Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another edition of the Daily Bible Podcast. Hello. And we've got a question. We've got some deep questions from one of our listeners who wrote in some pretty thorough reasoning and arguments here. Not arguments in the pejorative sense of like combative, but just laying out his thoughts and processes. And I, I think. What it comes down to if we're understanding it correctly, is the concept of the corporate identity of the nation in the Old Testament. And would God conceive of Israel, in other words, more as the sum of the parts than the parts themselves. And some of the thought process here is as we've been reading, even in the Old Testament, we've seen that God has judged the nation and even the concept of punishing the children for the inequities of their fathers, which the law does talk about visiting. The iniquity of the fathers on future generations. And is there something to the idea of the corporate judgment of God over the individual judgment of God? In other words, is God seeing Israel as a whole rather than as the parts? And so as the parts are being punished and judged, really it's more the nation or the national entity that's being judged than the individual parts that are made up therein. And I do think there's something to that question. This is hard to track with, man. I'm struggling already. It is hard to track with, do you wanna clarify it for me? I don't know if I could do much better, but I just feel like, man, okay. I don't know who's gonna track with what we're saying. Okay. Okay. I don't know if I could do any better. I was gonna say that the, so you take a family right? And you've got all your kids, let's say you've got a crazy family, like you've got five kids at home, right? Some insane family would have, and you said it's still personal. The kids are all upstairs and they're making noise. And you say from downstairs, Hey, you guys need to quiet down, otherwise there's gonna be consequences. And so upstairs you've got all five kids up there and they're. Is maybe one or two of them that are going to heed the words of dad and listen, and they're gonna say, okay I'm gonna listen. Because dad said, Hey, you guys need to calm down, otherwise there's gonna be consequences. But from my perspective as dad or from this random person's perspective as dad calling up, this is dealing with corporate. This is dealing with them as my children, and there's a responsibility that all of them share towards the peace in the house in that moment. And so those other three that aren't going to heed my words, are going to continue to be rambunctious and loud and cause a ruckus. Okay? And so at that point, that is gonna say, okay, that's it. You guys have lost dessert tonight. We're not gonna do dessert tonight. We told you to calm down. We told you to be quiet multiple times. No dessert for anyone up there tonight. Now, two of them that listened are gonna come and protest and say, but Dad, I wasn't doing it. I wasn't the one being loud. And yet they were part of the shared corporate responsibility because all five of my children are in view when I give the command upstairs to say, Hey, you guys need to quiet down up there, otherwise there's gonna be consequences. Does that help? Yeah, that makes a lot more sense. Okay. Does God treat Israel that way? Pr what are your thoughts? Yes and no. I think it's both. So obviously Israel has a corporate. Identity and responsibility to God. In fact, God covenanted with the nation of Israel. It wasn't just with Abraham, although Abraham is obviously the figurehead, but he covenanted with all of them, and so they do have a shared purpose and a shared destiny, which God set up for them. However, you start getting into a text like this in Ezekiel where God's saying, I'm gonna judge all of you guys. I'm going to. Do the thing that I promised I would do. And so what you have then is a problem where you think this isn't the same generation that has heard all these warnings and all of these potentialities. So why do they get the brunt end of the stick when everyone else got a free pass? And the answer is that they didn't. No one's getting a free pass. In fact, Ezekiel actually tackles this, at least par partially, and in chapter 18, we're not gonna get there yet. But Ezekiel says something to the effect of the soul that sins will die You. You can't say the fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge. In other words, their children are suffering for the father's sins. Ezekiel says, you're not gonna say that because the soul that sins will die, not just the one who I promise judgment to, but everybody who sins. And of course, the whole nation could say that's all of us, and that's absolutely right. So yes, there is a shared responsibility and a shared destiny. However, there's also individual personal responsibility and God knows how to manage both of those things at the same time. What would you say PPJ, is this true for the New Testament as well? Yeah I was just about to say, I think we see the same thing in the church. It's a diff different dispensation, and so on the one hand. One of the unique things about the church today is we have the Holy Spirit indwelling us as individual believers, and that's gonna result in a lot of individual conviction. And we're gonna have a responsibility before the Lord based on how we respond to the spirit's conviction and so forth and so on. But then there's also corporate responsibility. You brought up, as we were talking offline, the