Ezekiel 17:22-24. "Loyalty is Not a Small Thing in God's Eyes."

God emphasizes the importance of keeping promises, regardless of whether the other party deserves it. Breaking promises, leads to severe consequences. This principle applies to various aspects of life, such as marriage and employment, where loyalty and commitment are paramount.

The parable concludes with God’s promise of restoration through Jesus, a descendant of David. Jesus, by humbling himself and remaining obedient, fulfilled God’s promises and achieved his rightful place on the throne. This highlights that God keeps has promises and values loyalty.

In our lives, keeping promises reflects God’s character. Though promises might seem insignificant, they are opportunities to demonstrate faith and integrity. As Christians, let us be known for our loyalty and trustworthiness, embodying God’s unwavering faithfulness.

 This Sunday sermon, based on Ezekiel 17 verses 22-24, was preached at Grace of God Lutheran Church on June 16,2024.  This sermon is preached by Pastor Timothy J. Walsh, a member of WELS (Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod). Scripture selections come from the New International Version.

Our services are at 9:30am every Sunday morning, at our campus in Dix Hills on Long Island. Visit our website for more information, at www.graceofgod.church 

Intro Music "On the Way" by Vlad Gluschenko https://soundcloud.com/vgl9
Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0

Outro Music "Divenire" by Ludovico Einaudi
copyright (℗) by: Ludovico Einaudi (in 2006)            

Transcript

Peace and hope to you in Jesus’ name, people of God. Amen.

I’m going to take you into a really obscure part of the Bible today, friends. So as I mentioned earlier, have a Bible at hand, or the Bible app on your phone if you prefer. We’re starting at the beginning of Ezekiel chapter seventeen.Starting at verse one: “The word of the LORD came to me: ‘Son of man, set forth an allegory and tell it to the Israelites as a parable. Say to them, “This is what the Sovereign LORD says: A great eagle with powerful wings, long feathers and full plumage of varied colors came to Lebanon. Taking hold of the top of a cedar, he broke off its topmost shoot and carried it away to a land of merchants, where he planted it in a city of traders.”’” 

We heard from this book of the Bible, the prophet Ezekiel’s book, about a month ago, when we read his vision of a valley of dry bones. Ezekiel was a prophet who lived through what we call the Babylonian captivity. About two thousand six hundred years ago, the Babylonian empire conquered Israel, conquered Jerusalem, and took its people into captivity. Ezekiel was taken away with those captives, and God gave him visions and parables to share with the other captives about their situation. That valley of dry bones was one; this parable is another.

In this parable, God pictures the king of Babylon as a powerful eagle. This eagle breaks the top off a tall tree and carries it to a city. The treetop was the king of Jerusalem, Ezekiel’s king, a man named Jehoiachin. Jerusalem was conquered in 597 BC, and this was when Jehoiachin, Ezekiel, and the other captives - the wealthy and powerful people of Jerusalem - were taken to Babylon, the “city of traders” in the parable.

Verse five: “He” - the eagle - “took one of the seedlings of the land and put it in fertile soil. He planted it like a willow by abundant water, and it sprouted and became a low, spreading vine. Its branches turned toward him, but its roots remained under it. So it became a vine and produced branches and put out leafy boughs.”

After the king of Babylon took King Jehoiachin captive, he made Jehoiachin’s uncle, a man named Mattaniah, the new king of Jerusalem. This is the “seedling of the land” which the eagle plants. The Babylonians intended for Mattaniah to be their vassal, a technical word meaning a ruler who is ruled by another ruler. Mattaniah was going to rule over Jerusalem and the land of Judah as an ally of the Babylonians, and he was supposed to send them tribute money in exchange for them keeping him on the throne of Jerusalem.

Verse seven: “But there was another great eagle with powerful wings and full plumage. The vine now sent out its roots toward him from the plot where it was planted and stretched out its branches to him for water. It had been planted in good soil by abundant water so that it would produce branches, bear fruit and become a splendid vine.”

