- Psalmody: Psalm 27:7a, 8–9a; 1a; 47:5; Psalm 68:17b–18a; Acts 1:11; John 17:12a, 13a, 15
- Lection: Ezek. 36:23a, 23c–28; 1 Pet. 4:7b–11; John 15:26—16:4a
In the Name of the Father and of the ✠ Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Thus says the LORD God: “If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.” His words in second Chronicles are ones prayed by many Christians in our day, for we see what our land has become and where it is continually headed. What once may have been able to be called a Christian nation is now a place saturated with all kinds of perversion, self-gratification, greed, lust, and ungodly mirth. What once exuded sacrifice, virtue, and holy living now exports some of the most vile ways of life the world has ever known, much of which even Christians go along with and enthusiastically embrace in our own lives. It is likely that the world around us is the way it is because our Christian lives struggle to be distinguished from the ways of those who don’t go to church, who don’t pray, who don’t read the Bible, who don’t believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. Praise be to God that He abounds in mercy and steadfast love; mercy and love that extends in intention of sanctifying His Name in those who bear it; even in those who have defiled it.
If My people who are called by My name will…turn from their wicked ways. The words of the Chronicles describe what had again manifested in the lives of the people of God in the prophet Ezekiel’s day. The people, who were set apart from the nations by the Almighty placing His Holy Name upon them, despised this undeserved gift by choosing to live by their own desires and not by God’s. Instead of standing out as being different in ways that honored the King of Heaven, Whose Name they bore, they blended in with the world and couldn’t be told apart. How much is it that we, His people, are not able to be distinguished from the ways of the world?
The Lord is jealous for His Name and therefore accepted His own humiliation when He allowed His people to be raided, captured, killed, led away to the ungodly lands that they emulated. Such was not out of the Lord’s control. Moreso, it was His doing. Their ways were wicked, so in judgment the Lord sent them away from His holy land, from the place of salvation, to ones that matched their ways. By His own words we know Him to be the enforcing Judge as Ezekiel earlier records the Lord saying, “when the house of Israel dwelt in their own land, they defiled it by their own ways and deeds… So I scattered them among the nations, and they were dispersed throughout the countries; I judged them according to their ways and their deeds. When they came to the nations, wherever they went, they profaned My holy name—when they said of them, ‘These are the people of the LORD, and yet they have gone out of His land.’” So, could it be that the healing that the Church desires for this land of Freedom 250 is needed because those Who bear the Lord’s Name have defiled the land by mimicking our ways and our deeds to the world’s? Indeed, the Church failing to be the Church defiles the land. And accordingly then, the Lord’s judgment upon us is just, and if it is just in His eyes, then it is also entirely necessary, because when God’s people live in sin and indifference toward the world’s ways, we actively hide God from the world. He is always known by the way of a man, because the Word and Spirit are given to build a kingdom of kings and priests unto the Lord. The kingdom is built in the people called by His Name. It doesn’t exist in all the perishable things for which we cheer, buy, build, clamor, and sell. The kingdom exists in the people who are called by the Name of the Lord.
If they are lives thus called, then they live by the Spirit of God and not by the flesh. The world’s ways are the works of the flesh, satisfying it as if pleasure, comfort, entertainment, and ease are the gods rightfully worshipped. When we look at the unbelieving nation around us, we see it embrace and treat as normal the works of adultery, fornication, lewdness, idolatry, hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies, envy, murders, drunkenness, revelries. If we likewise embrace or stand indifferent toward such things in our lives, we hide God from those who need to see Him shining, calling out in such darkness; who need to know that there exists a way of righteousness that leads to life everlasting. We hide Him even from ourselves.
The prophecy continues in Ezekiel with the Lord declaring how holiness is restored, how the land is healed. I will sanctify My great name, and the nations shall know that I am the LORD, when I am hallowed in you before their eyes, which echoes the Chronicles, If My people…will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will…heal their land. Both writings declare unto us that the true life of a redeemed Israel, that is, of the Church of Christ, is one of perpetual examination and repentance, of turning away from sin and the world, of showing ourselves to be different with great reason, for it shall come to pass that whoever calls on the Name of the LORD shall be saved.
It is good to have a God Whose Name means something. To behold the Name of the Lord is to behold all His glorious attributes: holiness, purity, light, grace, steadfastness, mercy, judgment, love, righteousness. It is into these that He seeks to lead us and in so doing, sanctifies His Name. The nations know that He is the LORD, when He is hallowed in us before their eyes. He hallows us through the sprinkling of clean water, washing us clean by Spirit and Word, dwelling within that we might be living temples of the source of all life. He hallows us by taking the heart of stone out of our flesh and giving us a heart of flesh, a true, living heart that rejects the cold hard death of the world’s dainties. He hallows us by putting His Spirit within us causing us to walk in His statutes. When we turn from our wicked ways, determine to live according to the Lord’s righteous path, and distinguish ourselves by what God calls good, then the nations shall know that He is the LORD when we keep His judgments and do them.
Hope for our land by first hoping in the Lord Who shows Himself to it by those who bear His Name in lives that don’t blaspheme, but exalt Him. It is a sure hope, not built upon the limited promises of man, but upon the limitless LORD Who seeks not to destroy the sinner, Who seeks not to have any land perish in wickedness, but to turn to Him and be healed. That turning and response is the Christian life. It is how it is set apart. Rest not in the ways of the world, for there is no true rest there to be found. May the Church of Christ ever distinguish herself here below, for the One by Whose Name she is distinguished is the almighty and everlasting Healer.
In ✠ Jesus’ Name. Amen.
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