I invite you to open your Bibles to Ezekiel chapter 5. Ezekiel chapter 5 at verse 1. This is no easy reading. So give your attention carefully. Let your mind be focused and awake for Ezekiel 5. It says, and you, oh son of man, take a sharp sword. Use it as a barber's razor and pass it over your head and your beard. Then take balances for weighing and divide the hair. A third part you shall burn in the fire in the midst of the city when the days of the siege are completed. And a third part you shall take and strike with the sword all around the city. And a third part you shall scatter to the wind and I will unsheathe the sword after them. And you shall take from these a small number and bind them in the skirts of your robe And of these, again, you shall take some and cast into the midst of the fire and burn them in the fire. From there, a fire will come out into all the house of Israel." Now, you remember that the city that he's talking about is the model of Jerusalem that he made, that he's laying next to. So he's not talking about, you know, the city of A big, he's talking about the model Jerusalem. He's gonna do these things. So these are further signs that he's playing out. We go on in verse five. Thus says the Lord God, this is Jerusalem. I have set her in the center of the nations with countries all around her, and she has rebelled against my rules by doing wickedness more than the nations. and against my statutes more than the countries all around her, for they have rejected my rules and have not walked in my statutes. Therefore, thus says the Lord God, because you are more turbulent than the nations that are all around you and have not walked in my statutes or obeyed my rules and have not even acted according to the rules of the nations that are all around you, Therefore, thus says the Lord God, behold, I, even I, am against you, and I will execute judgments in your midst in the sight of all the nations. And because of all your abominations, I will do with you what I have never yet done, and the like of which I will never do again. Therefore, fathers shall eat their sons in your midst, and sons shall eat their fathers, and I will execute judgments on you. And any of you who survive, I will scatter to all the winds, Therefore, as I live, declares the Lord God, surely because you have defiled my sanctuary with all your detestable things and with all your abominations, therefore I will withdraw. My eye will not spare and I will have no pity. A third part of you shall die of pestilence and be consumed with a famine in your midst. A third part shall fall by the sorter all around you. And a third part I will scatter to all the winds and will unsheathe the sword after them. Thus shall my anger spend itself, and I will vent my fury upon them and satisfy myself. And they shall know that I am the Lord, that I have spoken in my jealousy when I spend my fury upon them. Moreover, I will make you a desolation and an object of reproach among the nations all around you. And in the sight of all who pass by, you shall be a reproach and a taunt, a warning and a horror to the nations all around you, when I execute judgments on you in anger and fury and with furious rebukes, I am the Lord, I have spoken. When I send against you the deadly arrows of famine, arrows for destruction, which I will send to destroy you, and when I bring more and more famine upon you and break your supply of bread, I will send famine and wild beasts against you, and they will rob you of your children. Pestilence and blood shall pass through you, and I will bring the sword upon you. I am the Lord, I have spoken." So far from God's holy word, dear congregation of the Lord Jesus Christ, God commissioned Ezekiel to prophesy about his plan to destroy Jerusalem and to punish the nation of Israel. And Ezekiel, as we learned before, would lay on his side in a public place and carry out a model siege of Jerusalem according to God's instructions. His prophetic sign would involve laying there for months and eating starvation rations and drinking very limited water. as a sign of the siege. And this would have been completely shocking to the Jews who were convinced that God was going to take their side against the bad guy, that is, their wicked captors, the Babylonians. If anyone deserves punishment, it's them. And if anyone is the bad guy, it's Babylon, not us. Why would God hound us? Why would God send a fire or a sword or arrows against us? And this was their attitude while they sinned flagrantly against God, defiling his worship even worse than all the nations around them. They couldn't imagine that they had done wrong. and they blame shifted to anyone but themselves. And God's anger was greatly kindled because they were so close to him, but their rebellion was so offensive and personal and ugly, a betrayal, an adultery in God's eyes, because these people who should have been the closest to him were strangers to him, were defiant against him. So we were working with this theme up until now. The Lord God commissioned the prophet Ezekiel to act out his divine