Excerpts From A Sermon
The Call Of The Prophet
In Declining Times
Ezekiel 1-3
by D.A. Carson
(Continued from page 2)
In revival times it is a wonderful thing to go out and preach. When the culture is against you, however, it takes a certain amount of courage; hence, the warnings not to fear.
Secondly, it is especially important in declining times because it is also the means by which God does His work; whether it is the work of judgment or a work of revival and renewal. It is by the word of God. Al Mohler, the president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville Kentucky, is wont to say, “For the Christian, optimism is naïve but pessimism is atheistic.” That is exactly right. Optimism is naïve because we believe in the fall. We do live in declining times. Let’s not be innocent or silly about the evil around us. On the other hand, God’s hand is not short in that He cannot save. Pessimism is, frankly, atheistic. It simply assumes that God can’t or won’t act. But God condemns by His Word. He judges by His Word. And He saves and transforms by that same Word . . .
But there is a third reason why it is especially important in a declining culture. In a culture where most of the people have inherited a Judeo-Christian worldview, a Judeo-Christian framework, then what we meant by preaching the gospel tended to be a sub-set of the biblical big picture. Up until twenty or thirty years ago, the vast majority of evangelism that was done in North America was along these lines: We simply assume that ninety to ninety eight percent of our hearers knew something about a Judeo-Christian framework. Even if we were talking to an out-and-out atheist, the atheist was not a generic atheist. The atheist was an atheist that disbelieved in the Judeo-Christian God. He wasn’t a Buddhist atheist, he was a Christian atheist. And thus his categories were the categories of the inherited Judeo-Christian culture. That meant that even people who were out-and-out atheistic, not less those who were agnostics, still used the categories that we use. And in context, therefore, they knew that the God of the Judeo-Christian inheritance was a personal, transcendent being: differentiated from this whole created order; that He made this whole shebang in the first place, that history is going in a straight line toward an ultimate end, that there is a difference between right and wrong and truth and error, that God keeps the books and He is the final judge, that sin is finally sin against God, that there is a heaven to be gained and a hell to be shunned, and that God’s justice is perfect and He makes no mistakes . . .
But now, suddenly, we are dealing with people for whom none of the original givens are any longer givens. And what do we do? Those who are still involved in evangelism know that there is only one thing to do. That is, to start farther back. There is more of the words of God to get across. It is as if you are now evangelizing a tribe in Papua New Guinea who have never heard the gospel before, because these people never have. They live in another worldview. It is as if you are proclaiming the gospel in northern India to Hindus who are wonderfully syncretistic, as many in our society are wonderfully syncretistic. You cannot hope to see any major transformation unless you paint the big picture. Paul understood this. That is why in Athens (Acts 17) he paints the big picture before he gets to Christ Jesus; quite different from his approach, for example, in a synagogue in Pisidian Antioch. What it means, then, to teach and to proclaim, to bear witness to all of the counsel of God, to teach all the words of God faithfully in declining culture becomes a much more embracing thing than in a time when many, many, many of your compatriots share your worldview and your vocabulary . . .
Finally, it is a call to empathize with God’s perspective and be unyielding (2:9—3:15). In the end of 2:8 God commands Ezekiel to open his mouth and God will give him something to eat. It is a scroll, we are told, and it is written on both sides . . . It is a way of saying this is the fullness, the totality, of God’s purposes in judgment and lament and morning and woe. And the remarkable thing is that when Ezekiel eats it (3:3), it tastes sweet as honey in his mouth. That is stunning! For you see, we can be so programmed by our culture that when we come to the passages in Scripture about judgment and doom and hell itself, then we often start openly by saying, “Oh these are very difficult things. I wish they weren’t in the word of God. They’re there, so I guess I have to proclaim them.” Do you hear the weakness? That almost makes it sound as if you are somehow a little more compassionate than God. Somewhere along the line we must have preachers who so empathize with God’s point of view that even words of lament and woe taste sweet.
Don’t misunderstand, there is no hint of glee here, no cheap triumphalism, no harsh looking down your self-righteous nose; nothing like that. What is at stake here, and throughout the rest of this chapter, is this powerful insistence that Ezekiel must be a man with unswerving loyalty to God’s perspective . . . In fact, God says in v. 8, “I will make you as unyielding and hardened as they are. I will make your forehead like the hardest stone, harder than flint.” Do you hear what God is saying? He is envisioning a kind of head-butting contest. “And Ezekiel,” He says, “you are not going to lose. I am going to make your forehead harder than anybody’s.” Now I realize, again, this can be played out to make preachers harsh and unsympathetic and unyielding bound up with their own ego and their own rightness in every issue. That is not quite the point. The point here is that you do not have reformers that are wimps. Eventually you need reformers who are so impassioned by the word of God that when they do engage in head-butting contests they win because of God’s strength in them, such that their foreheads are harder than flint. They butt-up against the culture and they don’t bend. They don’t crack. They are strong. Or, to put it differently, this is a call to empathize with God’s perspective and be unyielding . . .
D.A. Carson, PhD, is research professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois.