series that I did right way back at the beginning of our church launch on the seven churches of Revelation that Jesus is assessing the church, he's assessing the. Corporate entity there. And for example, the church in Ephesus, he says, look, if you guys don't come back to your first love corporately, then I'm gonna come and remove the lampstand the corporate church is gonna suffer, not just the individuals that maybe were out of line there or had specifically neglected their first love. So it is a both and still in the New Testament era as well. So he also asked a question about the conscience. What's the difference between conscience. And conviction? Are they the same? Are they different? Can they be used interchangeably? How would you approach answering something like that? I think the conscience can be used by God in bringing conviction, and our conscience is going to be unique to each person. We've talked about not singing sinning against your conscience. Your conscience may be sensitive to one. Area over another. And so it's not necessarily a universal truth. Conviction though is not always related to the conscience because there are universal things that are declared by God, this is right and this is wrong. And if you transgress, those conviction should come and conviction will come by the spirit. And so sometimes the conviction is not brought by the conscience, by the Holy Spirit more directly. In that essence it's not a matter of, this is my personal conviction over this. No, this is God's conviction revealed in his word that now I need to abide by, as I see it laid out for me in scripture, I don't have the opportunity to say you are free to do what you wanna do in your conscience on that, I'm gonna do what my conscience wants to do on this. There's a conviction that can transcend conscience and say, no, this is what's true regardless of what you feel like you want to do about it. Yeah, it's interesting how the soul works and sometimes we do use those words may maybe in a non-technical sense. Sure. We use the word conviction to speak about a few different realities. One of those being like, I feel strongly about this particular thing. We talk about a conviction about the superiority of scripture and its position within the church. We have convictions that mean a dogged belief about something, things that we would die for. We can also speak about conviction as though as a state, a legal state. In fact, that's what he mentions here. There is a state of someone being convicted by the law you. You are judged, you're sentenced, all those things because you are convicted. But there's also another way that Christians tend to use the word, and it means that we feel the paying of our conscience. Here you go, interacting with these two things together that causes us to say, I'm in the wrong, I need to do something about it. So there's a potential technical usage that I think you might be referring to. That I don't think we're saying here, we're talking about the conviction of a, we, you can't talk about the conviction of the spirit. That's part of his job. He comes to, to convict the world of sin or righteousness and judgment. Right now, and again, there is a legal sense that you're referring to, but I think the spiritual sense that we're referring to speaks more to the the personal response to the word, the personal response to that sense of, oh no, I'm in the wrong before God. So can it be improperly trained? Yes, there can be nature, there can be nurture, but the spirit does use. Things like friends who stab us in the face because they love us. Proverbs 27, 5 and six. There's also the sense of the word as you read the word, you feel like, oh no, I'm not doing what this word says. You can hear a good sermon and the sermon convicts us and those sense that sense of conviction is working in tandem with or in cooperation with your conscience, which can be shaped and informed in much of the same way. Yeah. Yeah. That's good, man. That's helpful as we've been known to say this is the same guy that's noticed us saying that too. Yeah, that's funny. Hey, Ezekiel, hold up. If we can answer your question if we missed it. Send us another email, send us follow up because we were trying to, we're saying, okay, is this what he's saying? And so your email, obviously lots of content. In fact I counted the words. Correction. I had GPT count your words. You wrote in 1,299 words. Dude, that's a lot of words. That's a lot of words I'm just saying. So we might have missed it. If we did, please send us a follow up, we'd be happy to answer it. Yeah. For the rest of you listening, if you've got questions after all this tough man, where were you best? And now we're expecting our best 1300 words or more. At least going forward, at least. Hey Ezekiel five through eight is our DBR today. So let's get in chapter five. Things are not gonna go well for Jerusalem. In fact, the indictment here that Ezekiel is commanded to do is really to enter into the state of mourning by shaving his head. But then God is gonna use the hair that he shaves off to this word picture here. And it's gonna be, a third of it is going to be burned. A third of it is gonna be struck. With the sword, a third of it is gonna be scattered to the wind, and this is gonna be picked up over in verse 12, as God is gonna lay out what he's gonna do with the population there in Jerusalem. And remember, this is those that are still remaining in Jerusalem after this deportation of 5 97. This, these are those that are waiting for the