Morning, brothers and sisters.
Good morning.
That’s great.
Father, I want to thank You this morning that we are found in Your love. Just as our brother exhorted us, when we come to the table, we come because You love us.
And, Lord, we touch and love as we can. So here we are before Thee, the most holy God, righteous in every way. And here we are, sinners standing in Your presence because of what Christ has done. And we worship Him this morning.
Now, Father, as we come to Your Word today, we ask that You would reveal Yourself to us. Lord, it’s not that we don’t want to see ourselves, so to speak, but even though we do, we want to see You. We want to see You expressed in Your Word.
And, Lord, only Your Holy Spirit can do that. So we come and ask, Lord, for that help from the Holy Spirit that reveals God, builds us up, and puts us on that right ground. So, Lord, we come to You this morning in the name of Jesus. Thanks, Lord. Amen.
It’s going to sound—I don’t want to—well, it’s just going to. You know, I’ve been considering, for about the past half year, something that goes back to our conference theme two conferences ago, from Nehemiah and Ezra.
I have been thinking, not about the time of Nehemiah and Israel, but about what brought about Nehemiah and Ezra. What I have really been considering is the exile of the Jews from Judah to Babylon, because that is what brought about the books of Ezra and Nehemiah; the prophecies of Zechariah, Haggai, and Malachi; and the book of Esther.
All these have to do with the Jews having been exiled. And I know this, to me, doesn’t sound very uplifting, to consider exile. But I will say this: in keeping with the theme from this morning, everything God does comes out of Who He is.
The essence of God, and Who He is, is love. And it is not the love of a man, because the love of man is miles short of the love of God. The way God loves, and the way God acts out of love, is beyond our ability to understand.
That is why we have to take it by faith: God loves me in all circumstances and in all ways. So even when Kenny goes to Romans 8 next time and asks, “What can separate us from the love of God?” the answer is that nothing can.
Even though we have the situation where the Jews are going into exile, that does not mean they have been cast out of love. It is very important to remember that, because I think we sometimes believe that when God is dealing with us, somehow He is not loving us anymore.
So, with that said, I have been considering the exile and wondering about it. There is not a lot written on the exile itself. I looked in some history books because the Scriptures do not say a great deal about what happened during the exile.
We have two books that occur during the exile: Daniel and Ezekiel. We might say Esther came during the exile, but that concerns those who remained when people were returning to Jerusalem. So, during the exile itself, we mainly have Daniel and Ezekiel.
What happened to the Jews? As I have been considering this, three questions have gone through my mind.
I am not going to cover all of this in one shot. This morning, I want to consider only why they were exiled. This has been hard to do because it is not happy. It just is not happy.
But it has to be dealt with. I think sometimes we just think everything is going to be okay, and we are all right. Yet sometimes we find out Who God is as we walk through life. And as we find out Who God is, He deals with us by showing Who He is.
That is why He shows us Who He is: because it deals with who we are. And it does not just deal with who we are. As Ed Miller says, everything is redemptive. Everything is redemptive.
That is another thing to keep in mind and in heart: everything is redemptive. What can separate us from the love of God? This, that, or the other thing? Well, it does not say that you escape those things.
I think that is what we sometimes believe—that we are with the Lord, and therefore we escape these things because we are His. But what does Isaiah 43 say? When you go through the fire, you will not be scorched or burned, but you will go through the fire. When you go through the flood, you will not be overwhelmed, but you will go through the flood.
When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee;
and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee:
when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned,
neither shall the flame kindle upon thee.—Isaiah 43:2
“I will be with you in it, because I have redeemed you.” That is the biggest thing we really need to understand as Christians: in times of judgment, when we find ourselves going through discipline, the Lord is dealing not merely with individual believers.
This is the whole nation of Judah. It is a whole nation. No one escaped. God is Who He is, and because He is Who He is, He has to deal with us as He shows us Who He is.
So, in considering the exile of God’s people, we also want to ask: is there a connection today? Is God doing something like this today in our very midst, in our very lives, in a very limited way?