fury and judgment against Israel and Judah with the sign of a months long public spectacle showing the destruction of Jerusalem. And last time we talked about that spectacle, the prophetic sign, and the besieged city. And there's a little more, that is the shaved hair. And then we want to talk about God's jealous fury, their hyper-rebellion, their super-rebellion, and God's jealous judgments. So we hadn't gotten through all of the depths of the humiliation that Ezekiel would endure to show what kind of judgment God had prepared for Jerusalem and for the Israelites. An additional part of the sign, the public spectacle, involved his hair shaved by a sharp sword. Sword-shaved prophet is what we see firstly. At this time, you know, it was common for Jewish men to have, you know, full beards. And I'm sure we can all agree in this room without any vote or, you know, any further discussion that it's socially embarrassing and generally undesirable for a man to appear in public without a beard. And I've tried to model for you one that's not even close to what, you know, we just let it go and go. So this, it was the norm for men to have, you know, big beards and God intends to use even Ezekiel's, you know, appearance, his grooming, his very self to show and signal his intentions in a way that can't be ignored. So we concluded chapter four with the discussion of his humiliating obedience that he willingly went through. The people are stubborn, but he will obey, and not just obey, but do difficult things to show God's word and to obey God's word. Well now, he also has to be disfigured for God's sake. Think about the imagery, a sharp sword will cut over him and remove his hair and remove his beard. And this is to be disfigured, but it's done in a strange way, right? Done by a sharp sword. I have some sharp swords and some machetes in my office. Some of the little boys of the church look at them with wonder. I have never trimmed my beard with them before a service. I've never even, well, I've thought about it, but I've never done it. And, you know, it's not something you think of like, oh, yeah, I'll use this giant sword, a very sharp sword to trim my body. but God says the sword will pass through them and over them. Imagine how scary it would be, like really, like on the street for someone to swing a knife at you and get so close that they get some hair. Imagine somebody attacking you with a knife and getting close enough that almost a couple hairs fall. That's a scary thing and that's what God is threatening To Israel, it's close and it's terrifying. Ezekiel's shaved face and head with the sword is a mark of calamity, of violence and bondage, of humiliation and grief. There's sort of two sides to it. There's violence and there's humiliation. They're shaved bare in a way that's disturbing. They're losing everything at the edge of a sharp sword. And this is God's intention for them. In many churches today, and for many pulpits probably at this very moment, there's an unwritten rule. And it is a detestable one. Keep it light. Keep it inspiring and positive. Keep it happy. Make it nice, make it comfortable. So let's talk about burning human hair. It reeks. It reeks. It's maybe the worst smell that I can think of, burning human hair, an awful stench. And I find that many churches today, many messengers today are not willing, they don't want to deliver the gospel as it's given And a passage like this is not desirable because they want to control it. They want to control the message. They want to manage the message. and make it in some way acceptable and make it in some way palatable and condition it to be a little lighter, a little more inspiring, a little happier, a little more positive, not to bring people down, not to threaten driving someone away or repelling them. but God will not be controlled or managed by anyone and his word is not to be mediated by us and so filtered and stripped. We are instead to sober up and remember that every sermon that was ever preached in the church was under a cross and is in the name of Jesus who was crucified and that matters. We're to submit when we hear something terrifying, to repent and to believe, not to wish it was something else. And so it is with this message from Ezekiel. God commanded Ezekiel to measure his sword-cut hair and divide it into thirds, burn some. Disease and pestilence, God said. starvation, and pestilence. Burn some in the midst of the city. Outside the city, strike some with the sword, violence and death at the hands of their enemies. Scatter some to the wind as though in exile, but take a small number, a remnant, and tuck it away, but then even out of them, comb through them and burn a few more. That's what it's gonna be like for the people. This is a frightening and a blunt message to them, a severe sign for people who God said are so hard-headed, they refuse to learn the easy way. They refuse to listen. And so Ezekiel has to be even harder than their flint foreheads. Hard-headed to the point of insanity. And so God says, a fire is what's next for you. A fire will