Good morning,
I
wonder what Noah preached about as he kept building his crazy boat year
after year? He claimed that God had told him to build that ugly,
smelly monster because judgement was coming. Everyone then knew that
things couldn’t really be that bad. Jeremiah and Ezekiel were men
assigned to tell their people and their neighbors that God had had
enough of their rebellion and idol worship only to find themselves
surrounded by famous priests, prophets and kings who knew that all that
they were saying was garbage and lies. Much later, John the Baptist,
Jesus and the Apostle John found themselves facing the same challenges.
Instinctively, good people know that we can trust sincere, gifted
people to give us the directions we need to be able to live life here on
earth in peace, success and prosperity. Their text is the Bible, their
gift is their clear teaching, and the proof of their blessing from God
is their successful ministries.
In Ezekiel’s day he was
surrounded by Jewish prophets in Babylon who were repeating what they
had heard from their prophet friends back home that all this trouble and
pain would soon be over. God told Ezekiel to call these evil prophets
liars, not lovers. Their triumphant theme was ‘All is peaceful’ when
there was no peace at all. God told Ezekiel to call them whitewashers.
He said these false prophets were putting a pretty white coat on a
crumbling wall as proof of what God was going to do for them. Ezekiel
was instructed to tell these whitewashers that the wall they were
bragging about was about to fall down. The people wanted to believe
lies because what God was telling them through Ezekiel was that they
must repent or face the anger of God. What none of these rebellious
people were able to accept was that these leaders were liars and would
soon find themselves disgraced and hated by the people they claimed to
love. I wonder, are we who call ourselves Christian leaders real lovers
and leaders or do we have our hands covered with whitewash today and
later with the blood of our followers?
Ezekiel 13:10
“This will happen because these evil prophets deceive my people by
saying, ‘All is peaceful’ when there is no peace at all! It’s as if the
people have built a flimsy wall, and these prophets are trying to
reinforce it by covering it with whitewash! 11 Tell these whitewashers
that their wall will soon fall down. A heavy rainstorm will undermine
it; great hailstones and mighty winds will knock it down. 12 And when
the wall falls, the people will cry out, ‘What happened to your
whitewash?’
Roy Wisner
