Daily Devotional • June 1
A Reading from Ezekiel 3:16-27
16 At the end of seven days, the word of the Lord came to me: 17 Mortal, I have made you a sentinel for the house of Israel; whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me. 18 When I say to the wicked, “You shall surely die,” and you give them no warning and do not speak to warn the wicked from their wicked way in order to save their lives, those wicked persons shall die for their iniquity, but their blood I will require at your hand. 19 But if you warn the wicked and they do not turn from their wickedness or from their wicked way, they shall die for their iniquity, but you will have saved your life. 20 Again, if the righteous turn from their righteousness and commit iniquity and I lay a stumbling block before them, they shall die; because you have not warned them, they shall die for their sin, and their righteous deeds that they have done shall not be remembered, but their blood I will require at your hand. 21 If, however, you warn the righteous not to sin and they do not sin, they shall surely live because they took warning, and you will have saved your life.
22 Then the hand of the Lord was upon me there, and he said to me, “Rise up, go out into the valley, and there I will speak with you.” 23 So I rose up and went out into the valley, and the glory of the Lord stood there, like the glory that I had seen by the River Chebar, and I fell on my face. 24 The spirit entered into me and set me on my feet, and he spoke with me and said to me: “Go, shut yourself inside your house. 25 As for you, mortal, cords shall be placed on you, and you shall be bound with them so that you cannot go out among the people, 26 and I will make your tongue cling to the roof of your mouth so that you shall be speechless and unable to reprove them, for they are a rebellious house. 27 But when I speak with you, I will open your mouth, and you shall say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord God’; let those who will hear, hear, and let those who refuse to hear, refuse, for they are a rebellious house.
Meditation
What does it mean to be a Sentinel of the Lord? For the Prophet Ezekiel, the responsibility is one of sacred warning. If God proclaims a destruction for wicked actions but if the prophet doesn’t warn those who do them, who is to fault the wicked in their ignorance? God sets this heavy responsibility upon Ezekiel. If Ezekiel doesn’t provide the warning he is required to by God, according to the text, “their blood I will require at your hand.”
The Church has often struggled to discern properly what it looks like to fulfill the office of the Sentinel—the one who proclaims the wickedness of wickedness for a world otherwise ignorant of its wrongdoing. Often, our propensity to too-quickly declare a “word of the Lord” without discernment has injured the urgency of our prophetic witness. Yet nevertheless, a crucial part of the Church’s witness is to fulfill the office of the Sentinel: reminding our culture, especially those in power, of the consequences of wrongdoing. If done with discernment, we have an opportunity to be an effective moral voice in a world that so desperately needs one.
When we see the powerful trampling down upon the rights of the lowly, or when we witness degradations performed against the image of God in our neighbor or any other matters of grave injustice, those are moments when the church should not speak using the mere articulations of law, rights, or appeals to common sense. Instead, we should offer the serious moral voice, providing a warning to the powerful just as Ezekiel was commanded to do so: “You shall surely die.”
Ian Edward Caveny serves as pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Alton in south-central Illinois and as an occasional lecturer for the John Martinson Honors Program at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.
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Daily Devotional Cycle of Prayer
Today we pray for:
The Anglican Church of Korea
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Baton Rouge, Louisiana
