turning his face away from his people. But now I want us to put that together with the prophet, priest, king, who effectually bear sins. And so picture that griddle in the face, and then listen to the words of Jesus Christ on the cross. And about the ninth hour, Jesus cried out with a loud voice saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani, that is, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? A griddle in a face is quite the picture of the reality of God's judgment upon sin. Jesus Christ on the cross, bearing our sins in such a way that the very face of the Father is against Him, is the depths of the love of the Son and what He suffered in taking all of God's wrath for us and saving us on that cross. Well, now, brothers and sisters, we have the brick and the griddle and the cords and the punishments all tied together. spend a little bit of time talking about breads and diets. It's helpful to see that we have two different diets here. The first one we're gonna call the siege diet. And it's described in verses 10 and 11. And then it's explained, the prophetic word of explanation is in verses 16 and 17, where the language of weighing out food and drink returns, and it's sandwiched around the description and explanation of another diet, which is something that the Hebrews do all the time, right? They start to say something, and then they talk about something else, and then they come back and sandwich it around. So this is, it's not the way we always talk, but it's the way that the Hebrew Bible is often given to us. including the New Testament, and that it's written by Jews, by Hebrews, and so in the Gospel of Mark, we saw that sandwiching all the time. Well, let's look first at the siege diet. What is it? Verses 10 to 11, 20 shekels weight of bread. That's about eight ounces of bread. A sixth part of a hin of water, that's about two-thirds of one quart. Or if you prefer to think about measuring cups, not the big cups up in the cupboard, but the little measuring cups in the drawer, it's two and two-thirds measuring cups. And day by day, 10 to 11, this was Ezekiel's food for 390 days. As it has been said, this is enough to keep a healthy 30-year-old man alive, but barely. He's literally starving in front of the people. Which again, remember, sign acts are not normative. But on this occasion, God calls his prophet to starve himself. to make the picture plain to his people. Again, even here there's grace, because if they would have paid attention to it, and they know it's related to Jerusalem, then they would have all been sending the warnings back to all their family members still in Jerusalem, and they would have been preserved from this bread of affliction, and from the cutting off of the bread that God, Jesus, speaks about in verses 16 and 17. But sadly, they did not listen. That's the bread of the diet. That's the siege diet. Christopher Wright once summarized it this way, quote, it was just as well that he would be spending much of each day laying down since there would be little energy to spare from such a lean diet, end of quote. Now, he did have one other thing which he was allowed to eat. But it may be that, again, the text does not say, but it may be that this other cake was for the 40 days after the 390 days. So it's not clear when he was allowed to eat this. But there is one other thing he's allowed to eat, and that's a symbolic barley cake. Now, verse 12 of the ESV, I think, leads to some confusion. I'm going to read, you can look at verse 12. I'm going to read the translation by Daniel Bloch. This is other conservative commentators have a translation very much like this. And his translation is this, and a barley cake, you shall eat it, baking it over pellets of human excrement while the people watch. Okay, why is that translation better? So I think it helps us to see that we're moving to another bread. Okay, this is not the bread of poor mixed ingredients. from back in verses 9 and 10. This is not the siege diet. This is another bread with another purpose. And God explains what this bread is doing in verse 13. Thus shall the people of Israel eat their bread unclean among the nations where I will drive them. So we've got two different diets. We've got the starving siege diet over 390 days. to make the point clear, there's gonna be great suffering soon in Jerusalem. And then there's this unclean symbol where Ezekiel does protest to that. He doesn't protest the fact that he's gonna be on a near starvation diet for more than a year, but he does say, Lord, don't give me anything unclean, which tells us a couple of things. If God's people were careful, even in exile, they could follow the dietary laws. Daniel is an example of that as well. And it also tells us that Ezekiel really wanted to draw the line here and said, God, please don't make me do this. And God heard his request and told him that he could eat it on the much less offensive cow dung, actually dried cow dung. is still used in the Near East for even for cooking fire sometimes. They don't have much wood and there's often poverty. And so this actually would not have demonstrated that much. And so what we're left to assume is that God allowed Ezekiel to communicate that the cow dung was a picture of something that came from a different and more offensive place. So these are the diets that the Prophet has. And if we just put this together, all these things that Ezekiel is doing around his brick map that he draws on the first day of this long sign act. Well, let's put it together for our conclusion, thinking about one thing from our emphasis from last week, which was the need to speak. And then we'll end with an emphasis tied to this week, which is the need to pay attention and here. So first of all, if we think about all that Ezekiel is doing and the need that we have to speak the word, brothers and sisters, let us simply say it this way. It is not for lack of effort and personal sacrifice on the part of the prophet Ezekiel that the people refuse to listen. Surely, as we said last week for those who are here, it is God who must change the heart. It is God who must give the increase. The prophet, by God's command, puts himself through starvation, suffering, laying on his life. We need God to give the increase. And so that's one thing that ties back to our emphasis from last week, the need to speak. But we're thinking especially this week about the need to hear. And let me just say it this way. A griddle in the face is a very clear picture of something. For every member of this church, may the bread and the wine held out. and the water which flows, be very clear and very clearly explained symbols to us. As we now look back at the body and the blood of Jesus Christ given and spilled for us at the washing of regeneration that we have in Jesus Christ, brothers and sisters, Let me say it this way, for every member of this church, may the gospel be very clear to us. And I trust it is. But then I say also this, because the griddle in the face and everything else, again, there were many who did not hear Ezekiel. And so now I end with this, that we would not just know, that we would not just be a church where the bread and the wine and the water and salvation in Jesus Christ are very clearly laid out to us. That we are saved by his blood. May we not just hear, may we not just see, but may it grab our hearts. May it sink deeply into our hearts. And may the truth of the gospel that Jesus Christ died for us sinners be at the center of our heart and our life. Amen. Let us pray. Lord God Almighty, You speak clearly to us. And how beautiful it is