Happy Sunday. Welcome back to another edition at the Daily Bible Podcast. Let's do it. We are two chapters today, big chapters, and it's Ezekiel, so it's big meaty chapters and so that's the way I like it. Yeah. It should be good. But yeah, happy Sunday. We're back at church today and hopefully you're excited to be there with us or you have already been there with us, but church is so good, man. I, I love our church. In fact, yesterday, we had a team of men show up down at our old storage facility down in Frisco to pack up a lot of our kids men's stuff and load it onto a truck and drive it up here to prosper to our new storage facility. And not only did they do that, man, they did it in the rain. They did it in the rain, in the pouring rain. Yeah. Abe Ramin, Dan Mayer. I'm looking here on the video. Oh, the video ended. I see, I saw those three at least. I think Jacob Sealander was there too. Okay. Yeah. Jacob Sealander. Yeah, that makes sense. That tracks. Yeah. So man, just Paul Paone. I think I see Paul there. He was there. Yeah. Jared, I think I see Jared Bradley. Yeah. If I'm not calling your name out I'm looking. Don't worry. I'm looking, but man, thank you. Yeah, you're right. What an incredible team of men. We appreciate you guys so much for the work that you do. We are so thankful. We are so thankful for the kind of guys that you are. Totally. And not just that we were, we've been talking a lot about. Our volunteers in our church and those that, that are already doing so much because we realize how dependent we are on you guys for so much of what we do. And and we couldn't do it. We're just talking about our worship team, right? We've got so many selfless servants there. They all are right there. Yeah. Got a picture of 'em all. Right on the screen there. I, I think I'll put this picture in the podcast. We should do that. I might make it the photo for the podcast. I could do that. You could do that. I have the power, the whole team right up there. I could do that. You should have Bernard read off their names that would be specifically honoring to them. That'd be fun. But man we just, yeah, our worship team they're volunteers outside of you. We, everybody else up there pretty much is not somebody that's paid to be there and they're given to their time and we are dependent upon them. Same with our hospitality team. So many volunteers, so many of you. Serve the church. So faith faithfully and selflessly. I al I almost said faith faithless. Don't wanna confuse though, not the same thing. Yeah. Selflessly. And and we are, we're so thankful for you. You guys do such a great job. So we don't say it enough. But thank you. You are imperative to what we do. And you should notice too, that God is rewarding your labor. God is adding to our number, which is has been a wonderful problem that it's been a nut we've been trying to crack for the past few weeks. We've been noticing people coming in so you can help us with that as you continue praying for our church and as you continue serving both of those things critical, it would be practically helpful for us if you would move closer to the front of the stage. Yes, I can assure you most of the time, pastor PG is not biting people. It's true. Only ever. Rarely do we see that we settled that outta court. That's fine forward. Yeah. It worked out really well for us. They think that guy's gonna make a full recovery yet to be seen, but you could sit closer to him. And Amanda's awesome too. She That's great. She, there's space next to her and the kids are normally not sitting right next to her. So there's space next to her. There's plenty of space up front. We'd love to have you sit there and one more ask if you can scoot in closer to the middle. Yep. I know those end seats are so delectable. They're the best place to sit. 'cause you can make an easy escape if. In case Pastor P starts biting people. Yep. Understand that. Yep. But if you can scoot in closer, that would help us figure out really how much space we have in there and how much space we can make for people that are coming in. Yeah. Which is again, a great problem to have. Thank you guys for doing what you're doing. Inviting people, encouraging people, connecting with people, talking to new families and faces. You guys are crushing it. Thank you for what you do. Keep doing that. And let's see what. Where the Lord leads us in this. Yeah. And in fact, we had a meeting with some of our, just our core team leaders on, on Friday night, and we were talking with them and about a year ago we started meeting with them. And one of the things that we laid out there for them is, Hey, this is where we're at. This, these are what our average attendance numbers go look like. And this was Churchwide. We were at 253 at that one Churchwide. At that time, and we threw some numbers up on the screen and it was throwing pickles at a window. It was like, Hey we're looking at trying, throwing tamale's at the crowd. Some might say, we're Bob's your uncle. We're trusting the Lord that if it's his will we love to hit numbers like this. And one of the numbers that we threw up there was by 2026 having an average attendance of 300 people. Yeah. 300, that's what you said? Yeah. 10,000. No, 300 people. So to go up from 2 53 to, to 300 people. And we just met on Friday and I updated our numbers with them. And since January of this year. So going back to January of this calendar year, we're up to two 70 on average. And over the last five weeks, we're hitting 2 91 On average. The last month we're hitting over 300 on average, that's fun. It's awesome. It's so great to see how God is bringing people into the church and growing the church. And so that number, that 300 number that we threw out there saying, okay maybe this would happen. We, it looks like it's gonna happen and there's nothing magical about that number. But we want to be a church that's growing. We believe that a healthy organism is growing. We believe that if we're doing our job to reach, teach and train people, that that's gonna result in people showing up in growth happening in the church. And we're seeing that. And like you said, pr a, a lot of that has to do with you guys listening to this podcast. You're the ones that are doing so much of the work and the labor behind the scenes, helping us see people show up, stick around, and be a part of our church. That's right. So good job. Let's keep at it, folks. Yep. Speaking of