Ezekiel - Lesson 7

Lesson number seven, Fumigating the Mountains of Israel, Ezekiel 6, 1 to 14. Companies that we hire to eradicate noxious pests often resort to a process called fumigation, disinfecting or purifying an area with lethal chemical fumes. Farmers will do this periodically with their barns to ensure that unwanted insects and rodents are not eating away at their structures or posing a threat to the health of the animals they are trying to raise. And so we often hear of this as the only sure treatment for the lovely little creatures we call bed bugs. Typically the process involves sealing off the infested environment, releasing the deadly fumigating gases into the space to be purified, and finally ventilating the space so it is safe for humans or livestock to enter depending on the area to be fumigated. Well this is the subject of Ezekiel 6, the total cleansing of the land of Israel of its defiling creatures.The subject is surprisingly common in the book of Ezekiel. We will return to it in chapter 36, 1 to 15, where Yahweh responds to outside nations who are trying to take over the land of Israel after it has been fumigated. And in 36, 16 to 19, where Yahweh summarizes the earlier need for fumigation and the process used to accomplish it. The following message of Yahweh came to me, human, concerning the house of Israel. At the time they were occupying the land, they defiled it with their conduct and their unrestrained behavior. In my view, their conduct was like the impurity of menstruation. So I poured out my fury upon them on account of the blood they had poured out on the land and for the pellets of dung with which they had defiled it. I scattered them among the nations and they were dispersed among the countries. I punished them in accordance with their conduct and their unrestrained behavior. In these texts, Yahweh was looking back on a past event. The land had already been fumigated. Just as pest control companies do. In Ezekiel 6, Yahweh served notice that he was coming to fumigate the land of Israel. I suppose we should recognize the Lord's grace in the fact that he gives the people advance warning. He was not obligated to do so. Actually, as we will see in a moment, he had given the warning long ago. And they will know that I am Yahweh. I have not threatened in vain to inflict this evil upon them. Verse 10 of chapter 6. This statement alludes to the curses embedded in the Israelite covenant. When Yahweh had established his covenant with Israel at Mount Sinai, the final documents recording those events had included a formal list of the consequences of infidelity to him and the covenant that we heard in the last session. But when that covenant was renewed with a new generation on the plains of Moab, those curses were reiterated and reinforced in even greater detail as Moses' means of stimulating joyful obedience to the Lord as the thank you for his grace. And this is Deuteronomy 28, 15-68. In the New Testament, Paul understood the need for such warnings in God's response to infidelity perfectly. When you say they are wicked and should be punished, you are condemning yourself or you who judge others do those very things. And we know that God in his justice will punish anyone who does such things. Since you judge others for doing these things, why do you think you can avoid God's judgment? And when you do the same things, don't you see how wonderfully kind, tolerant, and patient God is with you? Does this mean nothing to you? Can't you see that his kindness is intended to turn you from your sin? But because you are stubborn and refuse to turn from your sin, you are storing up terrible punishment for yourself, for a day of anger is coming when God's righteous judgment will be revealed. Romans 2, 1-5 NLT. In Ezekiel 6, we see the Judean chickens coming home to roost. This 500-year-old proverb speaks of curses being like chickens. They always come home, meaning that at some point our offensive words or actions will boomerang back and hit us in keeping with the way we have treated and invoked evil on others. In ancient Israel, a house was rendered ceremonially unclean by the presence of a ritually impure person. In Ezekiel 36, 17, our prophet illustrates the notion with reference to a woman who is momentarily unclean because of childbirth or menstruation. But of course, this kind of uncleanness is not a moral issue. It means there's no guilt involved, whether it involves male or female emissions, there is no guilt involved. These are natural bodily functions. But Ezekiel's illustration works for a society that is preoccupied with external purity but pays no heed to the fundamental moral and spiritual rot that is degrading the body from the inside out. Hear the words of Jesus, Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth passes into the stomach and is expelled? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart. And this is what defiles a person. