This is the Baymont podcast with Marty Solomon. I'm his co-host, Brent Billings.

Today we examine the apocalyptic visions of Ezekiel and his message of encouragement

to a people trapped in exile. Yeah, so we have been walking through the profits. We did

pre-assirian profits, Assyrian profits, Babylonian profits, and now we transition into what we're

calling Ezekielic or Ezekielic. We can't figure out which one it is. I think Ezekielic.

I don't know his exile. How about you say Ezekielic and I'll say Ezekielic. We'll just cover all

of our bases. Okay. I love that. Okay. But yeah, we enter a whole new section, a whole new

column on our diagram. So now the people of God are sitting off in exile, and maybe not literally,

but in a really real sense, they're sitting away in the kingdom, the empire of Babylon.

Now the conquest is over, and you kind of end up losing hope. They're sitting there

some of the phrases by the rivers of Babylon. We sat and wept to the old psalm, and so you'll hear

people reference the rivers of Babylon. They sit there, and they're dealing with this new reality

that their temple no longer stands. Their homes have been gutted and destroyed.

The way that they wanted to live has been done away with. And now I'm assuming as we sit in exile,

I'm assuming we'd have a bunch of kind of new questions. What do you think if you're sitting

in exile, Brent, you're going to be asking, are we going to be here forever?

Right. Is this just what life is like now? Right. Yeah, I have questions down about like,

what did we do to deserve this? I realize we lost the plot of the story and we made some mistakes,

and we suffered with this. We struggled with some disobedience, but is this really justified?

I think I would wonder if I was in exile long enough, has God forsaken us? Not only will we be here

forever, but has God even with us anymore? I think in our world we'd even question,

has God even real? And so you're sitting in exile and you have all of these new questions.

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