Anyone who has been reading my posts over the last several months knows I believe there isn’t a more important pastoral concern for the body of Christ to be responding to right now than the parallel between our own cultural issues and the heart-issues that existed in Israel and Judah just prior to their exile to Babylon.

We’re in the hour of Ezekiel. No distinction.

The fact of the matter is, during the period of Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Joel etc. THE SINGLE TOPIC that we hear the Lord addressing – THE ONE ISSUE that He considers worthy of passing down to the succeeding generations, is the dynamic of His peoples’ adultery, and infidelity to Him and His ways, and their refusal to respond to His voice through the prophets.

We don’t find records in these scriptures of how the people of God were to celebrate the feasts, build their families, walk in unity, or overtake their enemies – literally EVERYTHING written to the covenant people during the pre-exilic period addressed their egregious departure from their faithfulness to God Himself – over and over and over again… In the prophets the Lord is putting the full-court-press on His people in order to purge the deceitful narratives, the conspiracies, the false-hopes, and every other thing that’s keeping them from returning to Him in humility, contrition and repentance.

Yesterday morning in our prayer room we sang two of Keith Green’s songs, “My Eyes Are Dry” and “Create In Me A Clean Heart O God”… We began to weep over the thought that these corporate heart cries have become SO foreign to the spirit of the body of Christ in this hour. Where do we hear the high-profile “prophets” leading the people of God in the songs of the threshing floor???

We don’t. 

This single dissimilarity between the nationalist prophets of today and the dung-hill prophets of God’s choosing should be an alarm for EVERY SINGLE HONEST STUDENT of the BIBLE. 

If we DO hear the alarm, I pray it troubles us to ask the Holy Spirit three questions:
a.) Holy Spirit show me how my lens on reality IS BEING DISTORTED by the fact that I am a part of the wealthiest, most free, most-self-indulgent, most mutually affirming “people of God” in the history of the earth.

b.) Holy Spirit show me how I, like the people of Judah, am “refusing You – the One Who IS speaking“. (Hebrews 12:25) Truth-be-told, history shows no record of Judah ever responding to the thorough, corporate repentance that the Lord called for in Joel 2. 

c.) Holy Spirit, direct me into a radical lifestyle where Your (Psalm 139:24) analysis has daily access to every part of my heart.

Beloved. The transition we’re about to undergo isn’t like the one in Jeremiah’s day. This transition isn’t simply going to move us from one geographical location to another. Both heaven and earth are in the process of moving from one age to the next!! The universal nature (both micro and macro) of the transition that is upon us can barely be comprehended! 

I want – no, I NEED the order of heaven, and the ways of our King whole-heartedly fixed and celebrated in my heart, now – today!

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JSB • October 22, 2022