The pot can be seen as being a city, a community or even a church. In the Bible, a pot always brings sickness so it can be assumed the city, community or church is being effected by sin.
A mission team sets forth and arrives in a community to teach the good news and proclaim the truth of the Word of God and allow people to become interested in the church.
Of those interested though, some have been sent by the enemy. They accept the invitations to the church, they listen to the preaching and, accept them, mix themselves in the church or community, and win friendships within them. They are dark and devious. They begin to spread their malicious false teachings, albeit subtly, gently and through various seemingly innocent ways, by which they begin to cause upsets within the church or community as they seek to poison the true word. If they manage to obtain a position of authority within the church, they can cause huge disruptions, lead people away from the truth, and eventually could confuse them, cause them to leave the church, cause the church to split or even kill the church off. This would have an adverse effect on the wider community, enabling the church to become weaker to lose its effectiveness, its vision and its God-given healing power to the community.
Flour- A substance which neutralises the effect of the poison. People who are strong in the Lord, who know the truth, who know the Word of God and who are intercessors, warriors of prayer, who cover the whole situation in prayer. Prayer can neutralise the effects of the poisonous teachings because it calls upon the power of the God and the Holy Spirit and they can cause the false teachings and the false teachers to be exposed for what they are.
Compare this with Ezekiel 11:3 where the city is a cooking pot and wicked men are the poisonous meat which God then causes to be thrown out of the pot because of its wickedness.
Ezekiel 24 also mentions a cooking pot. This symbolises society of only the best people, the well educated, the famous, the higher classes and castes and the most wealthy or influential people. The society in the pot is boiled. It becomes a hive of activity. Its passions become intense, a magnet for business where the rich get richer. In the pot, bones are added for their additional nutrients. The wheels of commerce turn greatly. Life is great, life is pleasurable and sin abounds. There is bloodshed for those who cannot survive in the community, those who society pushes out, makes poor and who they trample upon on their way to the top. These people become like garbage and because of their number cannot be entirely hidden or buried away. They hang on the fringes of society like scum. Their lives although insignificant to some, remain as hints of danger.
The sin in the society is exposed. It is broken up or the society dies out, goes out of fashion, but now the remains of those who were trampled upon, those who were cheated, those who were ignored are now visible. It’s sins, cover ups, pay deals, murders, slanders are revealed. Those in the leadership positions in the society are not now beyond the law. They are exposed, however, even if all the deeds of the society are investigated and all assets are stripped away, and those in the society are forgotten about, its stained reputation will remain. Its impurities cannot be removed, even by fire. Such examples are like Sodom & Gomorrah, Babylon and more recently Waco, Texas.
Only when the Lord chooses, will the old reputations be forgotten and fade away.
Micah 3:2 explains that leaders in such a society rip people off, trample them, break them, destroy them to get want they want, but the Lord will turn his back on them.
No comments:
Post a Comment