THE LORD IS THERE
Scripture Reading: Ezekiel 48:30-35
Ezekiel is a difficult book to understand and interpret. I have preached from selected passages in the book a few times during my ministry, but I have never attempted to preach a series through the entire book. It is a tough one, at least for me.
But I like the way the book ends. As much as I don’t understand what Ezekiel wrote, it seems to me that the last four words are what everything he wrote was leading to. It is the grand climax. We can all understand the ending of his book.
“THE LORD IS THERE.”
The English Standard Version and the New King James Version both put those final words in all caps. I like that. It is like a giant exclamation point as the last word in the book.
Revelation’s last chapters have the same exclamatory ending, though in a wordier form than Ezekiel’s final four. Revelation 21:3 says, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.” Similarly, in Revelation 21:22-23 John says he “saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light and its lamp is the Lamb.” Then, in Revelation 22:4 we are told that we “will see his face, and his name will be on [our] foreheads. And night will be no more. [We] will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be [our] light, and [we] will reign forever and ever.”
So, I don’t understand everything, or even much, of what Ezekiel wrote about the future, but what I do understand, and what he states clearly and with emphasis is that in the future eternal kingdom, it will always be true that “THE LORD IS THERE.”
It is a true statement about the nature of God to say that God is omnipresent. God is everywhere. It is also a true statement to say that our experience of God’s presence and our awareness of God’s presence isn’t always the same. In our worst days, God seems absent. Even in the best of times, we walk by faith and not by sight. We are the blessed of whom John wrote “who have not seen and yet have believed,” (John 20:29).
But there is coming a day when our faith shall be made sight and “when he appears…we shall see him as he is…” (1 John 3:2). There is a coming age during which every day we will be able to say with exultant joy, “THE LORD IS THERE!”
