Zeke

I finished Ezekiel.
My favorite chapter has always been 37 that has the valley of dry bones and God brings them back to life

13 Then you, my people, will know that I am the LORD, when I open your graves and bring you up from them. 14 I will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land. Then you will know that I the LORD have spoken, and I have done it, declares the LORD.' "

Ezekiel ends with a description of a temple and many measurements of all the details of the temple. And then the river that flows out from under it and Ezekiel goes deeper and deeper- it is a river of life. God measures things out then comes to bring LIFE.

Ezekiel ends with

"And the name of the city from that time on will be:
The LORD is There ."

And where the LORD is, there is life.

and by this you will know that I am the Lord

Ezekiel seems to talk about ways that the Israelites would know the Lord.
One that recurs is that they will know that He is God when they are punished for their sins. I take that to mean they will see that God is righteous and just and see that they are not and know that God is Lord.
In Ezekiel 24 it says that Ezekiel himself would be a sign to the people and they would know that He is Lord.
Now in what way would he be a sign? By being a prophet and them seeing that what he foretold was correct? I think even being himself with the crazy goings on might be a sign!

Ezekiel 18 and the life of Darth Vader

Yesterday night I read Ezekiel 18 and today I read to James the book "The life of Darth Vader" and I couldn't help but see the similarities. Vader starts out as good but becomes evil but then turns back to good again and it was what he was at the last that counted for where he went to Jedi heaven.
This is the same as what Ezekiel 18 says- if you live righteously and do right you will live.
If you change and do evil, you will be punished for your sin.
But if you change again and do good your sin will be washed away.
You are only punished for your own sin, not your parents sin, not your kids sins.
And this was all before Jesus came!

your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite

Ezekiel 16 is not too pretty. God doesn't seem bothered by the reality of humanity as He(through Ezekiel) speaks of a newborn baby covered in blood and left in a field to die. It's reality. We are that way before God restores us. Rustle started out that way too. God redeems us from the state we were in.
The chapter goes on to be a warning. When God has taken you away from being a bloody baby in a field. When you are starting to grow up. When you are becoming the man or woman that God wants you to be, don't get so full of yourself that you think you can make it without Him. Because you can't. There may be things in the world that cause you to take your focus off God, if you are doing ok, but He always is ready and waiting for you to come back.

Don't ask

In Jeremiah 42 Johanan and all the people approached Jeremiah to ask a question
"What should we do?"
And they must have known that asking God questions sometimes means you have to do difficult things and so they say:

6 Whether it is favorable or unfavorable, we will obey the LORD our God, to whom we are sending you, so that it will go well with us, for we will obey the LORD our God.

It wasn't that they didn't know what they were getting themselves into- they KNEW!
And then 10 days later the Word of the Lord came to Jeremiah.
My guess is that Jeremiah probably spent those 10 days praying.
This was direction for a whole COUNTRY. A whole people. I'd guess he dedicated some time to this. That he wasn't out cavorting and having a good time, when suddenly the Word came to him. I'd guess he was seeking it.
And then he tells them the answer:
"Stay"
Well they didn't LIKE the answer and they said that Jeremiah was lying. The answer didn't make sense- the king of Babylon was taking over their country so of course they should go. But God's answers don't always have to make sense. In fact they may more often than not make sense to our human minds. But God doesn't see things the way we see them. So He said "Stay" and they said "No"
Help me, Lord, to be obedient to you even when it looks like your answer is the wrong one.

The truth

In Jeremiah 40, 41 Johanan tells Gedaliah the truth about a guy named Ishmael.

40:16 But Gedaliah son of Ahikam said to Johanan son of Kareah, "Don't do such a thing! What you are saying about Ishmael is not true."

But it was true.
Sometimes we want things to be a certain way. We want the world to be a certain way, that we disrgard the truth because it doesn't fit with how we want the world to be. But how we want it to be is not always how it is.
It is important to be able to recognize truth.

Jeremiah 21

Jeremiah had the task quite frequently of telling people things that weren't so good. Things they probably didn't want to hear.
In this case a contingent comes to him with hope, wanting to ask God if He could do for them what He had done in the past. Could He rescue them from Babylon?
God's answer in this case is not positive- if you want to live: get out of the city!
I would have left the city right then! If God's answer is no to what you want, He still offers a path of life out of the difficult situation.
In the case in this chapter, the people of that city had created a problem and apparently the only way to fix the problem was to destroy the city. Sometimes fixing a problem requires destruction. But there is always a path out.