This new eagle was Pharaoh, the king of Egypt. Mattaniah wanted to be free from his Babylonian overlords. The king of Egypt offered to help him. We keep reading, now God’s own explanation of the parable, I’m at verse eleven: “Then the word of the LORD came to me: “Say to this rebellious people, ‘Do you not know what these things mean?’ Say to them: ‘The king of Babylon went to Jerusalem and carried off her king and her nobles, bringing them back with him to Babylon. Then he took a member of the royal family and made a treaty with him, putting him under oath. He also carried away the leading men of the land, so that the kingdom would be brought low, unable to rise again, surviving only by keeping his treaty. But the king rebelled against him by sending his envoys to Egypt to get horses and a large army. Will he succeed? Will he who does such things escape? Will he break the treaty and yet escape? As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD, he” - Mattaniah, the new king - “he shall die in Babylon, in the land of the king who put him on the throne, whose oath he despised and whose treaty he broke. Pharaoh with his mighty army and great horde will be of no help to him in war, when ramps are built and siege works erected to destroy many lives. He despised the oath by breaking the covenant. Because he had given his hand in pledge and yet did all these things, he shall not escape.”

God takes promises very seriously. That’s the point of this whole weird parable about eagles and trees and vines. God takes promises seriously. Mattaniah had promised, under oath, with a treaty, to govern Jerusalem as king with loyalty to the king of Babylon. He intended to break that promise. God was angry.

Why? Was the king of Babylon perfect? Certainly not! In the book of Daniel, we’re told of a number of times where the king of Babylon - who was named Nebuchadnezzar - showed himself to be a sinful human being, often one who rejected God. Nebuchadnezzar made an immense statue of himself and ordered people to worship it. When three young men from the group of Jewish captives refused, Nebuchadnezzar threw them into a fire. He boasted of his own greatness and power, failing to credit his successes to God. He was not a man who deserved loyalty.

God didn’t care.

When you make a promise to someone, God does not care whether they deserve you carrying out that promise. What matters to him is that you made a promise. Let’s do two examples. 

In marriage, husband and wife promise to care for one another in sickness and in health, until death. If one or the other would take up smoking, the other is not excused from caring for them in future illness, even if they might not “deserve” such care. The promise was made.

Second example. When we take a job, we promise to work for wages. When we are at work, our time does not belong to us. We are selling our time to our employer, and they have the right to expect that we will spend that time in service of the business. Our employer may turn out to be unkind; overly critical, inflexible, personally distasteful. None of that would give us the right to shirk our responsibilities in the workplace. We made a promise.

Mattaniah, king of Jerusalem, had made a promise to Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon. He had promised to govern Jerusalem with loyalty to Babylon. Yet he began preparations to break his oath. God knew. God was displeased.

God would allow Mattaniah to suffer the consequences of his oath-breaking, of his disloyalty. And to be clear, God didn’t have to do much. God didn’t even need to intervene. Mattaniah was making a foolish, stupid plan. The aid Mattaniah sought from Pharaoh would not be enough to keep the Babylonians away. The Egyptian armies arrived, and they did force the Babylonians to withdraw for a few years. But Egypt didn’t hang out for long. Mattaniah paid them, they went home, and the Babylonians came back. 597 BC, Mattaniah became king; 586 BC, Mattaniah was defeated. The Babylonians set fire to all of Jerusalem, burning down the temple and the palace. They took Mattaniah and his sons prisoner. They killed Mattaniah’s sons in front of him, and then they took out his eyes, so that his dying sons were the last things he saw. 

Mattaniah could have known that things would not end well for him. And we can know that when we break oaths ourselves, things don’t end well. When was the last time you broke a promise that it really ended up well for you? Where the temporary gain you enjoyed wasn’t ultimately outweighed by the damage done to the relationship? Disloyalty - oathbreaking - it doesn’t benefit us, and God hates it.