This is not to point out something and say, “Well, this is what is happening.” It is to consider: “Lord, what are You doing? Am I watching? Am I looking to say, ‘Lord, what are You doing in this time?’”
Exile is a form of God’s judgment. In looking at this, I asked, “Why does God, or why would God, judge His people? He loves them.”
I want to talk a little about judgment. We often look at judgment as condemnation. God is condemning something. And a lot of times, what we do as good Christians is say, “Well, He’s condemning them.”
I am sure you all love the book of Amos. Probably some of you would say it is your favorite book. But Amos starts out in the first two chapters: “For three transgressions, yea, for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof.” Then he starts naming places—Damascus and Gaza, which is a Philistine city, and all these places.
You go, “Yeah, that’s right. Get them. Stick it to them.” And then he says, “For three transgressions, yea, for four, Judah.”
Well, wait a minute. You are not supposed to—we are Your people. You are not supposed to be doing this. But they do not escape because they are dealing with God.
We all stand before God. Now, we stand there in Christ, but there are also times when we find ourselves standing there, saying, “Lord, let us see. This is who I am.” We fall on our faces, and He convicts us of our sins. He is dealing with things of that nature.
But the whole idea is that He brings us before Himself as Who He is. I said that His essence is love, but that love is many-faceted. It is so very many-faceted.
In His love, there is judgment and there is wrath. It is not just, “Oh, I want to give you a hug.” Because He is a holy God, His love acts according to that holiness.
So judgment: we often look at it as condemnation, but really it is not that. When you look at a court, when a judge makes a judgment, he has heard all the evidence and renders a decision. He renders a judgment.
Do you know what he is doing? He is making right what was wrong. That is what the verdict is. When you go to a court of law, you are coming and saying, “Make it right. I have been wronged. Make it right.”
Someone in my family has been murdered—make it right. Someone has stolen from me—make it right. Someone is suing me unjustly—make it right.
So when we think of judgment, we should think of it not merely as punishment, but as the Lord making something right—making things right. Not necessarily circumstances, although He may make circumstances right, but making us right in who we are, especially in relationship to Who He is.
In a criminal case, the one who committed the crime, if found guilty, is turned over to the Department of Correction. Brothers and sisters, this is what judgment is. It is coming to the house of correction, to the Department of Correction.
The Lord is daily correcting what is out of joint, what is out of place, and what needs to be righted. If we look at it that way, I think it takes away the idea of condemnation, because we know that in Christ there is no condemnation.
But let’s look at Hebrews 12, beginning in the middle of verse 5—the quotation from Proverbs 3:11-12, I believe.
My son, regard not lightly the chastening of the Lord,
Nor faint when thou art reproved of Him;
For whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth,
And scourgeth every son whom He receiveth.—Hebrews 12:5-6
This is key: “For whom the Lord loves He chastens, and scourges every son whom He receives.” If you endure chastening—and a better translation might be, “It is for discipline that you endure”—it is for His discipline that you endure.
In other words, He brings you to endure it. It is for discipline that you endure. God deals with you as sons. For what son is there whom a father does not chasten?
But if you are without chastening, of which all have become partakers, then you are—now mine is New King James, and I think even newer translations say—“illegitimate, and not sons.” That is not a good translation.
Today, when we think of somebody as illegitimate, we think of someone being born out of wedlock. But the actual word here is “bastards.”
There are two words my dad used that put fear in our hearts. Number one was when he said, “I’m going to chastise you.” Oh, that struck fear. Then we knew we had crossed the line. This was bad.
The other was when you knew my dad was really mad: he called us bastards. Because a bastard is someone a father does not own. He says, “You’re not mine.”
But He chastens every son He loves. A bastard is unloved by his father. His father will not even give him his name. His father will not provide for him. He will be put off in the distance, and the father will not even go by the mother’s house because he does not want to see the child. He does not want to provide anything for him.
I should have saved that for the end, but it says, “You are bastards and not sons.” Now I have to stop at that point, because in exile, the Lord was sending His people to the Department of Correction.
I think that is a good way to look at it. This does not lessen the reason He sent them away. Just because He is correcting them—because He is disciplining them—does not mean what they did was not that bad.