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, immorality, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defiles a person. But to eat with unwashed hands, that doesn't defile anyone. This was Yahweh's and Ezekiel's concern in chapter 6. I propose to look at this text diagnostically, asking how the prophet was to announce Yahweh's assessment of Israel's pathology and the solution to be applied. However, before we begin, I shall draw quick attention to the structure of this relatively short oracle by Ezekiel's standards. That is, the boundaries of this message from God are established by the word-event formula, chapter 6, verse 1, the following message of Yahweh came to me, and then is repeated in 7.1 to introduce a new oracle. But following that command to prophesy in 6.2, the oracle proper divides into two parts, consisting of a longer main panel, 1 to 10, followed by a shorter after-wave, 11 to 14. Ezekiel signaled the transition in verses 10 to 11 with a concluding recognition formula, then they will know that I am Yahweh, and a new citation formula, thus has Adonai Yahweh declared. That's the transition. Like the first part, the after-wave concludes with a recognition formula, then they will know that I am Yahweh. But the two parts both subdivide into two segments, 3 to 7, 11 to 13, and after-waves 8 to 10, and 13 to 14, respectively. The dominance of the recognition formula, then you or they will know that I am Yahweh, four times, 7, 10, 13, 14, leaves no doubt about the genre of the prophecy. This is what we call a proof oracle. Its intention was not simply to announce judgment on the mountains of Israel, but to declare the revelatory goal of the divine action, that the mountains, that's the you, and its population, they may recognize the person and presence of Yahweh in the event. That's Yahweh's evidence of presence. But let's return now to our diagnostic, analytical approach to this prophecy. I'll do so by asking four questions. Who is the addressee? That is, who, what needs to be fumigated? Two, what is the pest that needs to be eradicated by fumigation? Three, what is the process of fumigation? And then four, what is the goal of the fumigation? First, then, the target of fumigation. This text is remarkable in many ways, not the least of which is the role that inanimate objects play in the drama. We get the first signal in the Lord's command to the prophet in verse 2, human, son of man, direct your face toward the mountains of Israel, prophesy against them. Against whom? The mountains. And say, after this, the prophet himself was to make clear to whom he was speaking when he sought the attention of the rhetorical audience, all mountains of Israel, hear the proclamation of the Lord Yahweh. Really? Do mountains have ears? But he wasn't satisfied yet. In verse 3, he added a third prophetic formula, reminding the entire landscape that he was not giving his own private thoughts. But thus has Adonai Yahweh declared to the mountains and the hills and the ravines and the valleys. Now, we know that by identifying the Adressee as the mountains of Israel, Yahweh did not mean to limit this rhetorical audience to places like Mount Zion or Mount Gerizim and Ebel or Mount Gibeah or Carmel. The quartet of geographic designations, mountains, hills, ravines and valleys, emphasized that he was speaking to the entire countryside, the land of Israel, and that the mountains functioned as synecdoche for the whole or vice versa, like we do when we use a brand name. Have you got a Kleenex I'd like to use? Well, Kleenex is a brand name for tissue, irrespective of a company that produced it. So, that's what's here. Ezekiel maintained this focus throughout with the pronoun he used. When Ezekiel spoke of your high places, your altars, your incense altars, your slain, your bones, your dwellings, your idols, and you will know that I am Yahweh. Who is the you? The feminine forms of the pronoun keep the focus on the land of Israel. In Hebrew, geographic entities are typically characterized grammatically and morphologically, the form of the word, as feminine, while populations as a collective are typically cast as masculine. Ezekiel's present pattern is because he expected addresses that had no ears to hear the word of the Lord, nor minds to know that he was Yahweh. Indeed, throughout, he treats the house of Israel as the other party. Israel is the third party, in third person, as in verses 11 to 14. Say, ah, on account of all the evil abominations of those people, the house of Israel, for they will fall by the sword, by famine, and by plague. The person who is far away will die by the plague, and the person who is nearby will fall by the sword, and the person who remains under siege will die by famine, as I vent all my wrath on them. Then you will know that I am Yahweh when their victims appear in the midst of their idols, round about their altars on every high hill, on every mountaintop, under every green tree, and beneath every luxuriant oak, the cult sites where they had presented fragrant savors to all their idols. I will stretch out my hand against them and turn the land into an utter desolation from the desert as far as Riblah, in all of the residential areas, and they, the population, will know that I am Yahweh. But how did this work? As Moses had declared so eloquently in his farewell address to his people in Deuteronomy, Yahweh's covenant with Israel actually established a triangular relationship involving not only Yahweh as head of this triangle at the peak, but the people of Israel, the descendants of Abraham, and the land that Yahweh had promised to the Israelites as a covenant partner. Through the special ceremony envisioned in Deuteronomy 27 and fulfilled in Joshua 8, 30 to 35, the land of Israel was formally incorporated as a sentient and vital, that means living, member of this