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The Bible Breakdown
Ezekiel 16: This is What a Broken Heart Sounds Like
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Hello everyone, welcome back to the Bible Breakdown Podcast with your host, pastor Brandon. Today, ezekiel, chapter 16, and today's title is this is what a Broken Heart Sounds Like. This is what a broken heart sounds like, and I just got to be honest with you. I got to give you some disclaimers and some warnings before we get into this one. So just buckle up. I'll give all those to you in just a second. But if you have your Bibles, want to open up with me to Ezekiel, chapter 16. If you're new around here, first of all, please come back. Don't let this be the only podcast you listen to today episode. Don't let it be the only one. Come back and while you are on your way back, make sure that you like, share, subscribe to YouTube channel and the podcast, make sure you are leaving us a five-star review on the podcast it really does help and make sure you're going to the Bible Breakdown Discussion on Facebook. I cannot wait to see what they do with this chapter. It's difficult. It's going to be hard. Disclaimer's on the way We'll get there together. Praise the Lord. All right, so have your Bibles, want to help with me to Ezekiel, chapter 16. I want to give a quick disclaimer and that is this.
Speaker 1:Several months ago, when I was first starting to think about us going through Ezekiel and I was reading through this on my own personal devotion time I came across this chapter and immediately I started thinking about the podcast. And I remember thinking, would anyone notice if I skipped this one? Because it's hard, it's a difficult chapter. And here's the reason why. Do you remember, back at the beginning, god told Ezekiel this is a stubborn people. They're not listening, they're not doing what I want them to do, they're completely disobeying me and they're very, very stubborn. So I am going to make you the exact same way. I am going to make you just as stubborn, just as difficult, so that you can stand toe to toe with them. Remember that. And then what we have seen over the past several chapters is he was right. These are very stubborn people. I mean, they're openly worshiping idols, openly doing all this bad stuff, and then they want to go sit in front of Ezekiel and say, hey, god got a word for us. And then Ezekiel is exactly why God told him he was going to be. He stands up and he says, oh yeah, I got a word for you. You know that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:Well, what we see today is a heartbreaker, because what God is going to do is he is finally just letting loose. And you imagine the people that God has chosen to love. He brought them out of Egyptian slavery, walked with them daily for 40 years through a wilderness, brought them into the Canaan land, went through all of that kind of stuff and then rose up kings, and they just continued to turn against God, over and over and over and over and over and over. God showed them mercy and kindness and drew them back to himself over and over again, and they continue to break his heart. Well, god is going to put in a metaphor this is not literal language, but as a metaphor God is trying to describe to the nation of Israel this is what your sins have done to me. I love you with an everlasting love. God is love. He is the nature and essence of what love is. Therefore, god loves completely and he is saying this is how you have treated my love. That's why we've entitled this.
Speaker 1:This is what a broken heart sounds like. But here's the thing. I have had the opportunity to sit with people who are experiencing grief, experiencing loss, experiencing betrayal, and it just comes out. What they have to say, is so raw, so difficult, so hard that you go. That's what grief sounds like. Well, god's going to say some stuff here. I'm going to go ahead and give it a hard PG-13, maybe a little bit of an R rating. And so, if you listen to this with your children, praise the Lord for the book of Psalms. But it's going to get real today, because this is God's broken heart. And so let's listen to this, let's read this together and just hear God's broken heart. And so let's listen to this, let's read this together and just hear God's heart today, as he is describing. This is what you have done to me. You ready.
Speaker 1:Ezekiel 16, verse one says this then another message came to me from the Lord, son of man. Confront Jerusalem with her detestable sins. Give her this message from the sovereign Lord you are nothing but a Canaanite sins. Give her this message from the sovereign Lord you are nothing but a Canaanite. Your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite. By the way, big time disrespect, all right.
Speaker 1:Verse four on the day that you were born, no one cared about you. Your umbilical cord was not cut. You were never washed, rubbed with salt or wrapped in a cloth. No one had the slightest interest in you, no one pitied you or cared for you. On the day you were born you were unwanted, dumped in a field, left to die. But I came by and I saw you helplessly kicking about in your own blood and I lay there and said as you lay there, I said live. I helped you thrive like a plant in the field and you grew up and became a beautiful jewel. Your breasts became full and your body hair grew and you were still naked. God help us More of that. Huh, verse 8,.
