This Is Getting Out Of Hand!

Eat the food as you would a loaf of barley bread; bake it in the sight of the people, using human excrement for fuel.” The LORD said, “In this way the people of Israel will eat defiled food among the nations where I will drive them.”

Then I said, “Not so, Sovereign LORD! I have never defiled myself. From my youth until now I have never eaten anything found dead or torn by wild animals. No impure meat has ever entered my mouth.”

“Very well,” he said, “I will let you bake your bread over cow dung instead of human excrement.”- Ezekiel 4:12-15

Today’s Reading: Ezekiel 3-4; Hebrews 11:20-40

Ezekiel starts off with a bang.

First, Ezekiel sees this incredibly wild vision of God. Then God informs him that he is His prophet and that He has required Ezekiel to go and speak the truth to the people of Israel and Judah.

Okaaaaay…

So then he gets there and then the requests get even stranger. He is to lay on one side of his body for 390 days, representing the number of years that Israel was in disobedience, and 40 days on the other side for Judah.

Wait a minute….

Then the doosy above came. This is getting out of hand! Ezekiel didn’t ask for this. He kept his mouth shut for the first requests although he was not happy about it. It took cooking his food with foulness for him to speak up.

It really sucks when you feel like God is asking you to do something that you don’t want to do. It probably won’t be as wild as Ezekiel’s journey but oftentimes what God asks of us is challenging. We are being asked to do something that we have never done, to have courage that we have never had, to act in ways that we never have acted.

But good gracious, the Ezekiel path is no joke. I’m glad that God hasn’t asked me to do anything wild like that. I thought it was already a bit much when I got the urge to do this blog. I’m thankful for Ezekiel and all of the other spiritual gangstas who blazed the trail before me so that my work is relatively easy in comparison.

Then again the path has just begun.

Question of the Day: Has God ever asked you to do something that you thought was crazy? Is it as wild as what God told Ezekiel to do? How did you know that it was God?