covenant relationship. This explains why when the relationship between Yahweh and his people was healthy, the land itself responded by yielding food for the people and their livestock and offering a secure home for them. In Ezekiel 6, Yahweh addressed the third, the right angle of the triangle, and in so doing, he also had in mind the second pillar of Israel's currently false base of security and well-being. To Abraham and later his descendants, Yahweh granted eternal title to the promised land. The people in Israel's real audience, the exiles, and in his hypothetical audience, the people back home, they deemed this triangular relationship to be eternal, inviolable, irrevocable. The point of the present prophecy then was twofold, to demolish that false base of security and to remind the people that within the covenant itself, Yahweh had specified that while the promise of land would never be retracted, the land's performance within that relationship was contingent on the people's fidelity to Yahweh. Indeed, the covenant blessings and curses had reminded the people that any given generation that turned its back on Yahweh had forfeited the right to the land's blessing, hence occupancy in the land and enjoyment of the land's fruit. But in this passage, the land of Israel is itself the addressee that needs fumigation so that we can have a clean land again and start over. That's the target, the need for fumigation. But why did the land need to be fumigated? Ezekiel's present oracle is clear that the land was not actually the problem. It had done nothing wrong within the covenant relationship. Just as houses do not defile themselves but are defiled by those who live in them, so the land had been defiled by its inhabitants. The problem is reflected in verses 1 to 7 and then in verse 13 by the catalog of troubling symbols. There are high places, there are altars, there are chapels, there are idols, and other fabrications on every high hill and on the mountain tops, under every green tree and every leafy oak. The last part of this description alludes intentionally to Moses' Torah text in Deuteronomy 12, 1 to 5. These are the ordinances and stipulations you must keep by putting them into practice in the land that Yahweh, the God of your ancestors, has given you to possess, as long as you live in the land. You must demolish completely all the places where the nations whom you are dispossessing have served their gods, on the high mountains and on the hills and under every flourishing tree. You must tear down their altars and smash their sacred pillars. The Asherah poles you must burn up with fire, and the carved images of their gods you must chop up. You must obliterate their names from that place. You must not treat Yahweh, your God, like that. That was the prescription. However, instead of dealing with the symbols of the Canaanites' pagan practices as Yahweh had commanded, the Israelites had simply taken over their cult installations and either continued to worship these pagan gods or adapted pagan rituals to the worship of Yahweh on every formerly pagan site. But Yahweh offered his own interpretation of this behavior by the designation he uses for idols, gilulim. We've heard this word once before already. This word occurs about 50 times in the first testament, 40 of which are in Ezekiel, and six times in this chapter alone. It's kind of the theme verse, verse 4, 5, 6, 9, 13a and 13b. But Ezekiel didn't invent this word or its metaphorical sense. Yahweh had used it in the covenant curses of Leviticus 2630. He had said, I will destroy your high places and cut down your incense altars and cast your dead bodies upon the dead bodies of your gilulim, and my soul will abhor you. Indeed, in Ezekiel 6, 4 to 5, we hear clear echoes of that curse. Your altars will be leveled, your chapels smashed. I will hew your victims down before your gilulim. I will lay corpses of the descendants of Israel before their gilulim. I will strew their your bones round about their altars. But what are these gilulim? In Deuteronomy 29, 17, Moses had talked about their disgusting things, shikutzim, a different word, and their gilulim of wood, stone, silver, and gold that were among them. Of all the words available, why was this Ezekiel's, actually Yahweh's, favorite designations for idols in the book and in this chapter? And of course, the word is based on a root, G-L-L, galal, meaning to roll, which suggests the noun represents a round thing that rolls. Now, in Ezekiel's time, it referred to sheep or goat or ibex, feces, droppings, excrement, which are typically shaped like peanuts or marbles. This suggests that for equivalent effect in English when we translate it, we should probably translate it something like dung pellets or manure pellets, if not a four-letter word that starts with S and ends with T. This is what idols are to God. Worshiping idols is like bowing down before and offering sacrifices to a pile of manure. But notice the shocking reference to the places where they offered soothing aromas, that's a nice smell, a nice aroma, to all their piles of manure. No wonder the place needs to be fumigated. Manure smells. Trust me, I grew up on a farm where we raised sheep and cattle and hogs. To God, idols are feces, and to worship idols is a horrifically smelly business. The soothing aroma that pure sacrifices to him represent had been replaced by an entire system of