come into all the house of Israel. In verse five, now we see the plain message, God's own interpretation for these signs, openly condemning the rebellious Jewish nation. It's a message of God's jealous fury. Every single week we talk about the Lord our God, who's a jealous God, and it's true, it's right. And it's not as though that's only in one place in the Bible. God is jealous for his own glory, for his own worship, for what belongs rightly to him. The Jews didn't want to hear this message any more than people today want to hear about the cross that stinks like burning human hair. They don't want to hear it. It's unpleasant. in our nostrils. Why do we have to look at this? Why do we have to think like this? We want preaching, but pleasant. We want church, but our way, sanitized of this kind of talk. When the message repeated from the prophets, from the apostles, when the message of God's word is to sober up and pay attention, to why the apostles preached Christ crucified and suffered much instead of sugar-coated, pandering messages that itching ears want to hear. They were true servants of God that suffered like Jesus and like the prophets who came before them. Ezekiel, who was God's true servant before Christ, all of them pointing to Jesus, all of them reminding us that this is a cross-centered gospel, that it's a dangerous one and a deadly one and a powerful one. So listeners today would be offended right along with the Jews who were listening and watching Ezekiel for the months, 14 months, that he was carrying on this sign. We don't like the idea that God threatens us with punishment, that he threatens to chastise us with such punishments, because there are others who are worse sinners, because my sins in my own eyes are not that bad, because do they warrant this jealousy? Do they warrant this fury? And it's because we don't know. We don't know what it's like to deal with the jealous God who protects his own holiness when everyone else is a liar. who protects his own integrity and purity when everyone else is defiled. He should be angry with us because we feel like, you know, shouldn't he focus on someone else, like on our enemies, on worse people? But if they actually listened to God, they would have to face these hard truths. God points to Israel in the middle of many nations and a city that he planted, as it were, strategically in the middle of all these countries. And they are there in the midst of them with God's laws and with God's promises, his covenant to Abraham and with the sign of his circumcision and with his temple and his priests. And spiritually speaking, they are first in line and as it were a lamp on a stand in front of all the nations for the glory of God. And what does God say about them, the privileged sons and daughters of his kingdom? That they are more wicked. than all the nations around. In fact, the nations around them are like little kids on a tricycle with their speed of wickedness compared to Israel. Israel is more turbulent, it says, than all the nations around them. You know what turbulence is in a plane, scary. Some people, that's like their worst nightmares to be on a plane in heavy turbulence. They're more turbulent than all the nations around. You despised your advantages. You had God's holy sanctuary and you defiled it with detestable idols and with wicked thoughts and actions and with empty worship and so on, but they say, You know, we did nothing wrong. We don't see any fault in us. And with no small slant, because the Babylonians are worse, and therefore we're okay. And because we are desperately wicked in our hearts and ready to justify ourselves at God's expense. And God is very angry. at this thought, that he's jealous for the truth and for his glory, he's jealous for his holiness, that they say, well, what did I do when they have violated God's commands worse than all the nations around? That's a scary kind of blindness. What did I do? This is their attitude towards him. And it really spirals. Look at verse seven. You have not walked in my statutes or rules, acted according not even to the rules of the nations around you. They thumb their noses at God's command. They make the other idolatrous, wicked nations look like amateurs. And they admit no fault. They've done no wrong. They need no prophet to tell them to repent or change a thing. And this is something that we have to see like a train wreck and learn from. And it's something that is very connected to the table as we approach the self-examination. That's, you know, is this me? Do I dare to talk about being close to Jesus while I scorn Him? Do I dare to talk about His cross and the sufferings that He suffered while I excuse myself? Do I dare to drag, you know, into His presence uh, wicked thoughts, wicked attitudes, uh, and justify myself and say, you know, I've done nothing wrong. You know, you can safely pass over me to someone else because they've got way bigger problems than me. We, we have to examine our hearts. Is this, is this me that, that I, that I would thumb my nose at God and pretend that I've