Excerpts From A Sermon
The Call Of The Prophet
In Declining Times
Ezekiel 1-3
by D.A. Carson
“It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” So reads the opening line of Charles Dickens’ famous novel A Tale of Two Cities. Doubtless that simple paradoxical summary could be displayed to describe many periods of history. Nazi Germany, for example, 1932-1939. It was the best of times. The corruption and the ineffectiveness of the Weimar Republic were done away with. Currency was stabilized. The shame of the Treaty of Versailles was being removed. Youth had a sense of direction again. The industries were flourishing. The economy was doing well . . . But freedoms were dying. The churches were being domesticated. The shadow of the Holocaust lay just over the horizon. In fact, just around the corner was World War Two and a mighty bloodbath. It was the worst of times.
It was true in Britain in 1740. It was the worst of times. At the height of the Industrial Revolution before the introduction of trade unions or any counter-balancing force, the rich were getting richer, and the poor were being crushed. Children were being sent into the mines at the age of five or six, putting in fourteen to sixteen-hour days. There were two hundred eighty crimes on the books for which you could be executed by hanging, including stealing a loaf of bread. In some parts of London every building was either a brothel or a pub. In fact, religion had sunk so low in the British Isles that on Easter Sunday, 1740, only six people showed up for communion at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. It was the worst of times. And yet in 1734 God had raised up a young man by the name of Howell Harris in Wales. In 1738 George Whitefield began to preach to the coal miners in Bristol. In 1740 the Wesley brothers started, and over the next sixty years there came such a mass of social overturn out of the preaching of the gospel that Britain was not the same beast by the end of that cycle as it was at the beginning. It was the best of times. Out of this came the abolition of slavery. Out of this came new laws on child labor. Out of this came the beginning of trade unions that counter-balanced some of the power of capitol unleashed without discipline or accountability. Out of this came the beginning of prison reform. Out of this also came the beginnings of welfare hospital care and the like. It was the best of times.
Some would say the dictum applies to our own times. After all, the cold world is over and we won. We are actually dismantling nuclear bombs for the first time in history . . . In this country, although there are doubtless developments we may not like, there are things for which to be grateful. There is now a very high percentage of young people, eighteen and older, in tertiary education. The Gross Domestic Product has been pressing on a steady course for quite a long time. Despite the current jag in the stock market, the economy is basically sound. On the other hand, world-wide, many countries in the ten-forty window are desperately poor. Tribalism in Africa is fueling butchery veering toward genocide. The UN says there are one hundred million homeless and abandoned children on the world’s streets (that is, children under the age of twelve). The percentage of child prostitutes under thirteen, in the streets of Bogotá, has quintupled since 1987. UNISEF says there are more than eight hundred thousand prostitutes in Thailand serving plane loads of sex tourists, many from Japan and Germany, and increasingly from the US. This, too, is our world . . . But is this is all that can be said? “Weigh up the good and the bad. It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.”
No. We can say something more, especially on the smaller scale of the nation, if we look for the things God values and where they are leading. When we quietly think through what God values as disclosed in Scripture and test Western nations in that light, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that we are living in declining times. There is an increasing loss of any sense of objective truth. More and more, truth is defined in terms of the individual or the sub community. It’s a social construct, nothing more. It is not an objective reality in the public market. The residual forms of confessional Christianity have pockets of wonderful strength, but a fair bit of evangelicalism has succumbed to a focus on methods and power and ecclesiastical politics, or conversely, a mere traditionalism that really does not know how to engage the contemporary culture. There has been a long term decline of the home, the foundational building block of society. There is a formidable ingrained interest in present well-being, and almost no thought given to eternal well-being. A postmodern epistemology is on the rise, whose many effects include the relativizing not only of all truth, but of all morality, and much more.
Against such a scale, the fact that the GDP continues to rise is of relatively minor consequence; a blessing, but a minor one. Perhaps even a deceptive one. You weigh the GDP against the mass of biblical illiteracy that is now characteristic in the land and, from God’s point of view, the gain is not great. The people who we might evangelize at universities nowadays have never heard of Moses. They do not know that the Bible has two testaments. We are living in declining times, and I doubt that there are many here who would doubt the point.
But we are not the first to find ourselves in this position. Almost six hundred years before Christ, Ezekiel lived in times that were remarkable for their declension on just about every front . . .
Now Ezekiel’s prophecy, we are told, begins in the thirtieth year. That is to say, probably the thirtieth year of his own life; at the very time when he should have been entering his richest priestly duties; when he should have been coming into the fullness of his priestly responsibilities. But, obviously, he never would, never could. There was no temple for him to serve at. We are also told that it was the fifth year of the exile of King Jehoiakim; that is, 593 BC, when the exiles are in Babylon. Jerusalem had not yet rebelled finally. So there is a six year hiatus now between 593 BC, and the overthrow of temple in Jerusalem finally in 587 BC. If we don’t recall those facts, the rest of the book makes no sense at all. When many were clamoring that God would spare Judah for the temple’s sake, Ezekiel begins his ministry . . .
Now what is vital for us, in the opening chapters, is the nature of God’s call on Ezekiel’s life. For God does not call all prophets in exactly the same way. Samuel is called as a young lad; given to the Lord from before his conception, but called experientially by God as a young lad. Elisha is called to serve a kind of apprenticeship under Elijah.
