Your Dearest Treasure
One Year Bible: November 12
Ezekiel 24:1-26:21
Your Dearest Treasure
What is the price tag that you would place on your faithfulness?
How hot would it need to get in your kitchen for you to throw in the towel and walk away?
The pot is HOT and boiling over right about now in the life of Ezekiel, and many a servant would run right on out of the kitchen and feel that what God is requiring of them is just too much!
Today’s story begins with a parable about meat cooking in a pot. The problem is that the meat is rotten and its corruption can’t be cleaned out. God is the FIRE below the pot and the heat He places on the situation has just added fuel for the fire. The time of cleansing has passed and the filth must be thrown out and God’s fury must be satisfied.
The servant carrying the sign to demonstrate this devastating judgment is Ezekiel and the price for his obedience is the death of “His Dearest Treasure”!
That very night Ezekiel’s wife dies! Ezekiel is told, “Yet, you must not show any sorrow at her death. Do not weep; let there be no tears. Groan silently, but let there be no wailing at her grave. Do not uncover your head or take off your sandals. Do not perform the usual rituals of mourning or accept any food brought to you by consoling friends.” (Ezekiel 24:15-17)
Can you imagine such a steep price of commitment to be God’s messenger?
Ezekiel was to be “The Living Sign” of what God was going to do to His own wife, Jerusalem. They were to know that when the time came for judgment, it was the Sovereign LORD! (Chp. 24) How sad for Ezekiel! Yet, his wife would not be there to face this devastating day of dread.
Ezekiel is not allowed to mourn or grieve, and his voice is then taken away from him also. It will not return to him until these things have happened and a survivor from Jerusalem comes to Babylon to tell him what has happened. “Then the people will know that I am the Lord”.
Perhaps, you may recall when Jesus went into the Temple in the New Testament and cleaned it out. His righteous anger showed that day also. He said, “My Temple will be called a house of prayer, but you have turned it into a den of thieves!” (Mt. 21:13)
The Sovereign God of the Old Testament is doing the Very Same Thing but to a greater extent.
They had brought “their rotten meat” to the altar and defamed the temple. The watching world had discredited Jerusalem and the Temple because of their disastrous actions.
God is “removing the rotten meat” that has been boiling over the pot for quite some time. He is also dealing with “The Pagan Pot Stirrers”... Ammon, Moab, Edom, Philistia, and Tyre.
You see, all of these nations had been rejoicing in Jerusalem’s destruction and God was not about to let them rejoice over evil. They too will learn that the wrath of God that demands OBEDIENCE rather than REBELLION.
Ezekiel was not the only servant of God to pay the ultimate price for his obedience to follow a Holy God in an Unholy World!
Perhaps you have never heard the name, Betty Stam, but to me, her story of faith by Standing In The Gap is truly unforgettable!
They were young missionaries to China and it was a bleak December day. They heard rumors of a possible bandit attack on their isolated community. They had a beautiful baby girl, Helen Priscilla, who had blue eyes, an innocent face, and curly hair. Betty asked her husband if he thought they should leave, but with the weather, they hunkered down to wait and see…
The wildly cheering bandits broke down the doorway of the Stam’s home and stripped them of their outer clothes leading them away in humiliation with just their underwear on this winter’s day. Their hands were tied behind their backs, and Betty was allowed to tightly hold her three-month-old baby. They were taken to a hut before being executed.
Somehow, Betty had wrapped the baby tightly and stuck a $10.00 bill inside the baby’s blanket before being executed. How the baby did not cry for 27 hours (to not be found or killed) is beyond human explanation. However, a man did find the baby and the money. With this money, he bought baby formula to save the baby’s life.
He placed John and Betty Stam in caskets and had to leave them there for fear of his life. John Stam had a short note on him, “My wife, baby, and myself are today in the hands of communist bandits. Whether we will be released or not no one knows. May God be magnified in our bodies, whether by life or by death.”
God was magnified in their faithfulness, and they were released into His loving hand through death into LIFE! A high price for faithfulness had been paid on that fateful day, but God had prepared both of their hearts in advance. Listen to the words of Betty Stam written on Aug. 3, 1925, nine years before being martyred with her husband, John, in China.
“Lord, I give up my own purposes and plans, all my own desires, hopes, and ambitions, and accept Thy will for my life. I give myself, my life, my all, utterly to thee, to be Thine forever. I hand over to Thy keeping all of my friendships, and my love; all the people whom I love are to take second place in my heart. Fill me and seal me with Thy Holy Spirit. Work out your will in my life, AT ANY COST now and forever.”
You see, both Ezekiel and John and Betty Stam knew the price of serving and the message that goes beyond all grief. Both gave up “Their dearest treasures” to receive… “Their Dearest Treasure.”
John Stam’s final words were, “To me to live is Christ and to die is gain.” (Phil. 1:20)
What or WHO is “Your Dearest Treasure”?