siege of Jerusalem. That's gonna happen in 5 86 and the downfall of Jerusalem. But the reason being is Jerusalem has become worse than the nations. The Jerusalem had. Done things he's gonna say verse what is it? Verse seven, I believe. Yeah, verse seven. He says that you've not even acted according to the rules of the nations that are all around you. You're even breaking the laws of the lawless. You're doing things that not even the gentiles would do. And so God says that I am against you. And the wrath that he's gonna be poured out or that is gonna be poured out as we've already seen in other readings. So we see here is going to be a. Pless wrath of Yahweh. And it is terrifying to read about his judgment against the inhabitants there in the city of Jerusalem. Yeah. Here's one of the times that the word shows up, and it's a word that feels threatening to me, and it's in chapter five, starting at verse 11. He says this multiple times in the book of Ezekiel. My eye will not spare and I will have. No pity. That's terrifying. And it also strikes me as being is that entirely true? Did God show no pity? I guess in a sense, yes. Because he delivered exactly the judgment that he promised. And on the other hand, it's almost as you read in, in the Book of Lamentations, we just finished that one. He'll show compassion again to his people. He has faithfulness endures, and so there's something interesting happening here. What is Ezekiel saying? I think Ezekiel's communicating exactly what God wants. The judgment is coming and the judgment will be exactly what I'm saying. It's gonna be, it's not gonna be less than that. And so God is saying, I'm showing no pity. When in reality, I think there's a lot more happening here, but at least one aspect of the reality is that God is going to come out full force because his threats are never empty. And you wonder too, if there is, because we've talked about it before, for example, hell is not gonna be the same experience for every single person that's in hell. There are levels of God's wrath that are being administered in hell. For instance, Jesus says it's gonna be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah than for the regions of Capernaum on the day of judgment. And so you wonder here if maybe this is an allusion to that reality, that even in God's temporal judgment against the city of Jerusalem, there are those, and perhaps even thinking back to the law, the high handed sins versus the other sins there, there are those that God is going to show no pity to. He's going to smite them, and they are going to be brought under the full wrath without pity. But that is not necessarily indicative of. The way that he will treat everyone there in the city. Yeah, that's a great point. Chapter six, then we get into some of the specifics here. And a lot of it again comes back to idolatry, and that's gonna be what is in the cross hairs for God. He says, I'm gonna bring a sword upon you. I will destroy your high places, your altars your incense altars, and I will cast down your slain before your idols. So God is saying the ones that you worship, the ones that you love, your idols, I'm gonna cast you down as dead before them. In their presence as though you are he is shaming them. On top of that, even though again we know the statues aren't anything we've talked before that there may be demonic beings behind these statues. And so God is going to flex over them by casting down their worshipers as dead before them. And yet you talked about his faithfulness and his mercy. Verse eight. I will leave some of you alive. And so I think this is the remnant and they're the ones in verse nine who are gonna remember. Him and remember their sinfulness, and they're gonna hate their sin and feel sorrow over it. And I think this is a, this is that Second Corinthians chapter seven godly grief that we see here. It's not just, I'm sorry that I was caught. It's not just that I'm sorry that I'm undergoing the judgment, but. He says they will be loathsome in their own sight for the evils they have committed for all their abominations. You can't get to that place unless you are understanding your sin in the eyes of God. You won't get to that place where you say, a wretched man that I am like Paul does, unless you understand your sin in the eyes of a holy God. And I think that's what's being alluded to here in, in this middle part of chapter six. As chapter six con continues, though the judgment is still going to come, and there's a phrase that we see here. I think it's the first time that we see it here. I guess back up in verse seven, he says, you shall know that I am the Lord down in verse 13. You shall know that I am the Lord. Verse 14. And then they will know that. I am the Lord. This is gonna pick up in verse chapter seven again, verse eight. You will know that I'm the Lord. Verse nine. You will know that I'm the Lord of chapter seven. This is something that continues the end of verse seven, the final verse. They shall know that I'm the Lord. This struck me this time that, that God's wrath is a. Self-disclosure of himself. That's redundant. God's wrath reveals something about himself. The part of the purpose of God's wrath is to reveal himself to those with eyes to see, and ears to hear. And that's what he's saying here, even in chapter seven, as the day of the wrath is laid out here, the judgment is imminent, is what he's saying here. This judgment is meant to show the nations and to show those that are. Paying attention who I am, that my wrath reveals