Pastor Barry began with a brief recap of the nature of the book and earlier sermons. He then launched out into what is dealt with in Chapter 16 verses 27 onwards.
The parallels with today are striking! Judgement was (is) long overdue. Various features of the content are noted: the faithful were removed before judgement came The abominations being done were staggering; holy places were being desecrated; the Spirit of God departed and iniquity abounded!
It was stressed the The Holy Spirit was given to the church FOREVER, so things did dramatically change once the faithful were removed (and we can expect similar the next time it happens).
Ezekiel 4 contains a list of things that would be symptoms of the judgement.
Returning to Ch 16:
Ahaz & Manasseh: pro-Asyrian policy (2 Kings 16v7 & 21v1; 2 chron 33v1–)
Pastor Barry digressed a little and spoke about the frequency & duration of praying and of scripture-reading. There was a comparison of praying and the procedure at a drive-through for buying fast-food.
There was an examination of stoning being punishment for adultery (marriage faithfullness is highly Sanctified in God’s eyes).
The Crimes of Sodom were examined at some length: a list of things was presented (NOT what we commonly associate with Sodom!)
The crime of Samaria – idolatry! Jerusalem was WORSE!
Arrogance was added to the list.
Pastor Barry reminded us that Sin usually looks worse on others (not so much on ourselves)
The comforting fact was evident, that God promised restoration; also “Healing of the Land”.
We were reminded that God is just and sins attract judgement; that God’s judgement did fall, but on His Son, not on us.
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PS0: ::: The latest development on the “Transcript” section is that the text-file will be subject to far less preparation than before – less editing and correction. It will still be converted to sentence-column form as before, but any trimming and polishing will be left to the user. Any shortcomings in the transcription software should be pretty obvious and so not a problem in getting the meaning (and the audio file will provide the necessary clarification if required 😀🎧 )
PS1: ::: {not-so-}NEW FORMAT of the transcript.
To ease the processing and preparation of the transcript, and we hope improve the readability of the text, a new format was been adopted in mid October. This breaks the text into sentences instead of arbitrarily-sized “paragraphs”. When the reader opens the file in a program such as Notepad (in MS Windows), then the appearance can be just like a newspaper column. The format is such that the user has many options available, depending on preferences and what software they like to use.
Any feedback on usefulness, improvement suggestions, or whatever, would be most welcome.
PS2 ::::: TRANSCRIPT OF THE SERMON
There is a “button” labelled “Save Video” (or “Download Video” sometimes). This actually links to a text-file to download. It is a transcript of the sermon. At present it is at an experimental stage: it is an aid to getting the most out of the sermon audio. There is no substitute for listening to the verbal delivery of a sermon. However, searching through an audio file lasting the best part of an hour can be somewhat difficult. When you approach the search knowing that you’re sure there is something about “redemption”, for example, then a transcript text-search can take you right there and show you the time in the recording where you will find it! The file is simple “text” rather than a more sophisticated form so that you can edit or reformat as you prefer. This transcript is in 2 forms (in the one file). One half consists of normal text arrangement. These ‘blocks’ were at purely arbitrary boundaries (boundaries were inserted at about 800 character intervals, purely to avoid having one huge unbroken deluge of text, i.e. no attempt at grammatical accuracy). The format has now been changed as described above in PS1. The other section is short bunches of words (8 to 12 nomally) beneath the TIMES at which they occur (for the whole sermon).
This facility is in development (“experimental” as mentioned above) so any feedback on usefulness, improvement suggestions, or whatever, would be most welcome.
