Niv Apppication Commentary Ezekiel Quotes

“Exile. It is not simply being homeless. Rather, it is knowing that you do have a home, but that your home has been taken over by enemies. Exile. It is not being without roots. On the contrary, it is having deep roots which have now been plucked up, and there you are, with roots dangling, writhing in pain, exposed to a cold and jeering world, longing to be restored to native and nurturing soil. Exile is knowing precisely where you belong, but knowing that you can’t go back, not yet.”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“But to us as Christians, troubles come now not as visitations of God’s wrath on us but as opportunities for God to uncover his power to the world.”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“It should also be noted that the site of the temple itself seems to have migrated north in Ezekiel’s vision. Given that the tribal strips are equal (47:14) and that there are seven to the north of the sacred reservation and five to the south, the site of the temple ought in strict geographical terms to be located somewhere close to Shiloh, thirty miles north of its old location.11 Although the vision (perhaps surprisingly) does not explicitly identify the location of the heart of the sacred portion within the renewed Israel, it would not be surprising to find that Ezekiel envisaged a change in place for the sanctuary. Given”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“A temple-centered life, which is nothing less than a God-centered life, is the way to true freedom. The”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“Yet if we search our hearts honestly, most of us would probably find in our thinking about ourselves and in our presentation of the gospel a struggle over how to keep those biblical truths in balance. By nature, we are each drawn towards an unhealthy emphasis on either the walls or the river. Only”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“Christianity has always struggled against two pale imitations of itself, each of which seizes on one aspect of the truth and absolutizes it. On the one hand is legalism, which emphasizes the need for separation and distinctive living, for absolute obedience to the law. But legalism lacks the freedom and joy and fullness of life that are key marks of the Christian walk. On the other hand is antinomianism, the attitude that celebrates the freedom of being a Christian. But antinomianism tends to throw off any moral imperatives.”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“The indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the heart of believers, which was accomplished at Pentecost, turns each believer into a miniature temple. As such, he or she becomes not simply a separated sphere of holiness, a walled garden in the midst of a wasteland. Rather, the believer as a temple is to be a source of blessing to all around him or her, by transmitting to them the life-giving message of the gospel. By its transforming power, the gospel heals the spiritually dead, making them alive in Christ and fruitful in their service for God.”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“But God will live in our midst only as the King, nothing less.”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“We are also the players in a cosmic drama acted out before the heavenly hosts. In that play, “every act of faith by every one of the people of God is like the tolling of a bell, and a faith like Job’s reverberates throughout the universe.”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“However, as we have shown above, this is not how the passage was intended to be read. Rather, it is a dramatic statement of the central truth that no matter what the forces of evil may throw at God’s people, in the final analysis God’s purpose and victory stand secure. For”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“The ultimate problem with the approach to the Bible that reads Ezekiel 38–39 alongside the morning newspaper in an attempt to correlate the events described in the two documents is that it assumes that unless we are living in the end times, these passages have nothing to say to us. In fact, whether or not these happen to be the final days of God’s plan for the world, Ezekiel 38–39 addresses believers with a powerful message of hope. As”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“Perhaps few Old Testament passages have seen so many attempts to interpret them in the light of current events as Ezekiel 38–39. This is hardly a new phenomenon. The church father Ambrose, writing in the late fourth century, confidently identified Gog as the Goths.14 In the seventh century, Gog and Magog were the Arab armies that threatened the Holy Land.15 By the thirteenth century, Gog had become a cipher for the Mongol hordes from the East.16 William Greenhill, writing in the seventeenth century, records the opinion of some contemporaries who identified Gog as the Roman emperor, the Pope, or the Turks.17 In the nineteenth century, against the background of the tensions in Asia Minor that culminated in the Crimean War, Wilhelm Gesenius identified Rosh as Russia.18 This view was subsequently popularized by the Scofield Reference Bible, along with the idea taken from other sources that “Meshech” and “Tubal” are the Russian cities of Moscow and Tobolsk.19 During the First World War, Arno Gaebelein argued that Gomer was Germany.20 More recently, in response to the rise of Communism, these ideas have become the staples of popular dispensational end-times literature, to which has in some cases been added the contemporary threat of the Red Chinese, usually identified as “the kings from the East” in Revelation 16:12.”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“Certainly, in revising the architecture of their churches, nobody intended to lose the idea of holiness. The intention of the Reformers was rather to assert the holiness of all of life. In practice, however, we have all too often profaned all of life instead, leveling everything down rather than up. Thus we may call the room in which we meet the “sanctuary,” yet there is no sense of awe when we gather together as the church, no sense that it is the almighty and holy God himself with whom we are meeting. As a result, our individual lives are often similarly devoid of contact with the Holy One. Because we do not recognize the meeting together of the saints as a “sanctuary” in the biblical sense, we do not live the lives of sanctity that we ought.”