Ezekiel 17:22-24
Int.: Ezekiel the prophet was one of the priests of Judah who was hauled away into captivity in Babylon by King Nebuchadnezzar.
In Babylon God called Ezekiel to be his prophet and to call his wayward and unbelieving people back to faith in him. Ezekiel’s ministry paralleled that of Jeremiah. While Jeremiah called on the Jewish people who were left behind in the land of Judah to repent and turn back to the Lord, Ezekiel called on those who had been taken away into captivity to do the same thing. Their message was the same although the places and people to whom they proclaimed that message were quite different.
The 17th chapter of Ezekiel is all allegorical parables about the religion and politics of Judah. The figure of a cedar tree is prominent throughout the chapter. The cedar tree represents the house of David, the ruling family of Judah. By association, it also represents the Jewish people and nation. The first 21 verses of this chapter are directed at King Zedekiah, who was placed into office by King Nebuchadnezzar. Zedekiah was plotting rebellion against Nebuchadnezzar. In the parable God says that the rebellion will fail, the nation will be thoroughly destroyed, and Zedekiah will die in Babylon as a disgraced prisoner in chains.
The last three verses of this chapter, our text today, use similar allegorical figures, but tell a whole different story of the future. After a detailed promise of destruction for the king and the nation of Judah, the prophet ends this chapter with …
God’s Promise Of Salvation.
I. I Will Plant A Tender Shoot On A High Mountain.
That tender shoot from a tall cedar tree is Jesus Christ and the Church he founded.
Jesus was a shoot that came up from the cut off stump of King David’s family tree. Over a century earlier the prophet Isaiah had foretold, “A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.” (Isaiah 11:1) The Babylonian conquest of Judah ended the Davidic dynasty. In the 425 years that this single family ruled the nation of Judah, it had grown into a huge family tree. But when the nation was destroyed, all claims of royalty were destroyed with it.
It would be over 600 years before a new King of the Jews would arise from this family line. That king would not restore Judah’s monarchy, but its theocracy. That king was none other than the God-man Jesus Christ. Several times in this short prophecy God emphasizes how he himself is going to bring about salvation, and not some king or hero of this world. Through Jesus Christ God did exactly what he promises in our text.
That tender shoot that God would break off from the top of a tall cedar tree represents the Christian Church. God broke off the Christian Church from the Old Testament Jewish religion. The Jewish church of Jesus’ day was well over 1500 years old, and had grown into a large institution, a political institution that was spiritually dead and dry in its love for God and in its service to God.
The topmost part of that tree, which is the sprig that God is talking about in our text, represents the most faithful believers in the land and religion of Israel. They were broken off from the Jewish church by following God’s Son Jesus Christ, and the new religion that he founded, Christianity.
That shoot taken from the very top of the Jewish church God said would be planted on the mountain heights of Israel.
The Christian church was founded in the hills of Galilee, in the northern part of Israel, by the preaching and teaching and miracles of Jesus when he lived and preached there for the first two years of his ministry on earth. The real beginning of Christianity, however, can be traced to the sacred mountains of Judaism, the city of Jerusalem. There God truly began his Church on earth at the end of Jesus’ earthly ministry.
Christianity began with Jesus’ death on the cross for the sins of the world on a hill just outside Jerusalem called “Calvary.” Jesus was chosen by God to die as a sacrifice to pay for our sins and to earn their forgiveness for us. Jesus was also condemned to death by his own people because he told them who he was and why he had come to earth – he was the Son of God, who had come to be their promised Savior.
In raising Jesus back to life on the third day after his crucifixion, God proclaimed that our sins were all forgiven, and that our salvation was complete. That act broke ground for the building of the Christian Church as the home of God’s people on earth.
Fifty days after Passover, on the Day of Pentecost, Christianity was officially founded. On Pentecost Jesus’ followers were all filled with the Holy Spirit and clearly preached the Gospel of Salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. 3,000 people were converted to Christianity that day alone, and thousands more joined the Church in the weeks that followed. For the next few years the Christian Church was centered in Jerusalem and spread quickly throughout Judea, Samaria, and Galilee. The result was that most of the people in the land of Israel at that time became Christians.
But at the same time, the Church was also spreading far beyond the borders of Israel. At first it was spread by ordinary lay people just like you, people who went to new places and shared their faith with relatives and friends wherever they went. Then the apostles and others whom they trained went out to the far corners of the globe with God’s message of salvation in Christ, and people far and wide had a chance to believe the Gospel and be saved.
In our text God promises, “All the trees of the field will know that I the Lord bring down the tall tree and make the low tree grow tall, I dry up the green tree and make the dry tree flourish.”
God’s Church became a new tree – the Christian Church – and the old tree of Judaism dried up and died. It dried up through its own rejection of God’s Word and its rejection of the true, the Triune God, and its rejection God’s Son as its Savior and Lord.
Finally, in 70 A. D., God in his anger at their unbelief sent the armies of Rome to destroy Israel and to wipe that nation out for almost 1900 years. Their temple was destroyed and their priesthood wiped out. Without a priesthood descended from Aaron the brother of Moses, there is no hope of ever really reestablishing the Hebrew religion.
But God’s new Church on earth is a different story altogether. In our text God promises that …
II. It Will Become A Splendid Cedar.
Through the blessing of God’s Word and the work of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of people, Christ’s Church on earth grew.
