YEar 3 Day 122

Year 3 Day 122


Pray (ACts)


Read - Ezekiel 13:17-23


Message - Alan Burke


The Lord in Ezekiel’s day was not only against the prophets, but also against the prophetesses. Now while I called them prophetesses the word is not used here in the passage, the reason is because they are anything but, they enslave people, they were gifted spiritual manipulators they were using sorcery and divination, they were doing what the Lord had forbidden (Lev 19:26, 31 and Deut. 18:10-14). They are not like the true prophetesses that the Lord used in the Old Testament, Miriam in Exodus, Deborah in Judges, Huldah in 2nd Kings, Noadiah in Nehemiah (Judg 4:4-5:31, 2 Kgs 22:14, Exod 15:20, Neh 6:14), they are rather false prophetesses and like the male prophets they were also condemned. From what we are told here they are more like witches than they were prophets, they were profaning the word of God and the name of God for a few handfuls of barley and scraps of bread, that was the price of their services. The result of what they did was that the righteous were disheartened and the wicked were encouraged to keep on sining. They like the fellas had caused sin to flourish, they were white washers. 


God had sent His prophets for building up of God’s people, being those strengthen the righteous, to correct that which is wrong, to proclaim the truth, but instead here these who had claimed to have the word of the Lord were lying, they had disheartened, brought grief, they had not called the wicked to repentance, they as a result will know that he is the Lord in judgement. They were doing the opposite of what Ezekiel was called by God to do and the Lord would indeed make them know that he is the Lord but not by his grace or compassion but because of his judgement as he steps into save his people from such as these. For part of the problem of why the people would not believe Ezekiel, why they wouldn’t believe Jeremiah or many of the prophets was because of the lies of these false prophets. 


Jesus warns us, “Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves.” (Matt 7:15). How do we protect ourselves, well to start with the Bereans, in Acts 17 we are told even time Paul opened his mouth they examined the scriptures to see if what he said was true (Acts 17:11). Examine what you hear against the word of God, examine everything said by the word of God, do not trust a name just because it is a famous name, someone recently said to me that they only read the theology of dead guys, because their theology has been picked apart already and they can’t crash and burn. 


There is another thing that we have to keep us from error, creeds and confession of the church. The bible is the word of God we must always remember that, the creeds, catechisms and confession of the church are merely what we believe it teaches, they are summaries of its teaching, summaries of doctrine, they are not infallible, they are not equal to scripture to God’s word in any way, and in using them we must always make sure that we allow scripture to speak, they are convenient summaries of the teaching of the bible and they help us to avoid such false teaching. If we knew the Apostles creed, the Nicene creed the Westminster Shorter Catechism we would have such a defence against error, but we must never be content just to believe the creeds, confessions, catechism, we make sure that we personally prove it is the teaching of the bible only then will our faith be acceptable and secure. We must never let tradition adopted by the church, how we feel, or the culture that surrounds us add or take away from the word of God.


Pray (acTS)


Sing


WSC
Q6 How many persons are there in the Godhead?
There are three persons in the Godhead; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one God, the same in substance, equal in power and glory. (1 John 5:7, Matt. 28:19)
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