It does not lessen the reason why He sent them away, but it explains why He did. He did not send them away to punish them. He sent them away to make them right.
That is a big thing. A few years ago, I gave some messages on John the Baptist, and I wondered whether, before the Lord comes—since He sent John the Baptist the first time—He might send a generation like John the Baptist before He comes again.
I wonder, in looking at the exile, because out of the exile came the real expectation of Messiah. There was a real looking for Messiah because the kings were gone. So there began to be a looking for Messiah.
I have spoken with some brothers who say, “I think before the end comes, there is going to be a great outpouring of the Spirit and a revival.” But as far as revival goes, before exile there were two great revivals: one during the time of Hezekiah and one during the time of Josiah.
Yet when those kings died, the revival died, because the revival was only skin deep.
I wonder if that pouring out of the Spirit will not just be a reviving, but first a purging—a cleansing of His house, a coming in and making it right before He returns.
I do not think there is any way the Lord says, “I can’t wait to surprise them and come back when they are not looking for Me.” We misunderstand Who He is.
He wants everybody to know He is coming. He wants His whole family ready. That is why you have those parables in Matthew 24 and 25 about being ready. He wants everybody to be ready.
But I wonder whether, within the last days, the first movement of the Spirit may be one of the Lord purging His house and cleansing His house, just as when Jesus came the first time in John 2 and cleansed His temple.
They had made it a house of merchandise. They had made it something it was not supposed to be. Then, at the end, before He died, He cleansed it again. How interesting that the first cleansing had to be redone. Maybe that shows how forgetful we are.
I wonder whether the Lord is beginning a judgment—not the judgment of the nations, but the discipline of His house, of His own people.
When we had our first COVID situation, where everything went wonky, I wonder whether that was part of the Lord saying, “I’m dealing with you. I’m dealing with you.”
We want to say, “Well, Lord, deal with our country.” The Lord says, “Leave your country to Me, but I’m dealing with you.” I think one of the big things in the last days is that we need to be sensitive to the Lord dealing with His house.
When I say “house,” I do not just mean this assembly. I am feeling more and more that it is this house here in the United States.
When Kenny put up that thing about the brothers and sisters in Afghanistan—or Pakistan; it is one of those “stans,” right?—you look at them and say, “They are not being judged, but they are being proved.”
They are being proved. They are being strengthened. They are finding out Who the Lord is. But I wonder whether, for us here in the United States, we are being disciplined. There is a big difference between the two.
Peter talks in 1 Peter about going through various trials for a little while, so that your faith may be strengthened and proved like gold. But for us who have so much—I do not know. I am sorry. I do not want to rag on things.
Getting back: when He judged His people in the 600s and 500s BC, it was His people as a whole. Even those who were not in the condition that most of them were went through this judgment.
Think about that. They were not exempt from the Lord dealing with His whole house. Daniel went into exile. Ezekiel went into exile. Mordecai’s family went into exile. They all went into exile. They were part of the house; they were part of the body.
The Lord deals with the body. He deals with it as a whole. We can look at what happened to those who were upright, and there is something wonderful there. But in dealing with judgment and discipline, He disciplines the whole house.
I hated it when we would be bickering. We had six kids in our family, so you know what it is like with six kids, right? Especially Maureen V.
When we would be driving my dad nuts, we might be watching TV and bickering, bickering, bickering, and my dad would say, “That’s it. Turn it off.”
“I wasn’t doing nothing.” And that was true—but other people were. It was just too much for my dad. “Go to bed.” The whole family. All the kids.
There was a British comedy scene where death came into a dinner party, and everybody at the dinner party died. One of them said, “Oh, well, that’s a bummer to have at the time, but can you tell me what killed me?”
Death pointed at the meatloaf. The guy looked at it and said, “I didn’t eat any. But I didn’t eat any.” Oops.
The whole dinner party, the whole family, the whole nation, the whole people—God dealt with them in that way. They are not separate from the body, and the whole body is taken care of.
Now the question is: why the judgment? Why the correction? I have three things that stood out in looking at this.