something about me. And that's the purpose as he goes through and says, this is what I'm going to do. It's not for nothing. Not that his wrath ever would be for nothing, but a huge part of his wrath is announcing his presence, announcing his holiness, announcing his godliness for those that are there with eyes to see and ears to hear. Talk about God's wrath as it relates to his character, his essence, his being. You've been reading a lot about God lately. You've been reading a book about God called. The deep things of God may think the wrath would be one of those deep things that Christians might struggle with. We often talk about God, and even in your questions for last week, you talk about the difference between the Old Testament God and the conception of the New Testament. God, how do we put the pieces together when it feels like the Old Testament, God is mean. Yeah. And spiteful. And spiteful and the New Testament God, gentle Jesus, meek and mild, as some people say, is so different. How do we. Make heads and tails outta this. Yeah. Lemme start with Jesus's own words. When Jesus says in John's gospel, which we studied recently, he says, you know what my words come from God, and so do my works. And Jesus says, if you're not gonna believe my words, then at least believe my works, because both of them come from the Father. So Jesus right there undermines the argument that somehow there's a difference between him. And Yahweh or him and the father as we might classify the God of the Old Testament because Jesus says, I am doing only the things that he wants me to do. And so what we see in Jesus is the Father acting through the works and words of the Son. When we get to the Old Testament, we think about wrath. Wrath as we've talked about, I think before, is a byproduct of the holiness of God. So God is not wrath, God is holy. God is just. And because God is holy and because God is just wrath, is necessitated wrath is a necessary response from a holy God to the presence of sin. God cannot be or demonstrate anything other than judgment in response to that which deserves judgment or sin Otherwise, his character's impugned and for sin to remain unpunished. He is then tolerating in permit. Permissive of sin, which would cause again, his character to be impugned and he would cease to be God. He would cease to be who he is at his character. So God has to judge. He has to show his wrath because he is a God who is holy. Go to the New Testament. The reason why we don't see it as much in the New Testament is because of the cross. He did show his wrath. The wrath is there in the New Testament. It's just there. Through Christ on the cross, and now we have the good news that hey, you don't have to experience the wrath of God. If you repent and believe in Jesus for the forgiveness of your sins, then that wrath was poured out on him on the cross and it's not yours to bear in the future. Some would say, can't God, just say, I forgive you. Why does he have to execute wrath? In other words a Muslim can say, Allah just forgive. He just chooses to forgive who he chooses to forgive and not who he chooses not to. Why does God need to, it seems like someone would even accuse God of a weakness. There's a moral weakness on God's part to demand that someone be judged for their sin when he could just say. I'm not gonna hold it against you because none of us really want that, that, number one, and number two, that's not justice, right? It's the old courtroom analogy. If the defendant is in court, and that defendant has murdered one of your loved ones, and the judge looks down at the defendant and says, you know what? Because I'm such a magnanimous person and so gracious, I'm not gonna sentence you. I'm not gonna condemn you. You're clearly guilty. All the evidence stacks up against you. You deserve to die. But because I love you so much and because I'm such a God of grace and mercy I'm not gonna judge you. I'm gonna say you can go free. Okay. For the person that's pardoned, that feels great for them. But for the person who lost their family member for the sin that this person committed, justice hasn't been done, justice has been perverted on top of that. And that's not a loving act from that judge to pardon this person that, that did such a heinous crime against the other family. And so in light of that, God can't be just. And let our sins go because the sin has to be punished. It has to be judged. That's what's right. That's what just, and that's demanded by his character, by the fact that he is a holy God. And I dunno if that makes sense, but that's what I would say. That's why sin has to be punished. That's why he can't just snap his fingers and say Everybody's forgiven because the payment has to be paid. Otherwise, justice hasn't been done. So God's character is what constricts or constraints his desire to execute justice. You talked about earlier the fact that he's holy. Can you elaborate on that just a tad more? What is holiness and how does that connect with his desire for justice? Yeah, so holiness is the standard of absolute perfection. It is something without blemish, without flaw, and he is the standard. He is that standard. He is, he's holy and there is no imperfection. Sin is. Imperfection by definition, it's falling short of the mark. It is failing, right? And to live up to that standard of holiness, of absolute perfection. And so when sin exists, then holiness doesn't exist. And so the holiness of God in his wrath has to consume sin in judgment so that there is the purity left