Water from the Altar

Ezekiel 47:1-12

Ezekiel 47 is a part of the visions God enabled the prophet Ezekiel to see, which started in chapter 40 through the guidance of “a man whose appearance was like bronze” (40:2-3). The man took Ezekiel to different places and gave instructions to him about the east gate (40:5-16), the outer court (40:17-19), the north gate (40:20-23), the south gate (40:24-27), gates to the inner court (40:28-37), rooms for preparing sacrifices (40:38-43), rooms for the priests (40:44-47; 42:1-20), and the altar (43:13-27). Ezekiel says that he was brought back to the entrance of the temple (47:1), because he already came to the temple before (40:48-41:26). But this time, what Ezekiel was made to see was way more exciting. In his first visit, he only saw measurements of doorframes, jambs, and other parts of the temple. But in his return, the man showed him the contents of the heart of God.

Now he brought me back to the entrance to the Temple. I saw water pouring out from under the Temple porch to the east (the Temple faced east). The water poured from the south side of the Temple, south of the altar. He then took me out through the north gate and led me around the outside to the gate complex on the east. The water was gushing from under the south front of the Temple.

He walked to the east with a measuring tape and measured off fifteen hundred feet, leading me through water that was ankle-deep. He measured off another fifteen hundred feet, leading me through water that was knee-deep. He measured off another fifteen hundred feet, leading me through water waist-deep. He measured off another fifteen hundred feet. By now it was a river over my head, water to swim in, water no one could possibly walk through.

He said, “Son of man, have you had a good look?” Then he took me back to the riverbank. While sitting on the bank, I noticed a lot of trees on both sides of the river. ^8-10 He told me, “This water flows east, descends to the Arabah and then into the sea, the sea of stagnant waters. When it empties into those waters, the sea will become fresh. Wherever the river flows, life will flourish—great schools of fish—because the river is turning the salt sea into fresh water. Where the river flows, life abounds. Fishermen will stand shoulder to shoulder along the shore from En-gedi all the way north to En-eglaim, casting their nets. The sea will teem with fish of all kinds, like the fish of the Great Mediterranean (Ezekiel 47:1-10, MSG)

In the vision, Ezekiel saw water flowing from under the Temple, most probably right from the Holy of Holies, to outside the Temple down to the valleys. The water was gushing forth, and quite strongly, because the water from the Temple has formed a river 2 kilometers away from the temple, where its waters are over Ezekiel’s head: “water to swim in, water no one could possibly walk through.”

This is an amazing picture of what happens when the glory of God descends upon the church, because the church will not be able to contain the Holy Spirit’s presence and power. If the church is filled with God’s glory, an overflow is to be expected. The temple is situated in Jerusalem, and Jerusalem was on a mountain. Jerusalem is neither situated on a great river nor is it beside a river. So where did the water come from? The answer is… I don’t know. But the Bible is clear that water can come out of rocks (Exo 17:1-5; Num 20:1-11). When the glory of the Lord is in the church, nothing is impossible. The vision of Ezekiel tells us that God plans for water to gush out of the mountain where God dwells down to the valleys where life need to grow.

Outpouring for the World

It must also be noted that the water did not come to the temple, as if the temple needed to be cleansed. The water goes out from the temple. Although it is necessary that the church experiences the cleansing and transforming power of the Holy Spirit, that is not all there is for the life of the church. We can all be occupied with the need to be cleansed and sanctified, and we can spend all our lives pursuing these desires—and this is good. But we must remember that we are called not solely to focus on our own spiritual needs. There must come a point when the church is a water-giving station, and not just a bottle that wants to be filled over and over again.

Sometimes we can be too concerned about our own filth and needs that we only pray for water for ourselves. As we mature in our Christian lives, we must learn to get rid of the mentality that Christ died for me and that the Holy Spirit is sent for me. The Bible is clear: Christ died for all and the Spirit is poured out on all flesh (Acts 2:17). The vision of Ezekiel is very refreshing. He envisioned a moment when the church becomes the source of water, when the church is the one that gives, not asks. The church is not a pool that gathers all the water to fill itself; the church is an irrigation system that supplies water to fields. We must go beyond the act of asking, and proceed to the act of giving.