First of all, what is the immediate answer from what you know? Why did they go into exile? Unfaithfulness. Idolatry. Right?
Look in 2 Kings 23:25. It talks about their idolatry and their being put away for idolatry. But when you think of this idolatry, it is not just that they worshiped idols.
They had left their God for the idol. This idolatry was not simply, “Oh, we are going out and doing something physically.” This idolatry had infected their nature.
They were infected with idolatry, just as we are infected with self. We say, “Well, we are not idolaters.” Sure, we are not idolaters—we worship ourselves.
They were infected with it. I was trying to look up yesterday who said that even when Israel came out of Egypt, they brought their star god and other idols with them.
In other words, when those seventy people with Jacob went down into Egypt, they picked up Egyptian idolatry, and it became part of their life.
It was there. It surrounded them in Canaan. It was always there. And that idolatry was not merely an outward form; it invaded the inner sanctuary of their hearts. In Israel and Judah, it invaded the very temple.
You can read about King Manasseh, who brought in all these idols and put them in the temple. He brought in an altar and brought it into the temple of God.
In Ezekiel 8, the angel comes to Ezekiel and says, “Look, I want to take you.” Now, let me put this in perspective. When the Lord brought the people into exile, He did not do it all at once. That is why I said there needs to be watching.
He first came around 606 BC and took perhaps ten thousand people out of Jerusalem. He took the gold and silver from the temple. Daniel was among that group.
Then the next time he came was about ten years later, around 597 BC. He dealt with King Jehoiachin, took him away, and took a group of others, including artisans. Ezekiel went then.
Then, between 597 BC and the destruction of the temple, there were about another ten years. During that time, after Ezekiel was carried away and before the destruction of the temple, the Lord showed Ezekiel how deep-seated the idolatry of Judah was.
He said, “Come with Me. Let’s go to the temple.” Then He said, in effect, “No, no, no—we are not just talking about what you can see. Dig through the wall here.” He showed him priests worshiping all kinds of things in secret.
It was not just that they could hide the outward stuff. The Lord sees the inner stuff. It was so deep-seated. Even the revivals under Josiah and Hezekiah only touched the surface; they did not touch the depth.
They could destroy all the outward things, but they could keep the other things. Do you know what it means to be an idolater, to be lost in idolatry as a church? It means we have lost our center.
We have lost the center of who we are. Here, that is what the Lord was saying: “I brought you up out of Egypt to be Mine. I was the One Who redeemed you, to be My witness on the earth. And you have lost your center. You have lost sight of that.”
That brings me to the second thing. In Exodus 4:22, the Lord is talking to Moses before he goes to Egypt. He says, “I want you to go to Pharaoh and say to Pharaoh, ‘Israel is My son.’”
Thus saith the Lord, Israel is My son, My first-born:
and I have said unto thee, Let My son go, that he may serve Me.—Exodus 4:22-23
Hosea, hundreds of years later, used this as he was speaking of the northern kingdom going into captivity under the Assyrians. He was trying to reach out to the people, saying, “You are My son. Out of Egypt I called My son.”
That is important because sonship signifies something. First, a son has an intimate relationship with his father. Israel had, or should have had, an intimate relationship with their God. That was the Lord’s intention for His people.
No other nation in the history of the world has been called God’s son—not even the United States. Think about that.
He does not treat the United States as a son. He treats His church as His son. There is a big difference, brothers.
Secondly, a son carries his father’s name into the world in which he lives. In carrying that name, he carries it to bring honor to his father. That is why he carries his name into the workplace.
People say, “Oh, you are Tony’s son.” My dad’s name was Tony. “You are Tony’s son?” “Yeah.” Of course, I think they looked at that with disdain when they looked at me.
But he carries out his father’s will and carries his father’s name everywhere he goes. When people see him, they know he is his son: “Oh, that’s his son. I understand why he is like that now. That is Tony’s son.”
Third, he was to project that name to future generations. He was to have progeny. As Christians, we would look at that and say, “We are going to share the gospel—procreate spiritually.”
But they were not good sons. The Lord was taking them to make them right. They were not good sons.
