Bear the Burden!

Ezekiel 5

Good morning! This is Pastor Jerry Ingalls from New Castle First Baptist Church and today is Friday, June 7.

Ezekiel’s personal discomfort was not yet completed. Just as God commanded the prophet to lay tied up on his sides for 430 days, eating defiled food and drinking small amounts of water, next, in Ezekiel 5:1-4, the Lord instructed him to make another prophetic sign of Jerusalem’s impending destruction:

As for you, son of man, take a sharp sword; take and use it as a barber’s razor on your head and beard. Then take scales for weighing and divide the hair. One third you shall burn in the fire at the center of the city, when the days of the siege are completed. Then you shall take one third and strike it with the sword all around the city, and one third you shall scatter to the wind; and I will unsheathe a sword behind them. Take also a few in number from them and bind them in the edges of your robes. Take again some of them and throw them into the fire and burn them in the fire; from it a fire will spread to all the house of Israel.

This was not a barber’s tool that Ezekiel was commanded to use, but a soldier’s sword. The distinction was intentionally stated in God’s command to the prophet, making it clear that the sharp sword was symbolic of the military defeat of Jerusalem. Just as Jeremiah was tasked with embodying the Babylonian Empire’s rule by wearing an oxen yoke, so Ezekiel was commanded to bear the burden of the people’s hardship at the edge of a sword. While you may not be called upon to do such symbolic acts, you are called to demonstrate the work of God by how you live your life.

Seize the moment and bear the burden of other’s hardships as a way of showing them God’s love – “Bear one another’s burdens, and thereby fulfill the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2).

God bless you!

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YOUTUBE:

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