Speaker 1:And when I passed by again I saw that you were old enough for love, so I wrapped you in my cloak I've grabbed my cloak around you to cover your nakedness and declared my marriage vows. I made a covenant with you, says the Lord, and you became mine. I bathed you and washed you off and rubbed fragrant oils into your skin. I gave you expensive clothing of fine linen and silk, beautifully embroidered, and sandals by the fine goat hair leather. I gave you lovely jewelry, bracelets and beautiful necklaces, a ring in your nose, earrings for your ears and a lovely crown for your hip, and you were so adorned with gold and silver. Your clothes were made of fine linen and costly fabric, and you were beautifully embroidered. You ate the finest foods choice flour, honey and olive oil and became more beautiful than ever. You looked like a queen and so you were.
Speaker 1:Your fame soon spread throughout the world because of your beauty, and I dressed you in my splendor and perfected your beauty, says the sovereign Lord. But you thought your fame and beauty were your own. So you gave yourself as a prostitute to every man who came along. Your beauty was theirs for the asking. You used the lovely things I gave you to make shrines for idols where you played the prostitute. Unbelievable how you could ever do such a thing, how you could ever let it happen. You took the very jewels and gold and silver ornaments I have given you and made statues of men and worshiped them. This is adultery against me. You used the beautifully embroidered clothes I gave you to dress your idols. Then you used my special oil, my incense, to worship them. Imagine it. You said before them, as a sacrifice the choice flower, olive oil and honey that I gave you, says the sovereign Lord. Then you took your sons and your daughters, the children that you had born to me, and sacrificed them to your gods. Was your prostitution. Not enough, must you also slaughter my children by sacrificing them to idols?
Speaker 1:In all your years of adultery, detestable sin, you have not once remembered that, long ago, when you lay naked in the field, kicking about in your own blood, what a sorrow awaits you, says the sovereign lord. In addition to all your other wickedness, you built a pagan shrine and put altars to idols in every town square, on every street corner. You defiled your beauty, offering your body to every passerby in an endless stream of prostitution. Then you added lustful Egypt to your lovers, provoking my anger with your increasing promiscuity. That is why I struck you with my fist and reduced you your boundaries. I handed you over to your enemies, the Philistines, and even they were shocked by your lewd conduct.
Speaker 1:You have prostituted yourself with the Assyrians too, it seems. You can never find enough new lovers. And after you prostituted yourself there, you were still not satisfied. You added your lovers by embracing Babylonia, the land of merchants. But you are still not satisfied. What a sick heart you have, says the Lord, to do such things as these. Acting like a shameless prostitute, you build your pagan shrines on every street corner and your altars to idols in every square. In fact, you have been worse than a prostitute, so eager for sin that you have not even demanded payment. Yes, you are an adulterous wife who takes in strangers instead of her own husband. Prostitutes charge for their services, but not you. You give gifts to your lovers, bribing them to come and have sex with you. So you are the opposite of other prostitutes you pay your lovers instead of them paying you. Therefore, you prostitute.
Speaker 1:Listen to the message from the Lord. This is what the sovereign Lord says. Because you have poured out your lust and exposed yourself in prostitution to all your lovers, and because you have worshiped detestable idols and because you have slaughtered your children as a sacrifice to your idols, this is what I'm going to do. I will gather together all your allies, the lovers with whom you have sinned, both those you loved and those you hated, and I will strip you naked in front of them so they can stare at you. I will punish you and your murder for your murder and adultery. I will cover you with blood and my jealous fury. I will cover you with blood in my jealous fury. Then I will give you to these many nations who are your lovers and they will destroy you. They will knock down your pagan shrines and the altars to your idols. They will strip you and take your beautiful jewels, leaving you stark naked. They will band together in a mob to stone you and cut you up with swords. They will burn your homes and punish you in front of many women. I will stop your prostitution and end your payments to your many lovers. Then, at last, my fury against you will be spent. My jealous anger will subside. I will calm. It will be calm and I will not be angry with you anymore.
Speaker 1:But first, because you have not remembered your youth but have angered me by doing all these evil things, I will fully repay you for all your sins, says the Lord, for you have added lewd acts to all your detestable sins. Everyone who makes up Proverbs will say of you like mother, like daughter, for your mother loathed her husband and her children, and so do you. And you are exactly like your sisters, for they despise their husbands and their children. Truly, your mother was a Hittite and your father an Amorite. Your older sister was Samaria, who lived with her daughters in the north. Your younger sister was Sodom, who lived with her daughters in the north. Your younger sister was Sodom, who lived with her daughters in the south.
Speaker 1:But you have not merely sinned as they did. You quickly surpassed them in your corruption. As surely as I live, says the Lord. Sodom and her daughters were never as wicked as you and your daughters. Sodom sinned with pride, gluttony and laziness while the poor and the needy suffered outside her door. She was proud and committed detestable sins, so I wiped her out. As you have seen, even Samaria did not commit half of your sins.
