Today’s Reading: Ezekiel 26-28
I am thinking that today’s reading is somewhat like me watching a super team systemically destroy some junior team in a brutal way, and wishing the junior team would somehow turn a corner and make a brilliant play and overcome the super team! Is that what the Lord Himself was feeling as He watched Tyre rejoice over beating up His people! I can’t help anyone, but the Lord can certainly and will certainly help His junior team, Beloved Israel, to do it! Maybe more accurately, the Sovereign Lord (there’s the phrase that the Lord is impressing on His people) will do it! Sovereign meaning He has the right and ability to do as He pleases, and Lord meaning He is over all! Yet I feel sure that at the time, it must have seemed to the people listening, like listening to the radio tell me that U.S.A. or Canada will fade off the scene and disappear altogether soon – totally impossible for me to conceive of such a thing (because my security is linked with the stability of my country)! But God can and does speak of things which are not as if they were already existing!
Interesting for me that such dramatic change frightens the nearby neighbours. Certainly can see that in the world today, how a little shift and a September 7th, immediately fills up all the churches! Only trouble is that the world I live in and I myself, seem to have such an incredibly short memories when “God speaks once, yea twice!”
Well might a lament be written for Tyre – such big accomplishments and something that the people of this world envy and talk about constantly – financial – business accomplishments – ‘business roaring’! Never will I forget the man I hired to do some decoration work for us! He came from China, and as we chatted, he looked at me so earnestly and said seriously, “There nothing more important than making money, right?” I didn’t have the presence of mind to ask him at what dollar worth would he value his health?! Probably it’s a question I myself need to hear!
Not sure if you found the section on King of Tyre as interesting as I did. I was curious to see why he would be compared to Satan! I know that this passage is viewed as a description of Satan by many! (You were in Eden, the garden of God?) But this one is perfect and beautiful and high up in the chain of the command of God, until sin was found in him! Violence certainly fits Satan! Corrupted wisdom – wish Eve had known that before listening to the serpent! Pride! Something so simple, but I find so destructive in my life! Why is pride so offensive to God? All I have comes as a free and loving gift from my loving Father and to pretend that it came from me?! The good things of life are to be enjoyed – to be sure they are, but never boasted in as if we are the source of goodness in our lives! I think there is a verse that says that pride was the downfall of Satan! How much more will it become a downfall in my life, if I allow it to take root!
Don’t you love the picture of Israel living safely in their land and they themselves and their neighbour enemies knowing for certain that God Himself is the Sovereign God and Israel’s God! For the person who is willing to separate from unequal worldly yokes, comes the heavenly promise from a Heavenly Father to them and to me in 2 Corinthians, “18 And I will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty.” I feel like a little child looking up in delight at his father and knowing the security and joy of belonging to his father! I pray that this wonderful joy will never drift away from me, or put more accurately, I will never drift away from this joy being central in my life!