behind. It's is the reason why I think the New Testament uses, and so does the Old Testament, the image. The imagery of metal being refined by fire. The fire burns up theros. And what you're left behind with is the pure or the holy, we could put it that way, metal. It's the unadulterated, pure metal that's left behind. And that's why it's put through the crucible. The crucible is the wrath of God and the wrath of God is gonna burn up the sin that would otherwise diminish or devalue his character and his holiness. And it has to be that way. Otherwise you don't have the pure holy God on the outside right on. Good questions, hard things to think through. For sure. Yeah. Part of the judgment notice in verse seven, we've seen this before, but they, it says in chapter seven, I keep saying verse seven, chapter seven, verse 26. They seek a vision from the prophet while the law perishes from the priest and the council from the elders. Again, God is gonna reveal his or remove rather. His word, his revelation. There's not, they're not gonna be able to hear anything else from him. We're about to see that in, in detail over in chapter 10. But until we get there God is setting the stage for that. And that includes chapter eight, which is our last chapter for today. And this is where the prophet is going to be caught up. So now we're about 5 92 bc so we're about 14 months or so after the first vision in chapters one through three. So 5 92 bc He's gonna be caught up, remember he's in exile. He's gonna be caught up in a vision, it says by the spirit and taken to Jerusalem. And he's gonna be shown. The temple there in Jerusalem and all of these various abominations that are taking place in the temple. So in the outset, he sees this image of jealousy. We don't know exactly what this was, but it was an idol that was set up somewhere in the temple. And this is something that the people are worshiping, and I think it's intentionally vague here, because the point is the fact that they're worshiping idols, not exactly which idol it is, but God has been replaced by the people in the temple. Later on, he's gonna see people worshiping the creatures, these images. That have been etched into the walls of the temple. That's Paul and Romans one they've worshiped the creature rather than the creator who's blessed forever. And then they, the reasoning is they say they're in verse 12. Yahweh doesn't see these things. The Lord doesn't see us. The Lord has forsaken the land. And so we're gonna do these things. 'cause what does it matter? God's not paying attention and that is. That's a mindset that can creep into the church too. That's a mindset that can creep into our lives. We can think I'm getting away with this sin. God doesn't see this. No one knows about this, so I'm fine. And it's a revelatory of a heart of idolatry, which is what we see in these people. And yet what the prophet keeps saying is, or hearing is you're gonna see greater abominations. Greater abominations. And then he sees these 25 men he sees the women before that worshiping Tam Timus with a was a god of fertility. And then he sees these 25 men that are worshiping the sun to the east of the temple there. And so God is setting up for Ezekiel an understanding of why he is about to do what he's about to do. This is the state of things there. If Ezekiel hadn't seen these things before exile, he's seen them now, and now he's gonna understand the wrath that's coming. This whole section here is called the temple. Sermon or the temple vision. This chapters eight through 11, so we're not done with this yet. This is just the beginning and this is what God is showing Ezekiel in order to say, look doesn't my response make sense given what we're seeing here. And one thing that I continue to point out to people as we read this, especially in chapter eight here, these 25 people, what their backs to the temple basically are giving the Lord their backside, their dairy air. This is the height. The height of disrespect to the Lord. They're worshiping the sun with their rear ends pointed toward the Lord. I do not blame the Lord one bit for responding in wrath to all the things that he's done in kindness. This is so egregious in their sin that it makes perfect sense, and that's the way that you should feel as you read this. You should be able to say, what? I can't believe this. There's a, there should be a righteous indignation inside of you that agrees to the Lord. This is injust. This needs to be dealt with swiftly. With that, let's let's pray and then we'll be done with this episode. God we pray that you'd keep us from such presumption. We pray that you would keep us, that we would think to ourselves as we read passages like this, but for the grace of God, go, I Lord, that we would not be so pri proud. Prideful as to think that we are above this, that we are beyond this, that we could never fall prey to anything like this. But instead, Lord, by your spirit and with the impact of other people in our lives, I pray that you'd keep us close to you. Keep us worshiping you, keep us from drifting use those warning passages that we find in scripture like Hebrews, and even passages like this as the guardrails to remind us of the danger that exists if we drift away from you and keep us close to you. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen. Keep bringing your Bibles. Tune in again tomorrow for another edition of the Daily Bible Podcast. Bye bye.

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Yeah. I would agree with everything that you said