The spiritually healthy response to the hardened, evil world around us
…is to hang out in the uncomfortable space between indifference and rage.
A couple weeks ago I was invited to a Sunday afternoon Bible reading marathon. The idea was to show up at my friend’s house along with 5 or 6 other people, and spend the next few hours taking turns reading half the book of Ezekiel out loud.
When I was initially invited to this, I was excited to do the unusual thing of reading a book of the Bible straight through with a bunch of chums, but a little depressed about the Ezekiel part. It’s not like we run to Ezekiel to find great comfort and instruction during our trials and tribulations…
Surprisingly, there were many, many verses sprinkled amongst the 24 chapters we read that day that blew me away— verses I simply had forgotten about because I haven’t read Ezekiel as a whole in over ten years. I want to share a specific passage with you on this post, though, because it relates to the post I sent out a couple weeks ago. Not the part that had to do with reigning in sin, but the subplot that dealt with anger as a secondary emotion (for those of you who read it, the part where I talked about road rage).
The sort of anger I’m referring to stems from the state of disrepair we find the world in every time we see a news headline, leave our homes or spend any amount of time on the internet. The Bible is not lacking in examples of this brand of anger, where we feel offended on behalf of God when we see people blatantly rejecting His wisdom and love. It is found all the way through the Psalms where David and the other psalmists are like, “God, can you just take the wicked and smash their skulls in so we can have a little justice in this world? And can we stand over here at a safe distance and watch you do it? Just so we can see with our eyes a little of the vengeance you promised?”1
Because anger is a secondary emotion, or an emotion we default to when the original emotion we are feeling is too much for us to bear, we know the rage we feel towards the evil in this world is not about the anger per se, but about a mournful overwhelmed-ness. That mournful state, as we will see, is actually an appropriate response to the unrighteousness we see all around us, and God wants to show us why the pain of living on a fallen planet does not need the protective covering of our anger thrown over it every time the world makes us crazy.
So here’s what I found in Ezekiel.
Ezekiel, along with the nation of Israel, is an exile in Babylon when this vision in chapter 9 takes place. The vision has to do with how God is going to punish Jerusalem specifically for all the heretical practices taking place not only in the city, but in the deepest layers of God’s temple.
Then the glory of the God of Israel rose up from between the cherubim, where it had rested, and moved to the entrance of the Temple. And the Lord called to the man [an angel] dressed in linen who was carrying the writer’s case. He said to him, “Walk through the streets of Jerusalem and put a mark on the foreheads of all who weep and sigh because of the detestable sins being committed in their city.”
Then I heard the Lord say to the other men [angels], “Follow him through the city and kill everyone whose forehead is not marked. Show no mercy; have no pity! Kill them all—old and young, girls and women and little children. But do not touch anyone with the mark. Begin right here at the Temple.” So they began by killing the seventy leaders.
-Ezekiel 9:3-6, NLT, emphasis mine
Those in Jerusalem who “weep and sigh” when they see how blackened with sin their city has become are marked on the very public and obvious place of their foreheads. And that mark is their ticket out of God’s judgement. This theme of God “marking” His people or setting them apart for various reasons and states of preservation runs through the entire Bible, from Genesis to Revelation.2 It is a strong system God uses over and over again to delineate the fate of those who follow Him and those who do not.
The important question in this passage is why these people in Ezekiels’s vision are marked, and the answer is very simple: because they cared.
It bothered them that their city— the holy city where God dwelt—had gone to crap. They were marked because they saw what was going on around them and they refused to call it normal or fine or OK or charmingly progressive. They refused to not hurt, if I may use a double negative, over the paganism their entire society was engaged in. They sighed because they knew God was sighing. They mourned because they knew God was mourning over the actions of His people.
They were marked because they chose to sit in the smack-dab middle of the immense tension between knowing God, and also knowing their city were not headed in a good direction and there was nothing they could do about it. Their orientation towards God forced them to sink down into the static, aching pain of that tension. It forced them to face how powerless they were to change any of it. They might have found comfort in thinking, “Maybe someday God would bring righteousness back to our land,” but other than that, there was nothing to accompany them as they stepped outside their door every morning but the heartbreak, the sighing and the restless dissonance of disagreeing with the entire world around them. That’s it.
Things haven’t changed very much in the 2600 years since Ezekiel 9 was written. I feel like those sighing residents of Jerusalem every single day.
And incredibly, according to Ezekiel’s vision, this reaction to the world around me is exactly what God wants me to do when I see my society crumbling around me.
The vision shows us that God sees— truly and intimately sees— those of us who mourn over the horrific, godless path towards destruction our world is gaily skipping down. He fastidiously notes the individuals who disagree with the direction the world (and oftentimes the church) is headed. Why do you think the angel in Ezekiel’s vision carried a writers case? Because God’s judgement is not careless: on the contrary, it is rigorously neurotic, hence the writers case to inform the specific, precise work the angel is doing. God has notes and tabs on the feelings and opinions of individuals and those notes are about to shed mercy or blood during Jerusalem’s time of judgement.3 Think about that.