In Ezekiel 36, beginning in verse 20, after the temple had been destroyed and as the Lord was preparing to speak about the new covenant, He said:
And when they came unto the nations, whither they went, they profaned My holy name;
in that men said of them, These are the people of the Lord,
and are gone forth out of His land.But I had regard for My holy name,
which the house of Israel had profaned among the nations, whither they went.Therefore say unto the house of Israel, Thus saith the Lord God:
I do not this for your sake, O house of Israel,
but for My holy name, which ye have profaned among the nations, whither ye went.And I will sanctify My great name, which hath been profaned among the nations,
which ye have profaned in the midst of them;
and the nations shall know that I am the Lord, saith the Lord God,
when I shall be sanctified in you before their eyes.—Ezekiel 36:20-23
That is a heavy thing. The Lord’s Prayer begins, “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name.” Let Your name be held in respect. Let Your name be held in reverence.
Here He is saying, “My people have not held My name in reverence.” In a way, that is the breaking of the commandment that says, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.”
I know this is a downer, isn’t it? But Isaiah speaks of causing God’s name to be blasphemed. What does blaspheme mean? You have caused My name to be injured, despised, treated with contempt, and spoken evil of.
I wonder: how do the nations—those without God, who do not see God and do not care for God—see His people?
During the election, one big thing people talked about was, “You have to have the vote of the Christian nationalists.” I wonder if that is taking His name in vain.
Christian nationalists. What are you doing with that kind of name? You are sharing His name with a faction. God is greater than that.
In the news, He is derided: “Christian nationalists—they are all bigots.” Where is the nature of God in what they see? This is hard stuff.
God is saying, “I am coming back. I want a prepared bride.” So His name is spoken evil of, and He says, “I have to make this right.”
Notice the end of that verse: “I will show them that My name is sanctified in My people before their eyes.” That is where it is.
We are trying to get people to look at God, and they say, “Why should I look at Him reverentially when you do not?” You know, that is your testimony to me.
Third, they did not have faith in God Himself. Now, they had faith—but faith in the wrong things.
For example: “God will not destroy us. He will not discipline us. We have the temple.” That is Jeremiah 7: “The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.” He is not going to destroy it. We have this. We have faith in that.
But the temple is not God. It is the One Who dwells in the temple Whom you need to have faith in.
They were trusting in other nations. “We know Nebuchadnezzar is coming. We will go to Egypt. Egypt will help us out. We have faith in Egypt. They have a great king; he will help us.”
But they were warned not to lean on Egypt. Egypt was like a broken staff: it would pierce their hand.
Then they put their faith in other gods. “God is the God of all gods, but in order for us to have a good crop, we have to worship this god. After all, our God is so big, doing all these other things.” It was like there was a god bureaucracy, and they had to go to the bureaucracy to get this god to do what they wanted.
Another thing was that it was presumptive faith. They presumed that because they were God’s people, He would not touch them. “We are God’s people, after all.”
I hated this bumper sticker. You might remember it. It came out, I think, in the 1990s: “Christians aren’t perfect; they’re just forgiven.”
What message does that send? It says, “Hey, I can live like I want because I’m forgiven.” The Lord has to say, “That is not true of Me. I do not let you live that way.”
That is Jeremiah 7, where He says, “You have made My house a den of robbers.” They were saying, “You delivered us so that we could do all these things—so that we could worship idols, commit adultery, steal, and murder? Is that why I delivered you?”
No. So He had to take them to task. He had to bring them to the Department of Correction.
Let us look at the Department of Correction. Who is the picture of the Department of Correction? Babylon.
If you read Habakkuk, there were several prophets around the time of exile and just before it: Jeremiah; Habakkuk, who was at the time of Josiah and beyond; Zephaniah; and Ezekiel.
Josiah was the last good king. After that they had twenty-three years of bad kings. Toward the end of Josiah, you have Habakkuk and Zephaniah. We had an opening from Zephaniah, I think Jack brought it, about how God rejoices over His people.
That comes after He deals with them. If you read the other chapters of Zephaniah, He is dealing with His people. Then you have Ezekiel in Babylon. So you have these four.
Habakkuk had a complaint. His prophecy starts with a complaint: “I see that You are not dealing with Your people.” Then the Lord says, “If I told you what I am going to do, you would not believe it.”
Then He talks about bringing Babylon, the Chaldeans, down. That blows Habakkuk’s mind because Habakkuk says, “They are so evil.”
The Department of Correction is not carried out by people who are more righteous than God’s people. Think about that. He uses evil people to discipline.
“He scourges every son.” That is it.
You might say, “Well, that does not apply to us because we are not going into exile. We are not illegal aliens. We are not going to Florida.”
But what is exile? Think about this. Exile means you are uprooted from what is familiar and brought into the unfamiliar.
That is what God did with His people. He uprooted them from the familiar. He took away all the trappings they were familiar with. He took away the temple.
What did priests do without a temple? What happened to the ark of the testimony? All these things were taken away, and they were brought into a place that was still vital.
This was the way the Lord dealt with His people. Again, this is not punishment. It is correction. We need to get our minds through that: the Lord corrects whom He loves.
There is one thing, and I need to wrap this up. Habakkuk ends his prophecy with a prayer:
O Lord, revive Thy work in the midst of the years,
In the midst of the years make it known;
In wrath remember mercy.—Habakkuk 3:2
Sometimes we think mercy means, “It gets me out. It lets this pass over me. It gets me out of the jam.” But I think it means, “What does not kill you is good for you.” You know what I mean?
Habakkuk, you are going to go through it. You are just going to go through it. This is the whole key.
When you look at these prophets who were prophesying during this time, this is what mercy in judgment looks like. Jeremiah corrected something because there were false prophets in Jerusalem, and Ezekiel spoke about false prophets in Babylon.
They were saying, “Okay, the Lord is mad at us. He brought us here, but it is going to be short. It will just be a couple of years. We will be back.” One said, “In two years the yoke will be broken.”
Jeremiah said, “Amen, let that happen.” But then the Lord spoke to Jeremiah, and Jeremiah wrote a letter to those in captivity. He said, “You know something? It is going to be longer than you think.”
It is going to be seventy years, because what is in you is so deep that I have to do a deep cleaning. I am not just doing a vacuum job here; I am doing the shampoo.
He said, “Look, I know you think this is really hard, but I know the thoughts I have toward you.” We use that as comfort in the sense that good convenience is coming, but Jeremiah 29, beginning around verse 10, says that He knows the thoughts He has toward them—for their future, that they may have a future.
That future is that you be My son. “I want to get you back to the place where you are supposed to be.”
My brothers and sisters, you might as well build houses. You might as well pray for the cities where you are, because you are going to be there for a while. But He says, “I know what I am planning. It is good.” Mercy in judgment.
Habakkuk’s message was really, after talking about all these things, “What do we do during exile?” Habakkuk 2:4 says:
Behold, his soul is puffed up, it is not upright in him;
But the righteous shall live by his faith.—Habakkuk 2:4
We talk about this: you have to have faith in what Jeremiah said, do you not? “I have planned good for you.” When I see all these things going on around me, can I hang on to this word that the Lord is speaking to me? “I know what I plan for you. I know the good I plan for you in this.”
Jeremiah says, for all intents and purposes, you need to submit to what the Lord is doing. Because if you do not, it makes it worse.
I will give you an example. My mom was a nurse, and we got all our shots from my mom. I am not just talking about when we were sick. I remember that every two years we got tetanus shots.
This was in the time when you had to sterilize the needles. You would be in the house and see a pot boiling. You would think, “Oh, Mom’s cooking something.” Then you would take a look and see the needles.
Oh, man. You talk about freaking out. “Oh, what’s going to happen? Who is sick?” “Nobody is sick.” “Oh my God, what?” “Tetanus.”
I remember one time—it was on a Saturday—I saw those needles and just ran down the street. My dad ran after me, caught me, and brought me back.
Then he had to hold me on the floor while my mom gave me my shot. My mom said, “You need to stop struggling, because when you are struggling, you tense up.”
