Welcome to the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Right now we're going through the entire Bible to understand it is one big cohesive story.

We're covering one book each day, and this one's about Ezekiel.

So it's been a while since I worked through the book of Ezekiel, and I have an opening observation after having gone through it carefully and anticipation of our conversation here.

And that is, wow, let me try it again. Dang, let me try it one more time. What the heck? It's so intense.

I forgot how much the book of Ezekiel is characterized by the sustained look at God's anger at a level and for an amount of time, screen time that I don't think we see anywhere else in the Bible.

This is God unloading on what's left of his chosen people as they are about to be taken away into captivity and utterly defeated and ruined by the Babylonians, and then even more piling on happens after they get taken away into captivity.

But like everything else we've seen where God's wrath and judgment comes out, there is also hope and there's also a promise of redemption.

But the mechanics of that work a little bit differently here, back to my original point though, the intensity here is massive.

So much so that I felt as I read this kind of like I feel when my friends who have kids start scolding their kids and getting after them and like, I had nothing to do with what their four-year-old just did wrong, getting their fruit roll up hands all over somebody's class or whatever.

Whatever, maybe the kid needed to be corrected or scolded, maybe they're breaking rules, but when they start yelling at their kid, I feel guilty, I feel bad, I feel awkward, I feel like I've done something wrong by proxy.

And that is how I feel going through this. I'm not from Israel, I was born 2500, 2600 years after the events described here.

I got problems, but it's kind of a different list of problems and what they have, but there is so much judgment from God as I listened to him scold his children, his chosen people that I can't help but hunch my shoulders as I read it.

I think that's probably the best way to read it. I think it's good to get worn down by the tone of Ezekiel and get to a place where you're like, all right, well, yeah, I'm not perfect either.

And I suppose if there was a book like this about the things that I got wrong, I wouldn't really like it if everybody got to read that for a few thousand years after the fact.

So I'm just going to take this correction by proxy as well and try to see what I'm supposed to take from this book.

So that begs the question, what are we supposed to take from Ezekiel and what's really going on here?

And further, how do we sift through all of this given the very bizarre imagery that we get throughout the book of Ezekiel?

I'm going to do my best to break this thing down.

First of all, let's talk about the guy who wrote it and it's pretty clear that this has a ton of autobiographical details and actually unlike many of the prophets of the Old Testament

where we have a sense of when they're writing with Ezekiel because of the time markers he gives us historically.

We can say like, I was probably like April 11th this year he was sitting there writing this thing, maybe not quite that precise, but really close.

We have a clear, clear timeline on when Ezekiel is writing all of this stuff down.

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