done nothing wrong or tell God, you know, Basically, to calm down. What is all this with Ezekiel laying on his side? Why? Burning hair and shaving with a sword? What is this? God, calm down. God is off the rails. God overreacts. God is too upset. And we have this casual attitude about our sins and about how God should think more like us. You know, God, you should be a little more relaxed like me. And you should be a little more open-minded like me. As many churches are telling God he should do, you know, as they bless abortion and as they wave their rainbow flag and as they look on the sins of our time with accommodation and open-mindedness, et cetera, et cetera. We're all telling, you know, calm down. I can use this body for sexual immorality. Nothing happens. There's no, you know, there's no tidal wave from it. It's fine. I can deface your image in myself and others with wicked living, with every kind of disobedience. I can deface your image and nothing happens. I can live the way I want to live with the life that's mine in twisted pride and use this tongue to lie and use it to shred up other people. I can use this mind you gave me to think of all the ways that I'm going to advance myself over others and advance my wealth and my comfort. God looks on us with this kind of pride and is furious and jealous for what's rightly his, the truth and the purity that he demands. And we, you know, we dare him. We dare him to do something about it. What are you going to do about it? You know, can you imagine somebody just walking by your car, some random person, they look you right in the eyes as you're sitting there, and they just drag their key right across the hood. What are you going to do about it? And some of us are like, I would tear them to pieces, and others of us are like, I don't know. I don't know what I would do. Maybe I'd want to tear them to pieces if I couldn't. You know, all these, you know, what is it like when the son of the chief of police gets arrested for robbery and kidnapping and murder? What is it like, you know, imagine, you know, your sibling, your sister works and talks all the time, I'm going to work and I'm going to save up this money and I'm going to take this trip. and you steal it and you waste it, you know, drinking and drugs or whatever. I steal it, I waste it, and I laugh in her face. You know, what kind of betrayal, what kind of sick attitude is this against the people we know? I can't imagine what would happen. You know, when I was a kid, if my mom set a plate of food in front of me for dinner, we all sit down, and I'm just like, I'm not eating this garbage. You dump it on the floor. I don't think I would have lived to see the next day what my dad would have done with just a small amount of scorn in a small matter towards my mom, who was faithful to her family. That's a sickening type of picture. And, you know, but calm down, God. Calm down. And my sins are not such a big deal. And my transgressions and my law-breaking compared to some other people, and that's what we love to do, you know. I actually rue in some ways mentioning the rainbow flag or mentioning You know, mentioning abortion, or any sin that we think is far off from us, so that those are the specter, and those are the offense, but my sins don't reek like burning human hair, and my sins don't provoke God to the point that fathers eat their sons, and sons eat their fathers in a siege. That's gross. That's ugly. Is that even a thing that can be said off the pulpit? Except here it is in the word of God. Can we stand there while someone abuses us and not speak up? While someone abuses our family, or our children, or our wife? Ruins our life, or steals from us, or harms us, and we won't confront them, and we won't protest? And then if we should confront them, they justify that, I didn't do anything. And it's so obvious, like the fires are burning, everything is broken. I didn't do anything. What did I do? I'm bringing up these scenarios with some kind of hope that we could understand how sin provokes the anger of God and demands justice. This is a large-scale Biblical theme, that our sins have provoked Him, and it's hard for us to imagine his jealous fury so that he says here, I will, my anger will spend itself and I will vent my fury upon them and satisfy myself and they shall know that I am the Lord. This is who I am. Then they'll know what kind of God I am. They didn't see fit to obey or honor. I will, I will show the world a spectacle that cannot be ignored. And that's the nature of them becoming a taunt, becoming a byword to the nations around. If they were on a pedestal and they chose to magnify rebellion instead of magnify the holy God, then their fall will also be just as public, just as just as visible, it will be a beacon as a warning instead of one for joy. A beacon of woe, which is exactly what the scroll said when Ezekiel ate it in the earlier chapter. It will be something that everyone will see. and that God will carry out because he is the God who he says he is. Maybe you follow the news and you've seen, as I've