But that’s not the end of this parable. Now we can look at the specific verses of today’s Old Testament reading, twenty-two to twenty-four. “This is what the Sovereign LORD says: I myself will take a shoot from the very top of a cedar and plant it; I will break off a tender sprig from its topmost shoots and plant it on a high and lofty mountain. On the mountain heights of Israel I will plant it; it will produce branches and bear fruit and become a splendid cedar. Birds of every kind will nest in it; they will find shelter in the shade of its branches. All the trees of the forest will know that I the LORD bring down the tall tree and make the low tree grow tall. I dry up the green tree and make the dry tree flourish. I the LORD have spoken, and I will do it.”

Long, long ago - three thousand years ago, five hundred years before Mattaniah and Ezekiel and Nebuchadnezzar - God had made a promise to a man named David. David, God promised, would be king in Jerusalem, and David’s descendants would always sit on that throne. The “cedar tree” that gets referenced at the very beginning of chapter seventeen is David’s family, the dynasty of kings descended from him. The top was plucked off; Jehoiachin was taken captive. 

But now God comes back to that cedar tree - God himself, not any of these eagles. He takes a shoot - a twig, a tender branch - from that tree, from David’s family. He plants that branch, and it becomes a new tree, a “splendid cedar,” where all manner of birds are able to nest. 

This “tender sprig” is Jesus. Jesus, who according to his human nature was a descendant of King David. God had promised that he would put one of David’s descendants on the throne forever. God keeps his promises. Jesus is enthroned in heaven, which the parable here describes as “a high and lofty mountain.” He rules over all things, and he has received what his great-great-many-greats-uncle Mattaniah wanted. Jesus is independent. He rules without answering to Babylon, without answering to Egypt. Jesus rules because God promised to David that he would rule, and God keeps his promises.

But the Bible offers us another perspective on how Jesus became the one ruling over all things. He didn’t get there through worldly power. He didn’t bribe Egypt to help him become king of the universe. Instead, Jesus was raised to his position ruling over all things because he trusted in his Father, and committed himself to God’s plan of salvation. This is what the apostle Paul tells us in Philippians two: “Jesus made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death— even death on a cross! Therefore” - that’s the important word, that’s the word showing us that this is how Jesus achieved his rule over all things - “therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name.”

There’s two ideas for us to bring together, then. One, Jesus rules over all things because God had promised to David that one of David’s descendants would rule over all things. But two, Jesus also rules over all things because he deserves to rule over all things. He became the lowliest of the low, he is the Crucified One, who died naked and mocked outside Jerusalem’s walls. He did that so that you and I might be reconciled to God, because he loves us.

For such love, Jesus deserves his place on heaven’s throne. And indeed, the throne belongs to him by eternal right as well, for he is God’s own Son, true God from true God. In every way, Jesus deserves his place on heaven’s throne. He deserves it by who he is, and he deserves it by what he has done. And from that throne, he does what kings do. He issues declarations. And this is the incredible declaration of the perfectly loyal, righteous, holy King of All: You are forgiven. Your sin, in every respect, has been paid for. And in particular, today, we can focus on the fact that your failure to keep promises has been forgiven by the one who has never ever let a single promise fall to the ground.

God brought forth Jesus from the dead tree stump of a forgotten dynasty which hadn’t had a king on the throne in centuries. That little baby, born in the backwater town of Bethlehem, became the Savior and Ruler of all. This is what Jesus teaches with his own parable of the mustard seed. The smallest beginnings can bring far larger outcomes than we can ever imagine.

We can take that perspective into our own lives as we make promises to others. Promises are not merely words. They are opportunities for us to show forth the character of God in our lives. God is ever loyal. His promises do not fail. When we make promises, we can show what our amazing God is like by keeping our word. In this way, the apostle Paul tells us, “the gospel bears fruit and grows throughout the whole world—just as it has been doing among you since the day you heard it and truly understood God’s grace.”

A promise may seem like a small thing. Insignificant. But God urges you to think differently about the small promises you make. To be loyal, to keep our word, is far more impactful in the lives of the people around us than you and I often recognize. As husbands or wives, parents or children, employers or employees, as citizens, churchgoers, friends, may we be known as people of our word and people of God’s Word. May God’s Holy Spirit strengthen our faith to live in such love. Amen.