worship that needed to be flushed. You can hear and feel God's disposition in verse 9. There among the nations to which you've been taken your escapees will remember me, how brokenhearted I have been over their promiscuous heart that has turned away from me and over their eyes that hoard after dung pellets. Jeremiah talks about exchanging living water for water out of broken cisterns. This is far worse than that. They will loathe themselves because of the evil actions they have committed. That's for all their evil, abhorrent, abominable practices. In verse 11, the Lord characterized the actions of the Israelites as all the evil abominations, abhorrent practices of the house of Israel. Could he have been more comprehensive than that? That's the smell we've got to get out of this place. Well, the process of fumigation. The identity of the fumigator, and here I use capital F because it is the divine fumigator in this oracle, is clear from the very beginning. Notice all the first person pronouns in verses 3 to 5 and 14. Look, yes, I, I, I am wielding the sword against you. I am about to demolish your high places. Your altars will be leveled, your chapels smashed. I will hew your victims down before your dung pellets. I will lay the corpses of the descendants of Israel before their dung pellets. I will strew your bones round about with your altars. I will stretch out my hand against them, and I will turn the land into an utter desolation. The fumigator is coming. From as far as the desert, as far from the desert, as far as Riblah, in all the residential areas, it will happen. Now, although Yahweh is the Orcan God, as he had done in chapter 5, here he identified the means through which to accomplish his fumigating judgment, sword, famine, plague. And what will be the effect? Essentially, the mountains, the hills, the ravines, and the valleys will be purified of everything that defiles. The whole landscape will be laid waste, verse 14. With respect to the defiling objects, altars, chapels, high places, they would all be destroyed, demolished, ruined, smashed, made desolate, cut down, and blotted out. Well, how about those who worship these smelly pellets of dung and piles of dung and their perfumed offerings? Yahweh declared, I will hew your victims down before your dung pellets. I will lay the corpses of the descendants of Israel in front of their dung pellets. I will strew your bones around about your altars. In God's mind, people become what they worship, and these idols would not be able to protect their worshipers from God's fury. The scene of bones and corpses piled up around piles of dung pellets is macabre. But in verse 12, Yahweh returned to a more familiar refrain from 512. The person who is far away will die by the plague. The person who is nearby will fall by the sword. The person who remains under siege will die by famine, as I vent all my wrath on them. He had not forgotten Ezekiel's sign action involving his shaving his head. Well, the outcome of the fumigation. Ah, but halfway through this prediction of horror, we hear of good news delivered to the land, the addressee. Verse 8, But a few I will spare among the nations. Inasmuch as some of you will escape the sword when you are scattered among the countries, there among the nations to which they have been taken captive, your escapees, notice the land owns the people, they've escaped from the land, your escapees will remember me. How brokenhearted I have been over their promiscuous heart that has turned away from me and over their eyes that hoard after their dung pellets. They will loathe themselves because of the evil actions that they've committed, their own smelliness for all the abominable deeds, and they will know that I am Yahweh. I haven't threatened in vain to inflict this punish upon them. This is a remarkable statement. Out of nowhere, we hear a hint of better news. Several features of better news deserve our notice. First, Yahweh himself was behind the good news, the fumigator. He would ensure a remnant of the population among those who had escaped the sword. This is undoubtedly a reference to the hair and the hem in the prophet's garment in 5.3. Second, the good news would happen outside the land of smelly Israel, among the nations where the remnant has been scattered. As a party to the covenant, the mountains of Israel could only observe what God is up to from a distance. Third, far away from home, the remnant would remember Yahweh. Here, remember doesn't mean simply to recall what they had forgotten, but it means to take into account, to give attention to, to act as if he really does exist and he really is the one to whom we are bound by covenant. Indeed, what follows suggests that to remember Yahweh implies a renewal of a relationship with him and confession of him as the covenant Lord. Perhaps what is most surprising is what they will remember. They will remember how broken-hearted Yahweh was over their promiscuous heart that had turned away from him, and over their eyes that had whored after the pellets of dung. What's wrong with people that they would do this? This last comment is intentionally sarcastic. They had abandoned their true living husband and their eyes were drawn, Deuteronomy says, seduced by pellets of piles of dung. Fourth, note the response of the people to their rediscovery of Yahweh and their discovery of their true identity and character. They