seen, a number of cases where big companies or big organizations, they lost a major lawsuit. And the judge and the jury awarded millions in a case where some big entity like a city or a school district or some company, they were penalized, right? And they had obviously done wrong. But often, there's cases that are settled in a way that says, we'll pay the millions, and every dollar, every bit of it, it says we're guilty. Every bit of it says we did the thing that we're accused of. However, condition of the agreement is that we admit no wrongdoing. We'll give the millions, but we will not admit fault. We will admit no error. We will admit no crime, no sin, no whatever. We will admit no fault. And is this the kind of deal that God has to settle for? We tell him, calm down, and maybe even, you know, God, we'll pay the millions, but we will admit no fault. Is that the best kind of deal? Does God have to settle for a deal? Does he have to make deals with flesh and blood, make bargains about good and evil, about right and wrong? No. He will consume with fire and sword and scattering disaster. God will maintain His holiness, even if no one else will, and jealously guard His truth against every lie and error, against every proud man who justifies himself. Every single man, woman, and child can say this is right and good and okay, but God's judgments are weightier, they are heavier, and that matters. And he says, you'll know it because I am the Lord. You'll know it. And this is to be believed about him. This is behind the message, repent and believe. for the kingdom of heaven is near. And the kingdom of heaven is a thing to think about, but if we think of anything, we have to remember that at its center is Jesus, who does justice. And when his kingdom comes, his judgment comes, and his righteousness comes, and his exacting purity comes. And so it is that God has said, I am the Lord, and you'll know you'll know what kind of God I am by the way that I deal with sin, by the way that I handle every crooked thing that I straighten, every twisted thing that I untwist, God is able to do it. So his people were like the spoiled children of some wicked billionaire. God just keeps paying the bills. Dad will pay, he'll pay. and no matter what I do, crash the car, burn down the house, commit crimes, he'll do the payoff, he'll make it okay. Whatever I do, this is how they acted, but now they're cut off. Now the money is turned off and the supply is shut down, and this is how Israel provoked God. They presumed that things would just go on the way they had gone, on like always, and Ezekiel is there, with the unwanted message. The message they didn't ask for, the message they didn't want, but the message that was true and the one that they needed to hear. The one that said there's going to be Sword passing through you, there's going to be disaster. A thing that has never happened. Even the abomination of a siege and desperate fathers and sons eating one another. Awful. I'll break your supply of bread. Famine. Wild beasts will rob you of your children. I imagine that here we're talking about sort of the wildness of their enemies. or in the desolation that followed when the wild beasts really did multiply. Both are possible there. Pestilence and blood and sword. I am the Lord. I have spoken. From many pulpits, that's an unthinkable message, isn't it? It's always prosperity. It's always blessing. It's always more, more, more for us. It's not this, is it? Look at verse 11. It says, therefore as I live, declares the Lord God, surely, because you have defiled my sanctuary with all your detestable things and with all your abominations, therefore I will withdraw. My eye will not spare and I will have no pity. What a statement. In a scripture that is filled with the message of God's steadfast love and of his compassion and of the thought that he looks down from heaven to protect and to guard and to bless, and he never sleeps to be the protector of Israel. What a statement. Now my eye is on you, but because you have become strangers to me, not like my children, but turbulent, but disobedient so that even the nations who were strangers to me look more familiar. With that in mind, my eye is on you. to crush you, to chase you with the sword. Those that live through the siege, those that are scattered, he says, I'll unsheathe the sword to follow you. And even out of the remnant that he will save, some will be burned. It's a scathing message from God. He loves to show mercy. He loves to show compassion. He had looked on them like a father looks on his children and pitied them and cared about them when they were slaves in Egypt. When no one would have said, oh, these are the people that I want, he saw them in their misery for their good to lift them out. He saw them in their need and showed compassion, and now they have hardened their heart to him so wickedly that he targets them like a missile, his eyes on them to chase them down. And God doesn't sleep and he doesn't rest. And at times in the scripture, this is the warning. the warning that God cannot