It grew then just as it does now: through the Means of Grace, the Bible and the Sacrament of Baptism. In the centuries after the destruction of Jerusalem, the Christian Church spread far and wide throughout the world. Wherever believers went they preached God’s Word, just as God has commanded us to do today. They told their friends and neighbors and relatives, just as we do, what God has done for them as well as for us in his Son Jesus Christ.
For almost 1000 years the Christian Church grew larger and larger, stronger and stronger, by adding more and more people to it. It became a splendid cedar tree in God’s sight. It became the dominant force in what is today the western world, and it formed our culture.
But in the Middle Ages that tree of the Christian Church died for lack of God’s Word.
Just as the Jewish Church had before it, the Christian Church first ignored God’s Word, and then openly rejected it. God’s Word was slowly replaced with the ideas and teachings of men. Slowly but surely, human reason and the philosophy of humanism became the driving force and popular belief of the Christian Church.
After a time God’s Word was all but lost to his Church, and the Church was all but dead as a result. And unfortunately, that same thing is happening today in much of the Christian Church throughout the world. Man’s ideas of right and wrong are replacing God’s, and God’s Law and morality are being shoved aside and discarded as irrelevant or old fashioned. Man’s natural beliefs about salvation by your own works are replacing God’s Gospel of salvation by faith in Christ.
Making up your own beliefs instead of accepting what God has revealed in his Word has become popular religion in the Church once again. Most people today see a church as belonging to its members and existing to serve them instead of God. That is exactly what Christ’s apostles foretold when St. Paul wrote to Timothy, “the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.” (2 Timothy 4:3-4)
At the end of the Middle Ages God brought fresh life back to his Church and made it strong again through the Reformation.
Men like Martin Luther brought God’s Word in the Bible back from obscurity and taught it faithfully to people who had been starved spiritually by being deprived of that life-giving Word.
God’s Word once again became the heart and core of Christian teaching, and Christ was restored as the Savior and Lord of his people. And so the dried tree budded out and was made green once again, just as God had prophesied in our text through his prophet Ezekiel.
The struggle to renew God’s Church goes on today just as it did at the time of Jesus and the apostles, and at the time of the Reformation.
The fungus of rejecting God’s Word is still killing off many of the branches of God’s tree, church body after church body, and the rot of human reason replacing God’s will with man’s mistaken ideas is endangering the very life of the Church. The truth of God is always in danger of being replaced by the lies of our own hearts, which are so natural and sound so good to our human natures. But those lies lead down the road to hell instead of up the pathway to eternal life.
It is a never-ending struggle for each individual Christian as well as the whole Church of God to resist that fungus of rejecting God’s Word, and the rot of replacing God’s Word with human reason, so that we can stay spiritually healthy and green and growing members of God’s kingdom.
But God promises that when his Church does that, it will continue to prosper and grow, and …
III. Birds Of Every Kind Will Nest In It.
Those are the believers from every corner of the earth who come to faith in Christ.
They can be found everywhere that there are people. In the most remote regions of the globe, as well as in the most densely populated cities, God’s Word is regularly proclaimed, and his people meet to worship him and to grow in their faith by studying and learning his word.
Here we have freedom of religion and churches flourish. There are more Christian churches in and around Swartz Creek than anywhere else I have ever seen. But in places where religious freedom does not exist, God’s word is beamed to people by satellite. It is very likely that this proclamation of Christ by satellite has given the people of Iran the courage and the hope to rebel against their oppressive Islamic regime.
In places without modern technology, and even in tribes without a written language, God’s word is being proclaimed today from hand cranked “Proclaimers” that have the Bible recorded on microchips in their own languages.
The result is that people from all kinds of backgrounds and with all sorts of talents have become part of God’s Church on earth.
We see that today in this congregation, as well as in larger church groupings. What a wonderful blessing from God that he has made each and every one of us a member of his Church, no matter what our background, or what our former way of life might have been.
God says that we, like the birds of the air, make our nests, our spiritual homes, in the tree of the Christian Church. We come to God’s Church for spiritual shelter, protection, and as a place to grow and raise our families to be children of God.
God also promised through Ezekiel that the branches of his Church will produce fruit for our nourishment. Ezekiel was talking about the Word of God and Sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, on which our faith is regularly fed, and which makes us strong as God’s people.
You know, the lesson that God is teaching us in this parable about his Church on earth can also be applied to the lives of each and every single believer.
That is because your spiritual life comes from hearing and applying God’s Word to your own life on earth. Without God’s Word as a steady diet for our faith, you and I would also dry up and die spiritually. It is only with the teaching of God’s Word in the Bible, and with the use of the Lord’s Supper regularly in our lives, that God keeps us spiritually healthy. One hour of God’s Word a week is not enough for spiritual health – we need to read and study it every day at home.
Even the dry trees who have fallen away from God’s Word and from service to him in their lives can also be made green and alive once again if they come back to hearing and believing what God says to us in the Bible, just as God promises in our text where he says, “I dry up the green tree and make the dry tree flourish.”
It is only through the Means of Grace that God creates and keeps faith alive in the hearts of people and makes us a part of this Church, here in this world and also in eternity. How remarkable that over 2,500 years ago God’s prophet Ezekiel would detail for us in this parable, …
Con.: God’s Promise Of Salvation.
I Will Plant A Tender Shoot On A High Mountain, a new Church to replace the rebellious and dying one.
It Will Become A Splendid Cedar and fill the whole earth with its message of life and salvation.
Birds Of Every Kind Will Nest In It as people from all over the earth turn to Christ for their salvation and serve him as their Lord and God, just as you and I are doing today. Amen.