Jackals among ruins

“Your prophets, Israel, are like jackals among ruins.” (Ezekiel 13:4)

 

Some people sometimes misunderstand the pastor’s sermon calling for repentance. They expect that the pastor should only speak of Jesus of love and mercy. But Christ’s teaching is not such a teaching of attributes that would not matter even if practiced roughly depending on the situation. Main goals of pastor’s teaching are love and mercy, but the step process for that goals is repentance. When repentance is done rightly, love and mercy will be attained naturally. Ezekiel couldn’t just wait silently seeing what the false prophets of the time did. The false prophets prophesied according to their own thoughts carelessly. Because their only purpose was to take one, secular advantage. In these days too, that kind of injustice situation continues as well as past.

 

Any of man has to accept the Lord’s words by obedience. There are some people misunderstand that the pastor’s message is necessary only for a specified people. And certain pastor sitting among the audience at worship time shows an attitude being indifferent to listen to the preaching, as if it had nothing to do with himself. Nevertheless he also tries to analyze and criticize the contents of sermon that he hears now. Differently to that also, certain preacher thinks that the message oneself delivers is only for the audience not himself. In time of worship, no matter what pastor preaches, we should concentrate attention on listening to the voice of the Holy Spirit with a humble mind. We can see such causes are the same vein as it were to be able to communicate nothing at the conversation between Jesus and the Pharisees. So how would the Pharisees be able to change in their own life? Eventually, what they did was only they were involved in injustice to reject and kill Jesus.

The text Ezekiel 13:3 says, “Woe to the foolish prophets who follow their own spirit and have seen nothing!” Here ‘what have seen’ means things that perceived correctly through the Holy Spirit. People are often willing to set forth self-esteem by speaking self-consciousness. In general sentiment, that’s a reasonable idea and right argument. That’s a same attitude to what the Pharisees had shown. They had no choice but to think so because their spirits were not reborn anew in God. The way that everyone in general thinks is no different from that of the Pharisees. But it was a big worried problem that the prophets the spiritual leaders had done that. If the pastor of present church does like that, the church would have no choice but to get sick and destructed in the end.

In Ezekiel 13:6 Ezekiel said, “Their visions are false and their divination a lie. Even though the Lord has not sent them, they say, ‘The Lord declares,’ and expect him to fulfill their words.” There are those who habitually demand, “Do you believe?” and “Amen!” or “Hallelujah!” while not being able to teach them with conviction what, how and why to believe! It’s really pathetic that they say to blindly follow their own words without reading, meditating, studying, or practicing the Bible. “They are not the senders by the Lord,” Ezekiel said clearly, referring to those false prophets. Ezekiel’s harsh criticism should be applied definitely even to churches in present age. Especially Ezekiel, he pointed to their behaviors of idle life. The eating the bread of idleness means a life playing and eating without doing anything. On account of that, they had to hear the words they were like jackals among ruins.

The characteristics of jackal living in wasteland are their craftiness and eating without endeavor. False prophets seduce other people by saying that their own thoughts are prophecies given by God. Bible Ezekiel 13:5 says, “You have not gone up to the breaches in the wall to repair it for the people of Israel.” It means they did not try to perform their mission as the prophet, for the people. They had no choice but to do so because they had not sincere mind for the mission from the first. A man who hasn’t been anew in the Holy Spirit can never be a workman of the gospel for Christ. According to the news a while ago, the application rate for admission to a graduate school of theology was less than standard. In the past, when the churches were externally noisy and the pastor’s popularity was high, the applicants of the seminary were as many even bursting. However, as the sense of mission to pastors and churches became low, such an unfortunate change also occurred.

 

In the text Ezekiel 13:8, the Sovereign Lord says toward false prophets, “Because of your false words and lying visions, I am against you, declares the Sovereign Lord.”. And someday the time will come for them also to know the Lord, but unfortunately, then is not a time of salvation and grace, but a time of punishment and judgment. Therefore the pastor should not speak dishonest nonsense, but he has to be taught by the Lord through listening to the words with devoting one’s own heart in reading the Bible. And instead of doing to shout out the peace as a slogan, pastor should give guide saints to reach Christ’s love and mercy by themselves, through helping to repent their own sins.

 

(Written by Koonoh, Pastor of JDO Presbyterian Church in Korea, on Dec 18th 2022)