be resisted by any king, by any power, by anyone. He always lives and he always watches and he always carries out his purpose. And if his purpose is for your destruction and for your judgment, woe to you, woe to you. So how do we handle a message like this? I mentioned that it's a unique message and that it's one that no one wants to give. Ezekiel was the unwanted messenger, and this is an unwanted message by us. In the flesh, we don't want it. How do we handle it? How does it help us to talk about burning human hair and God's warning signs that will make Jerusalem a haunt, a terror, a horror to everyone who walks by? And this is for us something that we cannot miss. We have to take to heart that God makes these spectacles, all of them centering us on Jesus in the horrors of his sufferings and of his crucifixion, the greatest spectacle of judgment that the world has ever seen. forsaking Jesus, making him the one that is taunted, making him the one that is the very center of God's curse so that we would understand that he is the only one to whom we can flee. A God that does not sleep, whose eye is open to destroy the wicked, to obliterate them with his judgment, to crush them with terrors and horrors that make people talk, that people whisper about and say, look at what has happened. Look at the disaster. This is what God will do to those who persist in their sin. And the message of Christ was to repent and to believe and to put their faith in Him and have refuge, to have a place to flee from that kind of terror. in judgment, let every man, woman, and child understand that he is the only one to whom we can turn for shelter against that curse, against that judgment, against the storm, the sword that shaves, the fire that goes through the whole world. Jesus took that disaster on himself and he takes the calamity and he takes the bloodshed And he faces the jaws of death, which are every bit as sharp as the sword. And he endures the consuming wrath of God. No one can quench it for us except him. No one, there has never been nor will there ever be another who can quench the fury of God to the fullest extent so that God says, I'll spend it all. What power. I am the Lord and I will spend my full strength for judgment and who can stand. except Jesus. No one has ever, has ever received the fury of God spent to the last drop, to the dregs. And Jesus has done it. So that it says in Colossians 2, all of our sin and the record of our dead and everything that stood against us, he nailed to the cross. And it's done. It's canceled. So let the wise man hear. and humble himself and let the wise woman turn from her sin. and let us, all of us, confessing quickly and humbling ourselves, hearing his voice not hard in our hearts and, for that matter, our foreheads, the way that Ezekiel describes. Don't say anymore that our sins are no big deal or excuse them or make provision for them. Our little indulgences, no real consequence. Repent and turn and flee from your sins to Jesus. God will not relent outside of him. It's not safe out there. God will not rest. He doesn't forget about sin until it's handled, until it's satisfied. And he says here in no uncertain terms, I will satisfy myself. And that is, that's a powerful message. until it's satisfied and he will have satisfaction. The furious judgment that we see here, it's just a small taste of the desolation and the curse of sin and only Jesus shelters us from that storm. We cling to him, we live in him like the house that's built on the rock and then we have security. Then, finally, the remnant that God has preserved can have peace. Then, finally, we have a life with God that's unshaken. Nowhere outside is safe except through the narrow door, except in the house that God builds on Jesus as the foundation. Amen. Father in heaven, will we pray that we would come to understand what our sins are really like in your eyes and be wise. We have read of terrors in this text, even the burning of human hair, something that reeks and you have made the cross a stench to the ungodly. but you have made Jesus in his crucifixion the refuge of anyone who would escape from that judgment and have true life. Lord, we pray then that we would not be casual about these things, but flee to you. We pray, Lord, that we would not, like the Pharisees did, stand still, unwilling to change, unwilling to repent, while others fled into Christ, the tax collectors and the prostitutes and the sinners who saw your coming judgment, believed the message, and went in. Help us, we pray, then, not to be lukewarm and complacent. Help us, Lord, we pray, not to be unmoved when we hear words like these, but flee to you and find true security in Christ. Lord, you have made a way for salvation, and we are saved out of deep darkness, and we are saved as if out of the fire. And Lord, we have such joy at that thought. There is a refuge. We're not hopeless. We're not lost when we turn to Jesus and find in him the satisfaction that we could not make against sins that were very great. Hear our prayer, Lord, in Jesus' holy name, amen.