What does that do for a needle going in? It makes it hurt. The whole thing is, if you just submit, you do not have the problems you have by not submitting.
All throughout Ezekiel, it speaks of people being stiff-necked. In chapter 10, they are already in captivity, and they are still stiff-necked. The Lord is saying, “Just submit to what I am doing. Just submit to it.”
“I will bring you through because I have a good plan for you. But I cannot bring you through with you struggling against it.” Paul kicked against the goads, did he not?
Zephaniah 2, in the first three verses, speaks of two things. First, it says, “Seek meekness.” Meekness is the idea of submitting to what the Lord does. The Lord says, “This is what I am doing,” and you submit to it. You are meek.
The other thing it says is, “Seek righteousness.” Seek what is right and do what is right.
Micah 6 spoke to the people of Jerusalem back in the 700s: “You know what God wants. He has already told you.”
He hath showed thee, O man, what is good;
and what doth the Lord require of thee,
but to do justly, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with thy God?—Micah 6:8
Seeking righteousness is seeking to do right. If the Lord shows you what is right, do it. They were murdering, using false scales, and doing all those things. He said, “No, you need to stop. You need to do right.”
It is not just a religious thing: “We will get you ready, get you fine spiritually, make sure you have the right doctrines.” No, it is the whole life. Seek righteousness.
And part of this is, “I will hide you.” That does not mean He will hide you from going through something. But in going through something, you are hidden and protected from all that idolatry out there which could affect you and draw you away.
“I will hide you from that.” Daniel and his three friends were hidden from that, were they not? Because they purposed to do right by God.
Ezekiel 18 says: do not think that if you are righteous, you can go off at the end of your life and just slip, and the Lord will say, “I’ll let it slide.” No, He says, “I’ll judge you.”
And do not think that if you are living in sin and unrighteousness, God will simply leave you to that. He says, “If you turn, you will live.”
That is the whole idea. In going through something like this, it is turning to God. It is turning to God in this—not turning to something else, not turning to Egypt, not turning to religious things such as the temple and the ark, saying, “We have this and that and the other thing.”
It is turning to God Himself. “You are My son. Turn to Me.” I think Hosea says at the end that Israel will not turn anymore to another.
So, in closing, let me say this: all this tells us that when God comes and deals with His church, it tells us that we are not bastards.
This is the love of God. This is the love of God. It is not tough love. We want to label it something. It is love. It is flat-out the love of God—no mixtures to it, no need to explain, “Well, this is what He really means.” No, it is His love.
His love includes it all. He judges in love; He saves in love. He does it all. It is all His love. And we cannot get away from a love that will not let me go.
Also, it lets us know that if we submit to correction, there is fruit that comes out of it. There is good that comes out of it. But you have to submit to it, and there is a waiting.
That is what we hate to do, do we not? “Oh, Lord, can’t we just microwave this? Can’t You just microwave it? How about Minute Rice?” I love Minute Rice, incidentally.
You cannot separate God’s love from His holiness. His holiness demands correction, but His love carries it out.
His holiness demands that He cannot let His people go on as they are, because they do not represent His seed. They do not represent that divine life which is implanted in us.
But His love carries it out—a love that will not let me go.
O Love that wilt not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in Thee;
I give Thee back the life I owe,
That in Thine ocean depths its flow
May richer, fuller be.
I am sorry, in one way, because I feel I have been too hard.
Heavenly Father, we look to You with thanksgiving because You love us. Lord, we would rest in Your love.
We do not know what lies ahead, but we can be assured of this: You love us, and You will love us through.
You will cleanse us and purify us for Yourself. Lord, I can say for myself, I am afraid of that.
So I just have to trust You, because You know the plans You have, and they are for good and not for evil.
Lord, we commit Your church and ourselves to You—the church here in the United States. Lord, have mercy on us.
When judgment comes—and it has already started—Lord, we need to find mercy and submit to whatever You are doing.
Because, Lord, we want to be those who love You. We want to be Your sons. We want to be those sons in glory who carry our Father’s name to all places in this land.
Thank You for Your grace to us, in Jesus’ name. Amen.