The vision teaches us that the sense of powerlessness we get when we look at the evil around us is true on a level— we can’t change the hearts of our neighbors— but not true on another level. There is actual power in mourning unrighteousness, and the power has to do with how God will deal with us.
It makes me think of the verse, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled.” This verse could mean a person is thirsting for righteousness for themselves (a right standing with God personally), but it could also mean righteousness in general— in the world around them.
Jesus doesn’t promise, “They will live to see the precise righteousness they wish to see in the world.” He instead promises those who hunger for God’s rightness to reign will be filled. He doesn’t promise details, but he does promise eventual satisfaction. Blessed are you when right and wrong matter to you— so much so that it consumes you. Your hungry heart yearns for just a teaspoon’s worth of things being set right. You crave it fanatically the way your body craves water. If God sees you doing that, says both Ezekiel and Jesus, He takes note of it and He will square up with you personally because of it if you can hang in there. I find that simply incredible.
This concept shows us how we can heal our anger and/or survive the insanity of the time we live in.
By not only allowing ourselves to mourn the evil around us, no matter how painful it is, but by believing that God absolutely sees our mourning and intends to honor it one day. Our mourning is not for nothing. We need to see our grieved reaction to our culture, not as powerless pain, but as deeply meaningful work: work that will be “rewarded openly” by “the God who sees in secret.”4
And we need to be encouraged when we are moved to mourn the evil we see, because it proves what side of the line we are on.
So this post is for the ones who struggle, like myself, with what they see around them— who feel powerless towards the trajectory of our society (and some of our churches) and yet are of the breed of Christ follower that cannot simply turn off their voracious hunger for righteousness.
You don’t have to turn it off. Keep it on, no matter how much it hurts. Keep it on and don’t let it drift towards anger, because the mourning— the mere hunger for righteousness— is more than enough in God’s economy. The anger is just waste and froth: it doesn’t do anything but hurt us.5
Instead, God is looking for a vulnerable, broken heart. He promises to see, to take note, to pay immense attention to your sighs and weeping (and even the anger when it happens). He notices your zeal. He gets your zeal, because it was the same zeal that made him drive all the money changers out of the temple with a whip.6
Stay hungry for righteousness (while rejecting the temptation to feed that hunger with anger) so that someday, in whatever cosmic way God chooses, you can have the amazing honor of feeling what it’s like for God to completely satisfy that desire. It must be worth waiting for, because Jesus calls those willing to bank on that satisfaction “blessed.”
The world is marching off towards its fate and there’s not much we can do to stop it, but it doesn’t have to take us down with it. And if we keep our hearts sensitive to the right things, raw and broken though they may make us, we can be sure our God who sees in secret will one day make all that seemingly useless suffering and hungering completely worth it.
So let’s not get tired of doing what is good. At just the right time we will reap a harvest of blessing if we don’t give up.
Galatians 6:9 NLT
Psalm 17:13, 28:4-5, 137:9… the list goes on.
God marked Cain to preserve him, Noah was not technically marked but he was chosen to survive the flood because of his walk with God, Rahab hung a red cord out of her window to “mark” her for safety when the Israelites destroyed Jericho… fast forward to the New Testament and the Spirit that is given to us as a “seal of ownership on us” (2 Cor. 1:22), along with the people marked in Revelation. It’s all over the Bible.
The same thing happens in Revelation when Jesus is talking to the churches— He always says, “I know” about the seemingly tiny, sometimes invisible details of how they follow their faith, whether good or bad. And check this verse out: “Then all the churches will know that I am the one who searches out the thoughts and intentions of every person. And I will give to each of you whatever you deserve.” Revelation 2:23 NLT
Matthew 6:6
“The wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of God.” James 1:20
John 2:13-22. “Zeal for your house has eaten me up.”
This is really encouraging. The angel wasn't told to put a mark on the forehead of everyone who was shouting warnings from the street corners or those who had been locked up or shunned because they stood up for and with God's righteousness (although that may have been the case for some of those who were marked), but all those who merely mourned in their own hearts and minds over the wickedness.
It's also a good reminder and challenge to never let ourselves get calused. Just because we can't turn the world around on our own is no excuse to stop being disturbed by what we see. We can also take comfort in the fact that we can always find expression for that internal pain through prayer.
Right on. This verse comes to mind when I think about this topic: "he rescued righteous Lot, greatly distressed by the sensual conduct of the wicked (for as that righteous man lived among them day after day, he was tormenting his righteous soul over their lawless deeds that he saw and heard)" (2 Peter 2:7-8)