Transforming Effects of Water

Ezekiel’s vision tells us what happens when water overflows from the temple. First, wherever the water from the temple goes, there is healing and transformation. Ezekiel wrote: “This water flows east, descends to the Arabah and then into the sea, the sea of stagnant waters. When it empties into those waters, the sea will become fresh” (47:8).

This is a beautiful picture. The Dead Sea is very salty. When my wife and I went to Israel in 2009, we went for a dip in the Dead Sea. Because of the density of salt in the sea, you would literally float. No matter how much you want to stay underwater, the water will push you upward. The Dead Sea is very salty. When you step on the seabed, you feel as if you are stepping on big rocks, but they are actually big chunks of salt. But because it is also very salty, no marine life is capable of surviving there. It is literally a Dead Sea. But the vision that God gave Ezekiel was that even the worst and most useless sea in the world is transformed when water from the temple flows to it. This is the transforming power of God.

In Isaiah 44:3, God said, “I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground.” If in Isaiah what is transformed by water is dry ground, the water in Ezekiel transforms an entire sea. But the core thought is simple: a barangay or town or country pervaded by death and lack of life can be healed and transformed by the blessings overflowing from the church. We are all aware that we live in a world of death, poverty, injustice, and everything that is anti-life. This does not need to lead us to despair, because no matter how dead the world can be, water from the temple is sufficient to bring healing to it.

The Lord heals.   

Life-giving Water

The man who accompanied Ezekiel went on to say that “swarms of living creatures will live wherever the river flows. There will be large number of fish, because this water flows there and makes the salt water fresh; so where the river flows everything will live… the fish will be of many kinds” (47:9-10). The picture again is stunning. The overflow of God’s work in the church brings life to everything it touches. Out of the church comes the power to bring life into a once lifeless barangay or city. Where previously there was only sin and death, when the Spirit overflows from the church, these areas are transformed as an oasis of life. The same vision was given to John: “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations” (Rev 22:1-2).

The vision of Ezekiel teaches us that the church has a lot to give to the world. The church is meant to give. We cannot just release trickles of water and be satisfied. We cannot be content with ankle-deep results. We must pray that our ministry drowns the world with abundant grace. The church is not like a sprinkler, but is like a dam, which needs to open its floodgates wide.

When the floodgates of heaven open up and transforming water erupts from our church, we will not only see knee-deep and waist-deep spiritual floods around us. The vision of Ezekiel teaches us that when God makes His move, a mighty river is formed.

Christian Plumbing

Ezekiel’s vision was extraordinary, and the church must ask herself if this is happening and is true to her experience today. If not yet, when will it ever happen? Is the church an instrument of radical transformation, healing, and life to the world? Is our local church a source of living water flowing from our sanctuary to the outside world?

If we want these things to happen, then we must do something first. If God’s transforming, healing, and life-giving water is not yet flowing through us and our church in a magnificent way, then it is probably because our lives are clogged. It is probably because we are like wells filled with dirt, stones, trash, and vines that hinder the water from gushing out. The water wants to erupt, but there is so much garbage in our lives that the water simply cannot pass through.

This is something that I do not understand with God. I am a theologian, but I could not understand why God would need to rely on me to accomplish something that He wants. Why do I need to be clean to be a vessel of grace? He is God, and He can do anything He wants to do, regardless of my obedience or disobedience, or my strength or my weakness, or my existence or non-existence. But the mystery of the gospel is that God requires willing and sanctified people to be His vessels. He requires people to be His channels of grace. He requires holy people to be the irrigation through which His transforming, healing, and life-giving work flow.

This is a lot of pressure. This is a lot of responsibility. But the truth will never change no matter how much we ask or no matter how much we disagree: God’s cleansing, transforming, healing, and life-giving water flows out of the church. The world needs the church to do the right thing, otherwise the world will remain a Dead Sea. The church needs to be unclogged because it has been waiting the world for years for its healing and renewal.

The Way Forward is Backward

Scripture Reading: Philippians 1:3-6, 9-11 

There is always something exciting about the New Year. A new horizon is spread out in front of us and the prospects of many things can be a source of thrill. Perhaps some of us are even hoping for the New Year because there are exciting plans and events lined up for the year: some of us are planning to go somewhere; some of us are entering new phases in educational achievement; some of us are having babies, or planning to have babies; some of us are expecting to get married; some of us are hoping to get married; and some of us have new work responsibilities. There is also a sense of relief when approaching the New Year. When you have encountered some difficulties in the past year, entering the New Year can be a source of hope, knowing that things can change for the better.

But perhaps for some of us the New Year offers no great promise, or it might mean nothing at all. For some of us, there is no prospect of new jobs, new achievements, better health, more money, and so on. If you belong to this group, the New Year brings nothing but anxiety, for it is quite frustrating to think that nothing new is about to happen in your lives. Of course, to think about the future can also bring about fear, because the future is ultimately an unknown territory. There is an array of possibilities, but let us admit that these possibilities include some frighteningly unfavourable ones. It is this open-endedness of the future that is scary.

This year, in our chapel services at APNTS, we have repeatedly affirmed that “The Lord is our Shepherd.” It is fascinating that the people who usually utter Psalm 23 are people who are experiencing difficulties in the present, or are anticipating challenges in the future. In fact, it can be said that the occasion where most of the utterances of the Psalm is not during average Sunday worship services at church, but during funerals. My suspicion is that even among Christians, in their practical lives and prayers, Psalm 23 only has two redacted verses: “The Lord is my Shepherd… Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me” (23:1, 4). In this way, the Psalm is important to essentially two groups of people: (1) those who are really struggling in the present, and (2) those who are anxious about what the future offers.

What we must emphasize here, however, is not the contemporariness or the future-ness of the affirmation “The Lord is my Shepherd.” Rather, we shall see that Psalm 23 is not only a statement referring to the present or to the future, but is actually also a statement about the past. Here we are going to learn from the profundity of Alain Badiou’s words: “When a step forward is the order of the day, one may, among other things, find assistance in the greatest step back” (St Paul). This manoeuvre and emphasis on the past may sound anti-contextual, considering that we just celebrated the New Year in the Philippines. In fact, sermons preached on the New Year emphasize newness, progress, moving forward, and the like. But the move to step back to the past is important in order for us to better appreciate how we utter Psalm 23 in the is-ness of the present and the mystery of the future.

So how is the statement “The Lord is my Shepherd” a statement about the past? We often forget that the faith is Israel is a combination of the eschatological and the retrospective. It is retrospective because their faith is grounded in remembrance. This is evident in their major festivals. The Pesach (Passover) is celebrated in remembrance of the salvation of their first born sons against the angels of death that visited Egypt in particular and their deliverance from Egypt in general. The Shavu-ot (Feast of Weeks) is celebrated both because of the recent harvest and the commemoration of the giving of the Law at Mt. Sinai. The Succoth (Feast of Tabernacles) is celebrated to remember their wandering years after their Egyptian exodus (Lev 23:43). The faith is Israel is always looking back.

Even their expectations and anticipations, including restoration, is anchored not in an ideal future utopia, but in their experiences of God’s hands in the past. The expected Messiah is not  really a new sort of creature that will do things that are completely unheard of. In fact, the Messiah they were expecting is mirrored in the life of King David, viewed as the ideal King of Israel. This means that their expectations of the future work of God is grounded in what they already know as God’s work, and their understanding of how God will work is grounded in how they know God has worked in the past. Ultimately, they have a glimpse of what they will experience in the future because the main Actor of the future is the same as in the past, the Lord who is the “compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness” (Exo 34:6; 2 Chron 30:9; Neh 9:17; Psa 86:15; 103:8; 111:4; 112:4; 145:8; Joel 2:13; Jonah 4:2).

It is within this realization that Jewish faith is retrospective that we can appreciate David’s claims. Ultimately, David can make the statement “The Lord is my Shepherd” not only because of the factual knowledge he has about what a shepherd does (as David is himself a shepherd), but also because of the experiential knowledge he has about the Lord’s shepherding of his life. David is one who has experienced and has been experiencing the Lord in his life, and hence his affirmation is not grounded in abstract speculation on what God as God can do. His affirmation is not an empty self-deceiving assurance, a fantasy acting as a defence mechanism to cope with present predicament. His affirmation is not blind faith, for he has seen and heard and felt God’s shepherding all throughout his life. His affirmation is not an ignorant guess, but is an utterance informed by real life encounters with God’s provision, sustenance, protection, and guidance.

If we postulate that David wrote the Psalm during his reign as king, then we can say that he indeed has experienced God’s shepherding in his life. For instance,

(1) David himself has experienced Psalm 23:1-2, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures…” David was just a simple shepherd, and from the looks of it, his own father did not think much of him (1 Sam 16:11) but he was chosen to be king, to leave the dirty field and dwell in abundance. 1 Samuel 21:1-6 also records the story when David and his companions were hungry and asked for bread from the priest Ahimelech, who then provided them food (cf. Matt 12:3; Mark 2:25).

(2) David himself experienced Psalm 23:3, for we read the story of his restoration through the prophet Nathan in 2 Samuel 12 when he sinned, although such a restoration was painful (cf Psa 52:1-12).

(3) David himself experienced Psalm 23:4, for he has walked so many valleys of the shadow of death. We have the stories when he killed a lion and a bear (1 Sam 17:34-36), met the giant Goliath in an insane one-to-one combat (1 Sam 17), and when King Saul tried to kill him (1 Sam 19), and yet in three occasions, God protected David’s life. This is why he can also proclaim in Psalm 27:1-3:

The Lord is my light and my salvation—whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the stronghold of my life—of whom shall I be afraid?

² When the wicked advance against me to devour me,
it is my enemies and my foes who will stumble and fall.
³ Though an army besiege me, my heart will not fear;
though war break out against me, even then I will be confident.

David will certainly not agree with Ludwig Feuerbach, Sigmund Freud, and Karl Marx in their erroneous assessment of Christianity. According to all three, coming from three different approaches but having the same conclusion, the Christian faith is the projection or invention of an ideal being, a being we wish to be but cannot be. For instance, Freud thought that it is humanity’s primal need to have a parent figure to take care of their needs. For Freud, therefore, the concept of the Good Shepherd is a creative invention made-up by people in order to comfort themselves. But as we have seen, David was not a Feuerbachian, Freudian, or Marxist philosopher projecting an image made out of his own self and self-needs. Rather, David was someone who has really experienced God’s shepherding. J His affirmation is grounded in historical experiences, not in idealism.

The relevant question for us as we start the new year is this: “How do we face the new and the unknown?” By looking at the old and the known. This reminder is important, because as our reading indicated, sometimes it is very easy to forget. Elijah experienced God’s mighty power right before his eyes. God declared himself as the one true God through a very tangible means. But right after God has revealed himself to be the reliable ally to Elijah, when he received a death-threat, he ran as quickly as he can, fleeing for his life to Horeb because of fear (1 Kings 19:3). In fact, he was so afraid, depressed and feeling hopeless that he prayed “Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors” (19:4). We can ask: where did the feeling of depression come from? Was it not that God just displayed his power over every gods and authorities? The root of Elijah’s fear was his amnesia, his forgetfulness. The same is true with the Israelites in Exodus 32. God just delivered them from their Egyptian bondage, and they were in the presence of their Deliverer at Mount Sinai, and what did they do? They built a golden calf and worshipped it. Like Elijah, the ground of their foolishness is their forgetfulness. This is why the summon this morning is to look back. Let us not forget the God who guided us in the past, who graciously provided for our needs, who protected us from harm, who lavished his blessings upon us, and even gave his life for our sakes. It is only when we remember God’s faithfulness in our lives that we can truly say “The Lord is my Shepherd… I shall not want.” Yes, J new things can happen, but always look back and always look up.

Is it not comforting that we face today and tomorrow, knowing that, just as in the past, we have a Friend, Companion, Helper, Guide, Comforter, Advocate, Prince of Peace, Almighty God? Is it not comforting that the God of Jeremiah is the same God we have today, He who proclaimed “For I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future” (29:11)? Is it not comforting that the Holy Spirit who enabled Jesus to overcome the devil’s temptations is the same God who Paul pronounced as faithful, and who “will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it” (1 Cor 10:13)? Is it not comforting that Jesus, the one who breathed the Spirit of Peace to the disciples when they were afraid and stressed (John 20:19-23) is the same Jesus who is “the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End” (Rev 22:13)? Is it not comforting that “He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion” (Phil 1:6)?

[This sermon was preached at APNTS Chapel, on the 3rd of January, 2013).