In this fifth part of the examination of the Book of Ezekiel, Pastor Barry looks at some of the warnings and predictions of what is in store for Israel (and Jerusalem in particular) if they do not TURN BACK TO GOD. Comparisons with modern day events and trends are prominent in the latter half of the sermon.
To kick off, Pastor Barry likened the book of Ezekiel to Ch 6 of the Book of Revelation.
There is a quick recap of previous 3 sermons (Ch 1 to 6), then an overview of what was planned to cover in this sermon.
The following matters are spoken of: – the 3 sieges of Jerusalem.
– Comparison with developments in present-day UK
– Chapter 10 (Ezekiel) & amillenialism
– The “so-called Christian Church ” is falling for the various deceptions permeating the country / world and getting into a perilous state! It also appears that many are merely social clubs.
– These things will merit God’s judgement and punishment
Pastor Barry next turned his attention back to Ezekiel’s day: Jerusalem was going to be destroyed – no doubt about it!
Next is a verse-by-verse analysis.
Change and return to normal were discussed, in the context of upheaval and irrevocable disruptions (Israel never returning to how they were before, in contrast to our post-Covid-19-epidemic lives). The Rapture was briefly touched on, with reference to people not heeding the signs of what they are approaching.
Pastor Barry spent some time dwelling on the expression in scripture, "full of violence", (an estimated 458,000 international murders occur each year) and provided a wealth of statistics on this subject, including abortions and killing of Christians.
The way that the Israelites worshipped many idols and things of different types is covered in the next section. Many correspondences between ancient individuals (often thought of as being in the mythology of Greek, Roman and Eastern gods but also in the ancestries listed in the Bible) were shown in projected slides (present in the PDF file available here) and spoken of at length.
In the present day, goings-on in the Vatican and Canterbury cathedral are giving cause for concern. These are described in some detail and slides show some ot the results of questionable policies!
Current trends and activities (immorality, abortion, selfishness and similar) are discussed on the context of God’s laws. Finally, the reference to “God’s fury” is brought up and related to the matters preceding here. Pastor Barry stressed that of course Christians abhor violence and do not advocate it, but we have to be prepared for God treating people in a way that is commensurate with their behaviour.
ZXZXZXZXZXZXZXZXZXZXZXZXZXZXZXZXZXZXZXZXZXZXZXZXZX
PS1: ::: 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 has been adopted. 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.