Speaker 1:You have done far more detestable things than your sisters ever did. They seem righteous compared to you. Shame on you. Your sins are so terrible that you make your sisters seem righteous, even virtuous. But someday I will restore the fortunes of Sodom and Samaria and I will restore you too. Then you will be truly ashamed of everything you have done, for your sins. Make them feel good in comparison. Yes, your sisters Sodom and Samaria, and all their people will be restored, and at that time you will also be restored. In your proud days, you held Sodom in contempt, but now your greater wickedness has been exposed to all the world and you are the one who is scorned by Edom and all her neighbors and by Philistia.
Speaker 1:Your punishment for all your lewdness and detestable sin, says the Lord. This is your punishment. Now. This is what the sovereign Lord says. I will give you what you deserve, for you have taken your solemn vows lightly by breaking your covenant. Yet I will remember the covenant I made with you when you were young and I will establish an everlasting covenant with you. Then you will remember with shame all the evil that you have done and I will make your sisters, sodom and Samaria, to be your daughters, even though they are not part of your covenant, and I will reaffirm my covenant with you and you will know that I am the Lord. You will remember your sins and cover your mouth in silent shame, for when I forgive you of all you have done for when I Wait, read that last verse you will remember your sins and cover your mouth in silent shame. When I forgive you of all that you have done, I, the sovereign Lord, have spoken Whew, that was a mouthful, and there's a lot there. Bottom line is God's brokenhearted.
Speaker 1:So what can we get out of what we have read today? Do you know? I can't be mad at Israel. All I can do is say me too, me too. Now, I don't want to put this on you. I don't know what your relationship with God is and where you are.
Speaker 1:But I have had times in my life when God has brought me from such a mighty long way. God has done so many things in my life and I would go through seasons of my life where I would just be so thankful, so humble, just God. God that you would save me is, is my honor and my privilege, and all these different things. And then after a while, I got used to the blessings of God and I forgot about where I had come from and I started to expect God's goodness and I started to abuse God's kindness. And the very things that God had given me in order to worship him were the very things that God had given me in order to worship him, were the very things that I was using to crowd him out in my life and it broke the heart of God. And it wasn't until God took away some of those things God allowed those things to go elsewhere that I stopped and went. Wow, yeah, I did forget, and it was in shame that I remember where I had fallen.
Speaker 1:And even to this day, there are things in my life that, when I think about those things, I have to hold in tension, both a sense of thankfulness that God would forgive me, but also a sense of shame that he had to forgive me and so I don't want to put that on. You had to forgive me and so I don't want to put that on you. But I can't be mad at them because I am them, and the thing is that I love is even in the face of all of these bad things they have done. The chapter ends with God saying I will reaffirm my covenant with you and you will know that I am the Lord. That's the thing I love about God is his never ending faithfulness.
Speaker 1:The whole point of this chapter was to show what this experience has been like from the point of view of God, of God saying I give you everything and then you have used everything to hurt me. I'm not mad at you, I'm going to forgive you, but that's you got to admit that's messed up. And the thing is is that I think we'll never truly understand the greatness of God's love until we fully understand how badly we don't deserve it. Now we got to be careful. We don't want to live with a sense of shame and live constantly feeling like we're less than, because that's not what God wants us to do. He wants us to realize that in him we are forgiven whole, all the good stuff.
Speaker 1:But it is also important to never take for granted that all the blessings that we have not a single one of them have we earned. Every one of them are a product of God's good grace. So, whereas it shouldn't fill us with a sense of shame, it should fill us with a sense of gratitude that this chapter is about all of us. But at the very end he says but you're going to know that I am the Lord and you're going to remember these sins and cover your mouth and go oh, I can't believe I did that. But also you're going to have to remember that it was out of those sins that I still brought you and I still love you. Man, how good it is to serve such a kind and faithful God.
Speaker 1:Let's pray together right now, god, thank you so much for today. Thank you, god, that you are with us. And how many times do we break your heart? But how many times do you continue to come back, over and over and over again and forgive us, and you continue to show us your love and your grace. I pray today, god, that we will be reminded of how faithful you are and just let your grace shine in all of us. Thank you, god, for your faithfulness and your mercy. In Jesus' name we pray Amen. You know what God's word says in Ezekiel, chapter 34, verse 14, I will put my spirit on you and you will live again. I love you. I'll see you tomorrow for Ezekiel chapter.