will admit how loathsome they were for all the evils they have committed and for the abominable nature of all their conduct. So much for more positive self-esteem. What a contrast to the books of I'm okay, you're okay. No, I'm a mess and we're all horrible mess. These people will finally get what we all should, and that is I'm a mess and so are you. We need fumigation. We need to be cleaned up. This is remarkable. Having been spared by Yahweh, they would not develop a Jack Horner theology anymore. You remember Jack Horner, little Jack Horner sat in the corner eating his Christmas pie. He stuck in his thumb and pulled out a plum and said, see what a good boy am I. That's a profound theology. You stick in your thumb and you pull out a plum and you say, I'm a good boy. God has rewarded me. Somebody's rewarded me for being good. No, it's the opposite. On the contrary, the brilliance of divine grace will throw into even sharper relief the darkness of human depravity. And there was no point in denying it. Ezekiel will have a lot more to say on this matter later. But finally, out there among the nations, the remnant of the Lord's people would wake up, they'll acknowledge him, and they'll remember how grieved his heart had been over their apostasy, how just he had been in his judgment, and how true he was to his word. They'll know that I am Yahweh. I meant what I said when I threatened to impose on them these curses. Again, the reference in 610 is not primarily to Ezekiel's threats of judgment, but to the old ones built into the covenant itself. But in verse 11, Yahweh seemed to catch himself, and his attention moved from the distant future to the present crisis. He ordered the prophet to clap your hands, stamp your feet, and declare, Ah! But what shall we make of these physical gestures of clapping hands and stomping feet? We could interpret this several ways, as expressions of joy and celebration, clap your hands, yes, or as expressions of what we call schadenfreude, delight in making Israel suffer, or as expressions of derision, something like or as expressions of anger. Well, many interpret these as expressions of delight. This is unlikely for three reasons. First, because Yahweh finds no joy in making people suffer. It's just wrong. Second, more importantly, everywhere else when Ezekiel spoke of clapping the hands with hikka, this expression, it always happened in the context of divine fury. Enough. Third, the segment of text that opened with a prophet clapping his hands and stomping his feet ended with Yahweh declaring, Then I will have exhausted my fury on them. And fourth, that's verse 12, fourth, this interpretation is reinforced by the command to explode verbally with a para-linguistic outburst, Ah! This expression reminds me of an outburst I would often hear from my father, Ach, du lieber! Here, Ach is an expression of either horror or anger. While the future prospects for the scattered remnant may be helpful, Yahweh had to return to the present reality. Ezekiel's gesticulatory performance was driven by two rhetorical goals. One, maybe the audience is going to sleep, he's trying to capture their attention, so he claps his hands to convey the divine disposition toward his people. We may well imagine the prophet's neighbors asking him one another, What is this man so upset about now? But again, these were more than antics of an entertainer. Ezekiel was playing the role of God, and as his audience observed, they should have imagined Yahweh clapping his hands and stomping his feet and sighing in anger over all their evil abominations. But Ezekiel's ultimate goal was that his present audience, the exiles gathered around him, would recognize Yahweh, seeing how they had grieved him and that they would recognize their own rebellion. Hypothetically, he may have been speaking to the mountains of Israel, and perhaps to the people still living there, but his real audience was his fellow exiles, who were there because of their own evil abominations, and whose fate remained tied up with that of the people back home. Unless they repented, they too would be victims of Yahweh's fury. Even among the nations, his sword would find them. Another strong text. But what shall we modern readers and hearers do with this text? What relevance does it have for us, and how does it speak to us? Well, in truth, Ezekiel's message should not be lost to the church, especially in North America and Europe in the early decades of the twenty-first century. He's not writing to the world out there. This is not an evangelistic sermon. This is an address to people who call themselves God's people. What lessons are there? First, this oracle offers vivid evidence of the impassioned side of God's character. Twice this lengthy recitation of divine activity explicitly referred to the Lord's emotional state. On the one hand, his heart is broken over the infidelity of his covenant people, verse 9. On the other hand, the fury of his judgment arose out of the depths of his anger over covenant treachery. Yahweh is Elkanah, impassioned God. He cannot stand idly by while other gods vie for his people's affections, their devotion, and they spurn his grace. But when God expresses this fury, he does so with a very heavy heart. Second, it is possible to be sincere in one's religious commitment, but to be sincerely deluded and in error. The investment of the Israelites in their