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“Finally, God’s “wonderful plan” for our lives does not exclude the possibility of shame over past sins. Renewed”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“There is no “of course” about our salvation. By nature, we are deservedly dead and have no prospect apart from God’s wrath. It might be a more biblical approach if instead of starting with the love of God, we begin our presentation of the gospel where Paul does in Romans: “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men” (Rom. 1:18). That there is another way, as Paul goes on to unfold in what follows, is an astonishing testimony to God’s determination to finish what he started, for his own glory and not for ours. Our salvation is entirely by grace.”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“But what is the theological cost of viewing ministry as management and pastors as professional organizers, albeit in charge of spiritual organizations? What is lost in the switch is the biblical vision of the pastor as a shepherd of a flock of souls. Such”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“We need to learn from the past how to preach for deep heart conviction of sin, until people cry out in our churches also, “What must I do to be saved?”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“our felt needs are not always our real needs. Sometimes what offers temporary relief causes long-term problems. Jesus”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“One of the dangers against which I warn aspiring preachers in our seminary is that of preaching against all the sins with which no one in their congregation struggles. It is relatively easy to warn the heterosexuals about the dangers of homosexuality, the teetotaler about the snare of alcoholism, the politically conservative about the hazards of liberalism, the rigidly orthodox about the perils of false teaching. All”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“Her power is seen in the fact that the good news of Coca Cola is more widely proclaimed than the good news of Jesus Christ. Consumerism is making disciples in all nations through its seductive charms.”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“The true answer to seduction is to open people’s eyes to the shallowness of the “beauty” on offer. The”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“The heart of seduction lies in the promise of prosperity and wealth. In”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“A warning. However, it may also be that in some cases we fill the role of the surrounding nations rather than that of God’s suffering people. For a common theme in God’s accusation of the nations is that they rejoiced at the divine judgment falling on others. Perhaps we too have been heedless or even happy when our opponents have apparently received their “comeuppance” at the hands of God, whether those opponents be inside or outside the Christian community. We have perhaps been secretly, or not so secretly, glad over the fall of prominent televangelists; some”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“Even though we may steer clear of its excesses, the health and wealth gospel (“God loves you and wants to give you a Cadillac and a mansion by the Country Club”) still influences our thinking. We tend to believe that God’s loving plan for our lives must surely include reasonable health, a job, a spouse, and a decent standard of living. If any of these things are absent from our lives, we tend to place the responsibility not on God but on the forces of evil in the world. God wants us to have these things, we theorize, but we are caught in the crossfire of the cosmic battle. Nowhere in his Word does God promise us such an easy ride through life. Nor does he pass off responsibility on others. He is the sovereign Lord, which means that even on the battleground, the buck stops with him. Ezekiel’s wife dies not because God is powerless to prevent such a thing happening, but because God has a significant purpose to accomplish through that “evil” also. It is a painful providence for the prophet to bear, but nonetheless he must receive this bitter cup too from the hand of his loving Father. As”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“As C. S. Lewis reminds us: In all our discussions of Hell we should keep steadily before our eyes the possible damnation, not of our enemies nor of our friends (since both these disturb the reason) but of ourselves. This [doctrine] is not about your wife or son, nor about Nero or Judas Iscariot; it is about you and me.”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“It is hard to imagine a viewpoint more radically different from that of Ezekiel 20. For Ezekiel, what is definitive is not Israel’s choice but the Lord’s choice. Israel”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“We may need to learn how to lament and weep before the Lord and recognize our sins and those of our fellow Christians that have caused God to depart from our midst. In the midst of the pain of our lamentation, however, our confidence may yet be placed in God’s faithfulness. As”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“But to be true to God’s Word, optimism must always be optimism in God’s power combined with a healthy pessimism in our own abilities. God can do all things with or without us; without him, we can do nothing (compare Ps. 127:1–3).”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“Charles Haddon Spurgeon put it: Oh, my brothers and sisters in Christ, if sinners will be damned, at least let them leap to hell over our bodies; and if they will perish, let them perish with our arms about their knees, imploring them to stay, and not madly to destroy themselves. If hell must be filled, at least let it be filled in the teeth of our exertions, and let no one go there unwarned and unprayed for.18”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“We suffer from the same rose-tinted myopia that Zedekiah did. On a societal level, we think the problem with our world is essentially political. If we were just able to kick the present set of bums out of office and elect people who agree with us, the world would instantly be a better place. So we pour our time and energy into political campaigns and boycotts and other efforts to bring about change through political means. On a personal level, we think the solution is to pour our time into gathering the information necessary for wise decision-making. We read the consumer reports before we purchase a new car. We do our homework before we invest money in a particular stock, to ensure, as far as possible, that we will get a good rate of return for our money. We plan our careers years in advance, trying to make sure that we are in the right place at the right time to reach the very top. We try to make wise provision for our retirement years so that we will not be in want.”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel