Ezekiel 33:10-11 HOPE IS ALIVE

I invite you to open your bibles to the book of Ezekiel chapter 33… 

This easter Sunday we come together and celebrate the resurrection of the man known as Jesus of Nazareth. He was a mighty prophet in word and deed in the sight of God and all the people. But He shook up all of Israel and much of Rome for that matter when He proved himself to be God by rising from the dead. Death could not hold Him. For death cannot hold God. This is a fact, proven over and over and over again. Many in our modern age see the Bible as a book of ancient stories disconnected from reality. Disconnected from fact. We know this because so many don’t believe it, but use it as they would a fable. But how many times does God need to prove himself to us before we believe Him?

God delivers Israel from Egypt. Over a million people just left one of the largest nations in the ancient world. An attested fact. God delivers Israel and her Kings from the nations time and time again… God is favorable to Israel through Babylon and Assyria after captivity. Jesus did many wonderful things and was killed on a Roman execution tree. All these things are facts, hard to argue against from history. And all of them display the glory and reality of God. But the greatest evidence proved to nearly 500 witnesses is the resurrection of a dead man. It’s the testimony of 12 cowardly men turned radicals over night. God proved himself to have the keys to death and the sovereignty over life through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

But listen… it wasn’t the first time he has proved this. It wasn’t the first time people were in an uproar asking God to share his secret to life. Israel, some 600 years prior to the death and resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ ask for the remedy for this problem of death, and God tells them. So, let’s stand this morning and read verse 10-11 of Ezekiel 33, hear what sovereign Yahweh says…. 

““Now as for you, son of man, say to the house of Israel, ‘Thus you have spoken, saying, “Surely our transgressions and our sins are upon us, and we are rotting away in them; how then can we live?” ’ Say to them, ‘As I live!’ declares Lord Yahweh, ‘I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that the wicked turn from his way and live. Turn back, turn back from your evil ways! Why then will you die, O house of Israel?’”

The Bible describes every human’s experience when it says,“surely our sins are upon us and we are rotting away in them…”. Before the apostles preached that “the wages of sin is death” and that we all are , “like sheep gone astray”, Israel came to realize this through the preaching of God himself. Word after word from God through the watchman Ezekiel, and this is the first time it finally clicks… they finally see the misery they are in that the Lord has been telling them about. It is one thing to know, “I am a sinner”, like yeah I have done a bad thing or two. It is another to confess as Israel did, “my sin is killing me”. I fear this truth has lost its impact on the modern man. Even the modern Christian. Our sin is not just bad, it is horrifying; it separates us from God. 

Israel confesses, our sin is upon us, and it is rotting us away. Our sin is like a flesh eating disease that comes upon us, and slowly over the course of time, before we can even realize it, rots our heart and soul away and drives us far away from God. Far enough that we might denounce Him altogether because we don’t care for Him as much as He cares for us. In fact, we shove God down. Because in our darkness, like cave dwellers, the light of the truth is too bright for us to bear!  We can attest that cancer kills the body. It affects our temporal material being; our cells. Worse yet, the Bible tells us that sin is like a cancer but is worse. Sin affects not just our body but our soul….and its effects are not temporal only, but eternal.

Israel deep down knew that Yahweh was the one true and living God even as they chased down fake gods who they thought would give them what they want. And like most pre modern men, they knew that they were eternal beings. You can hear it when they cry out, “Our sins are upon us and we are rotting away in them”. There is a consciousness in their confession that is shaded in the darkest feeling of despair in regard to life. AS they cry out about their rotting flesh they are referring to a passage in  Lev. 26:39. And now they get it. God told them, if you reject my word and do not stand firm in my statutes…. “I, in turn, will do this to you: I will appoint over you a sudden terror, consumption and fever that will waste away the eyes and cause the soul to pine away; also, you will sow your seed uselessly, for your enemies will eat it up (Leviticus 26:16, LSB)… and…26:39 So those of you who may remain will rot away in their iniquity in the lands of your enemies; and also in the iniquities of their fathers they will rot away with them.  (Leviticus 26:39, LSB)… God has opened their eyes to see a striking reality, they were in the midst of judgment from a covenant keeping God. He had done what he said he would do, and they were sick.

That is why they did not stop there. They followed that confession of death up by asking, “How then can we live”? We can’t even ask such a question with genuine inquiry until we fully understand the reality of our spiritual deadness and distance from God. 

The reality is that nothing has changed, humanity is dying, and they don’t know it. You and I were born with a nature that loved our sin. By nature all of humanity, including you and I, do everything they can to shove this truth away from them. They disconnect from the truth with entertainment and excess alcohol that numbs their brain and steals their logic so they don’t have to think about God. They hide the truth of oncoming death by covering it up with cosmetics or surgeries. They run from the truth of reality by trying to busy themselves with every little thing, of coming up with excuse upon excuse… “I have no time to think of this now, I will settle the matter later”. 

Again I say, the truth has lost its impact on the modern man. In the days where there was not as much entertainment, cosmetics, access to alcohol, and frivolity, humanity had a strong sense that their soul needed help. So they sought after truth. Today, humanity takes comfort in anything other than seeking the living God. Because they don’t care that they are dying. They are fine with it. And this is due in part because the shepherds in the land who know the truth of the One True and Living God that fill the pulpit in many churches won’t tell them the truth. Instead, preachers and pastors tell people easier things; how to spend their money wisely, or how to be a more moral person, or how to be more accepting and loving etc. And in turn our version of God fearing men have grown weaker and weaker.

Like trying to get by with cough drops while actually having throat cancer; Money, morality, and acceptance do not really matter when the underlying disease has not been dealt with. The body is wasting away and so is the soul and no one seems to care.

IN the text we can see under the conviction of God, Israel sees their desperation and asks this question to God, “how then can we live”? And He answers them… “As I live!” Here is a greater message to be told to the world than, “you can be a nicer, better, more moral person if you become a Christian.” It’s true, if you come to church you hang around people trying to better themselves, you might become a nicer person. But, going to church is pointless unless the pulpit is telling the truth that you are dying and where to find the cure…. and if you are listening and caring to do something about it…

You yourself can live as God lives! Humans who are born slowly dying in their corruption and sin, can become alive! And kill the sin thats killing them so they may live all the more. But not just alive in this world, but alive as God lives…and how does He live? eternally. 

God tells Israel that they can live as He lives and then tells them how. He tells them, “turn back, turn back from your evil ways!”. This may come as a shock to you that God was calling people evil who were just your regular people and not outright murderers or thieves, but much like your everyday person today. They were decent people with modest homes, a nice family, and a regular routine of worship at the temple. But because of a watchman that told them the whole truth through the word of God they came to understand that their condition was worse than they thought. 

In the sermon on the mount Jesus delivers the same message God delivered to Israel over and over and over through His prophets. He said, “I say to you, that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be guilty before the court and whoever says to his brother, “raca” shall be guilty before the Sanhedrin: and whoever says “you fool” shall be guilty enough to go into the fiery hell.”… Do you see it? The sin that is killing us is not as blatant as we think. It’s a slow, yet consistent, disease.

Where is the alarm? This is God’s who issue in Israel at this time. He had given them shepherds to speak the truth to them, but they were more concerned about their own comfort than the souls of other people. Is that far off from the situation we find ourselves in today? There are plenty of people who claim to be spiritual, who go to church even or call themselves cultural Christians, who are simply religious only.

People who believe that things are actually pretty good, and that their sin is not as bad as the Bible tells them it is, are a dime a dozen. Yet, when you or I call a person a fool, or stupid, Jesus tells us we get to hear the resonance of the disease in our heart that is slowly choking us out and needs to be dealt with. Therefore I ask you this morning, are you concerned with the sin that is liable to rot you away both body and soul? Or are you concerned with be a spiritual person in appearance only? The difference is life and death.

What then are we to do about this disease? God told Israel, “turn back from your evil ways”. He tells them that He takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked. He wanted the wicked to live as he lives! But he is the responsibility. He is inviting them to respond… They must draw near to Him. He says turn aback from evil. Back implies they started in the right direction. They started with God, but in their sickness had drifted.

God incarnate Jesus Christ some six hundred years later said, “repent and believe the Gospel”. Repent, in the ancient languages literally means to turn around. Like, you have been traveling on a path following a map going one way, but because you have new intel, you reroute and head a new way. What is that new intel? It is the Gospel. It is realizing that sin is killing us in this temporal world, only to place us permanently away from God in Hell forever in the eternal world to come. Yet, all the more, the good news of God is that this death can be stopped. The slow death we are dying can lose its power over us. While it is true that no Christian is sinless, and no Christian escapes death, our sin can be stopped from affecting our eternity and eternally separating us from God. 

My friends, our eternity is sealed by what we believe right now. A Christian is a Christian not by a prayer that they have prayed, or through some blessing of a pastor. All roads and all faiths don’t lead to Heaven. IF that is true God is a liar… That is not reality! One is reconciled with God in two ways… First by believing with a sincere trust that Jesus truly died and was resurrected from the dead. Jesus was not just a prophet as Ezekiel was a prophet. Jesus was God. The resurrection is so important because it proves this. Jesus was the first one to be raised from the dead on His own. Jesus holds the keys to death, and is sovereign over all of life. 

To believe that Jesus is the Christ is to heartily trust that no goodness or righteous act you have done could ever save you. Our “good works” are filthy rags to the holiness of God. What saves us is banking our life on the love of Christ. It’s saying, Jesus is Lord. He is in control as the sovereign King, and I submit to whatever He wants.

Secondly, one is reconciled to God by living what they believe. How do we live? How do we escape this sin that is rotting us away? By living as God lives! And god doesn’t live in entity alone, he lives here and now! He is at work through his church. A church that should be filled with people who come to see the weight of the sin that is killing them, and living in the great kindness of God by daily accepting the free gift of salvation from that death by forgiveness of our sin.

Again, not because they want to try to be a morally good person and clean up their act or fall in line with what seems to be the right thing, but because they have been changed by the Love of God! They now live to serve the Savior that loved them first. They live to promote the medicine that cured them. They live to point to the new way they have found. 

After baptizing people for their repentance of sin, John the baptist put it this way, “bear fruit in keeping with repentance”. Meaning, live a life that tells of the goodness of Christ in your life. We turn from our old way of believing which daily produced one way of living, and we turn to a new way of believing that daily produces a new way of living. 

My friends, let this resurrection Sunday hit differently. For this is not a gathering for religious fanfare. This is a gathering of people excited about the hope they have found in their salvation from their rot. Friends and family who were loved and are loved enough to be told the truth.

Christ loved us in giving his life for us. And he loves you enough to tell you again on this twentieth day of April 2025 that unless you have recieved and are walking in the cure, you are dying. I plead with you. Be reconciled to God and live today as God lives. Stop living a delusion. Stop waiting for the right and perfect time. Stop waiting for a sign. God lives, and I am your sign.

This word is truth and my life bears the testimony. Draw near today to God and stay near by. For, He is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy. To Him, he only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, might, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.