Ezekiel's God Is A Little Scary!

This morning as I make my way through Ezekiel, I have realized just how much time had in fact passed during Isreal's slow spiritual demise. Thus, perhaps how a culture can shift right under the nose of all, folk blindly adjusting, then gradually becoming something her founders could never have dreamed of!

Because of the way the canon of scripture was constructed, one's read through the prophets creates a tendency to tightly lump those years together, as if the "falling away" in Isreal was a more rapid journey. In reality, her spiritual demise took centuries with plenty of warning.

This has moderated my angst, given the brutality implied as necessary to get their attention, though I still question Ezekiel's image of God. One so in contrast with the Christ!

Yet, if I am to respect the Canon of scripture as inspired, perhaps mankind can so gradually drift away from grace, to the degree that destruction of lives (men, women and children) is necessary to move forward?

As brutal as it seems, God's faithfulness to Abraham at some point must have required such. Still, that's almost too harsh to accept, having lived such a blessed life here in this "second Isreal!"

The prophetic timeline breaks down as follows:

Isaiah (740–686 BC): Ministered much earlier, warning the Kingdom of Judah about the Assyrian threat.

Jeremiah (627–585 BC): Known as the "weeping prophet," he ministered in Jerusalem just before and during the initial Babylonian sieges.

Ezekiel (593–570 BC): Exiled to Babylon in 597 BC, he began his prophetic visions there, overlapping the later years of Jeremiah's ministry in Judah.

I must admit my struggle with Ezekiel's message! But then, given our own nation's current overplay of religion while fostering a huge and still growing wealth gap, layered against our tendency to justify the use of "weapons of mass destruction" in order to prevent others from acquiring the same, while in reality, perhaps only a means of global dominance, all for the sake of such prosperity, yet all done while celebrating liberty!

I'm sorry, I just see a few red flags!

If in fact these words were inspired, they provide a side of God we do not want to experience!

On the lighter side, I do understand the consequences of such transparency; to quote Kermit the Frog, "It ain't easy being green!"