cult—high places, altars, chapels, idols, sacrifices—attests to the depths of their commitment to false gods, to piles of manure. But idolatry is more than spiritual adultery. It represents devotion to futility, and its stench reaches to high heaven. Other gods are but excrement, the figments of depraved human imagination, so that even our heads and minds need to be fumigated of all the rot inside. Anything, any ideology that minimizes Yahweh's claim upon his people stands condemned. The course of human history is strewn with the shattered remains of human imagination and the corpses, smelly corpses, of deluded idolaters. But of course, we would never stoop to this kind of idolatry. We dismiss the pagans, ancient and modern, as unsophisticated and unenlightened. We know so much better how stupid it is to bow down in front of a piece of wood or stone as if it were indwelt by the real spirit of a real god with real power to hear and help you, really. But idolatry takes many different forms. In fact, anything that takes the place of God, that becomes the basis of my identity, my satisfaction, my happiness, is an idol. As Tim Keller says, anything can be an idol. Like ancient fertility religion, many in the West today are preoccupied with money, sex, and power. These are what seduce us and promise us pleasure and satisfaction. But when we read this text, we need to see our idols the way God sees them, as a pile of manure. We have bowed down to dung pellets, which leads me to ask myself, what are my own idols? What are those goals and objects to which my commitments have eclipsed my commitment to the Lord, my career, my possessions, my reputation, my studies, my children, my religion, my theology? Yeah. In Philippians 3, we find Paul's frank confession of his former idolatry, which he identified as his previous commitment to his religious heritage. Finally, my brothers, celebrate in the Lord. The text uses, the translation uses, rejoice, but that's Old English. We never use that word anymore. Celebrate in the Lord. To write the same things to you is no trouble to me and is safe for you. Look out for the dogs. Look out for the evilers. Look out for those who mutilate the flesh, for we are the circumcision who worship by the Spirit of God and glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh. We are the circumcision. Though I myself have reason for confidence in the flesh also. I was there. If anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more. Circumcised on the eighth day of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, as to the law, a Pharisee, as to zeal, a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the law, blameless. But whatever credit I had, I counted as deficit for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as deficit because of the surpassing worth over the top credit of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake, I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, skibalon, in order that I may gain Christ. To convey the crudity of the Greek here, we would say, it's all crap to me. That's strong language Paul is using. Third, the Lord is faithful to his covenant, to the very letter. Far from responding to human rebellion impulsively or arbitrarily, he reacts predictably in accordance with his righteous character and in keeping with the terms of the covenant. For him to exercise judgment on his church or on humanity is not to betray his character, but to affirm his unchanging nature. He is Yahweh. He has spoken. He acts accordingly. Fourth, the Lord's wrath is never so hot that it cancels out his grace. He may sweep over the landscape with his sword and visit the earth with manifold judgments, but he has always preserved for himself a remnant of those who should serve him. By his sovereign will and his eternal covenant, he stops short of total annihilation. Fifth, the oracle reminds all readers to look upon themselves as God sees them as totally depraved. Despite our elevated status as human beings within creation, as images of God, Psalm 8 and Genesis 1, 26 to 30, there is nothing within us as human beings that warrants God's love. The focus of some on innate human goodness and on the development of positive self-images is delusory. To be chosen as an object for divine grace does not reflect on the goodness of the individual, but on the character of the living God. And nothing will provide more realism to our self-understanding than an encounter with him. In the face of God's unblemished purity and holiness, his unswerving faithfulness, his immeasurable grace, sinners must see sin for what it really is, an abominable evil that defiles their entire being and everything they touch. Apart from the recognition of our depravity, mercy has no room to work. And finally, the God who reached out to Israel in the past and would reach out again and again in the future is none other than our Savior, Jesus Emmanuel, who embodies both the righteousness and the grace of God himself. And on the cross, these two characteristics meet. On the one hand, far from denying our sinful state, Jesus took on himself the rebellion of humanity, enduring the punishment of God on our behalf. But on the other hand, his hands are outstretched in mercy, saying to one and all, come to me, all you who labor and are burdened down with sin, and I will give you rest. Matthew 11, 28. Hallelujah. What a Savior.