keeping at it, let's keep at Ezekiel. Ezekiel 16 and 17 this is chapter 16, is one of those chapters that moms and dads might wanna preview before. Rolling it out there to their kiddos. It's graphic and it's God depicting Israel in birth and then growing up and developing and betroth her to himself. This is God's relationship with Israel and it's a history of that relationship in chapter 16. And it also includes Israel's faithlessness to the Lord and how she took all of the good things that God had done for her and despised him by honoring herself instead of him. In fact, she, he writes in verse 15 through Ezekiel, you trusted in your beauty and you played the immoral woman because of that. In other words, the beauty that God had. Given to her the beauty that God had cultivated in her, taking her from being a cast off and raising her up, so to speak, in, in this metaphor. She had been raised to be a beautiful woman and then she trusted in her own beauty rather than in God who is behind that. And that's just that picture of Israel spurning their creator and going after the idols and going after the nations. They were heart sick. In verse 30, how sick is your heart? This is more than the surface. This is more than. Just a matter of actions. This is something that's internal, that is the problem here. And God is upset. God is enraged God. This is what is drawing the wrath of God against the people. He says in verse 42. So I will satisfy my wrath on you. My jealousy shall depart from you. I will be calm and have no more be angry. But that's only after the wrath is going to be satisfied against the Israelites. The implications as he goes on is that they have committed sins that are worse than Sodom and Gomorrah even had. And and she was gonna be judged and she was gonna be punished for that. And yet still the chapter ends with a reminder that God is not going to completely abandon her. He will at that at one point. And this is the new covenant. Remember my covenant with you that Abraham at Covenant, that. In the future, he's gonna establish the ever not everlasting covenant. That's the new covenant there in verse 60. There's probably two questions I can think of that others might have as they read through this text. So let's quickly address, address one of those. And the first one has to do with verse 25. Verse 25 in the ESV does this a favor By not. Saying it as graphically as you might otherwise put it. In fact, if you have an ESV, you'll notice that there's a little number there that tells you what the literal wording is behind offering yourself to any passerby in case it was unclear what was being conveyed there. So why does God through Ezekiel, and we're not even at some of the more, some of the other things that we're gonna read soon enough where God uses even more graphical depictions of these things. Why is God so graphic? And trying to convey to Israel the nature of their relationship. Why does he have to use something that in our minds, it's like we wouldn't want our kids to necessarily read that. That's it's a little spicy. Why does God do this? What's the point? What are we supposed to get from that? Yeah. I would say it's sin is grotesque in the eyes of God, and I think we domesticate it. We don't think of it as, as evil and wicked and heinous as it really is because it's something that is, is commonplace or it's something that we. Just practice and we think that God's not paying attention because he hasn't done anything. He hasn't struck us with lightning even though there have been some pretty bad storms recently. So I wouldn't, trust in that I haven't purchased the shock collar yet. But if you want me to, you can zap me. You let me know. Yeah, sorry. Go ahead. So I think God is doing this for the shock value of saying, this is how bad sin is in my eyes. This is how grotesque is the eighties? An awful, hideous, grotesque, disgusting, filthy thing. And he wants the people to understand that and to feel that, because that helps us hate sin when we see sin for what it really is in the eyes of God. That's really helpful for you to say that someone's gonna naturally say then. Then it's appropriate on occasion, perhaps at least for me to use words that are as shocking and as. And as illustrative, let's just use that as what Ezekiel is using. In fact, lots of people have used Ezekiel. Remember we had this conversation on the last year. Yeah, we did. There was a certain pastor on the news for something like that. Is Ezekiel a good basis for us to say? There are times when using strong language and language that is highly evocative to make my point. I, we, we talk a lot about when the New Testament helps us understand something or. Modifies our understanding of something compared to the Old Testament. Now the Apostle Paul uses strong language in Philippians when he says, I count all things to be dung. It's a stronger word than that he uses. But the Apostle Paul and Ephesians also says that we should let no unwholesome talk come out of our mouth, but only that we should give for the building up of other people. So I do think that there's a New Testament principle that maybe overrides our temptation to say God does this, so I should be able to do this as well. I think is it normalizing or overriding? Because, yeah. To let, to clarify what I mean by that I think I know where you're going. Yeah. And that's a helpful idea. There's a certain sense in which the clear text, like Ephesians four, normalizes for us what everyday conversation should sound like. The way that we approach talking to people, is there then a place where you could say maybe conceivably, there are times when using Ezekiel style language or even Pauline language in your mind would be appropriate at some place, at some time, or would you say more strongly? No. No, there's no, there's not a time. Yeah. I think it's a very dangerous. Territory to step into. We talked about this back then. This is God speaking through Ezekiel, right? And even with Paul, this is the spirit inspiring the words that Paul is writing. When I'm preaching, the spirit's not inspiring my words. I'm not preaching God's word with my words. So I have to be careful that it's not my own flesh that's coming through or my own anger or my own. Commentary that's coming through as I'm saying these things if I were to ever go there and say anything like that, I would have to be very careful to not cross the line in, into a territory that's, that I would say I, I can't say for certain that God is behind what I'm saying right now. And I think when we're dealing with words like that and consulates get like that, I think it's really hard for us to be certain that we could say, man, God is pleased with me using this language, especially from the pulpit. That's helpful and clarifying. Thank you for that. The second one is on, it's the next page. It's my next page. I don't know if it's your next page, but it's mine. So in Ezekiel 16, he talks about the sin of Sodom, and it seems like he tells us what the sin of Sodom was. He says in verse 49, behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom. She and her daughters had pride, excess of food. And prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and the needy. They were haughty and did an abomination before me, so I removed them. So it seems and others have argued that what Ezekiel is doing here is identifying for us what the real sin of Sodom was. And it isn't what we think it is, as some would suggest it's actually this. There was social injustice and that was the real sin of Sodo. What say you about that? Yeah, I think that's selective reading. Number one if we want to argue this isn't, they're not condemning homosexuality here, which was the sin that most people are saying. That's what the judgment with Sodom was. We can go to the New Testament, we can go to other passages in the Old Testament and find that God did condemn that sin. And so because it's not specifically named here, doesn't mean that it's not named anywhere in the Bible. Second is. It goes on and says that they were haughty and did an abomination before me. We have to ask ourselves, what is the abomination? And we're gonna make a judgment. Those that don't wanna see that sin here, they're gonna say the abomination is social injustice. The scripture also calls those things that, that we know that Sodom was punished for abominations in other contexts. Yep. So I think we can easily see where, even though Ezekiel doesn't name the sin, I think the word abomination there. Envelops that sin in and of itself. All right. Clarifying. We've answered all the questions Perfect. That anyone could have for chapter 16. Ding. You're welcome. Yep. Let's move on Chapter 17. Then we get another parable as God is prone to do and had been prone to do here. And this is a parable of these two eagles and a vine. The eagle comes to Lebanon here, takes some of the choice bows back to its land. And and then the remaining branches spread out in this vine. And it's a little bit confusing as to what's going on here until we. Go to commentaries in a chapter like Ezekiel 17 is one that I would say, this is where we need commentary help. Because otherwise it's really difficult to understand here what's going on. But we see that these branches that are broken off and the, some of the other players here basically result in, these are the kings of Israel the remaining kings of Judah. Some of them are. Zeca is gonna be involved here. Babylon is gonna be involved here, and then it wraps up Chapter 17 does by looking forward to the Messiah because God himself now is gonna come and take a sprig from the lofty top of the cedar and set it out and break off from the top most of the young twigs, a tender one, and plant it on a high and lofty mountain. And this is talking about the Messiah. This is the future kingdom of God that he's going to establish here. But the initial here is this is the end. This is the downfall. This is what's happening in the near future for Ezekiel and his audience there of what God's depicting as the eagle being Babylon, coming in, taking captive one of the kings. And then you've got another king. You've got Zedekiah staying behind, rebelling, going to Egypt. There's a lot of that in the background of what's going on in chapter 17. Yet another reminder of God's care for Israel because he does promise, even though I'm going to judge you, I'm also gonna restore you. It's almost like God is saying, love's gonna keep this thing alive, and I can't tell you why. God is reminding them in these ways, but let's not take it easy. Let's take it to the limit. And let's make sure that God doesn't call us desperado. You know what I'm saying? Seems, it seems like maybe there's a song at work here you should write. I don't know, man. This seems catchy. I think I got several songs that These are good lyrics. They could be number one hits. Who knows? There you go. I might call my band The Twigs. The Twigs. Okay. Okay. Or the Vines. Okay. Or how about the Eagles? The Eagles. Oh, the Eagle. There you go. That's a bad one. That one's got something to it. Yeah. Yeah. Wait, let's let's pray and then we'll be done with this episode. Lord God, we are, as we talked about at the very beginning of this episode, so thankful for our church. Lord we depend on so many different people that if they were to not be there we couldn't do what we do. And so we're grateful for the selflessness of our people and their willingness to serve and to go above and beyond. We know that so much of their payoff is gonna come into eternity when they hear their. They're condemnation, not condemnation, commendation from you. When you say, well done, good and faithful servants, and they get to step into eternity in your presence. And Lord, we just want to be a church. That honors the people worthy of honor. And so when our people serve well, we wanna recognize that. So we thank you for the servants that make up our body and the joy it is to be able to, to labor with them. We thank you for your word and for the ability to read through it and to understand it as best we can. We pray that you'd increase our understanding all the more day by day. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. Keep your Bibles tuned in again tomorrow for another edition of the Daily Bible Podcast. Bye.

Well, thank you for listening to another episode of the Daily Bible Podcast, folks! We're honored to have you join us. This is a ministry of Compass Bible Church in north Texas. You can find out more information about our Church at compassntx.org. We would love for you to leave a review, to rate, or to share this podcast on whatever platform you're listening on, and we hope to see you again tomorrow for another episode of the Daily Bible Podcast. Ya'll come back now, ya hear?

Yeah. I would agree with everything that you said