Day 311

Ezekiel 13:1-15:8, Hebrews 8:1-13, Psalm 120:1-7

There is a lot of stuff in these readings that we have covered before. We see the false prophets, we see the new and old covenants and we see the importance of the Old Testament in interpreting the New. All of these are things that I have written about already as we have gone along.

So let’s take a different tack on the false prophets. There is talk of whitewashed walls in an analogy that I did not find that easy to follow. The main point relates to the fact that the walls are paper thin, cracked and not very well built. They are then whitewashed to make them look good, but the elements will soon knock them down and they will be shown for what they really are. The link is that the false prophets words are just as poorly constructed and yet they dress them up to look like true prophecy.

As I was wondering what on earth all of this meant I watched a video on the BBC news website about relaying a runway. The reporter tells us that each stretch of that runway has to be perfect, free from any error so that the planes can land. The runway must be perfect, it is a matter of life and death. If there is an imperfection in the runway the plane may crash and people may die.

The word of God is a matter of life and death. People are given new life through the grace that is offered us in the life and death of Christ. They die to their sins and they are born again into new life. When we mess with the word of God, when we dress it up for something that it is not, when we don’t tell people the truth about the Gospel, lives are in the balance. This is what the false prophets were doing.

Let us not be false prophets, let us speak the truth of the Gospel so that people might be brought to life and not to death. What are you going to speak out today?