In vain I have wearied myself;
    its thick crud does not depart.
    To the fire with its crud!

Ezekiel 24:12

A moment of silence for our lost cookie sheet. I mean, we didn’t LOSE lose it. We ruined it. 

Last fall my wife and I decided to make an appetizer we’d had at a Superbowl party. Little smokeys, wrapped in bacon, and drenched with brown sugar. Have you had em? They were yummy, but we may have overdone it a bit with the brown sugar. 

It covered the whole pan, caramelized, and burned it. We saved the smokeys, but the pan was blackened and warped, covered in crud. You couldn’t clean it with a jackhammer. It would have taken an act of God to redeem that sheet. We tossed it.

Ezekiel reported a similar story, sharing God’s words to Jerusalem on the occasion of Babylon’s invasion. God spoke of Jerusalem as choice meat placed into a pot but left boiling so long that all that was left was the burnt crud at the bottom. God was not very happy with Jerusalem and was insinuating that this invasion was because of their own overcooked corruption and unfaithfulness.

How very Old Testament, right? The rantings of an angry God, and the laments of a faithless people. We can wave the idea away and say such passages are a culturally outmoded understanding of how God works, but maybe we shouldn’t dismiss it too quickly.

Actually, we humans do seem to stew in our own sinful juices quite a bit. We can take the good things God has given us and turn them into something black and scorched. I look at all the consequences we as a species face because of our self-rendered crud, and I can’t help but wonder if, like my cookie sheet, we’re destined for the trash can.

Luckily for us, even an angry Old Testament God doesn’t give up on us. Here’s the verse that comes next:

Yet when I cleansed you in your filthy lewdness,
    you did not become clean from your filth;
you shall not again be cleansed
    until I have satisfied my fury upon you.

Ezekiel 24:13

Okay, not exactly a happy ending to the story. The point is, miraculously, it’s NOT the end. God takes that burned out pot and laments the crud. But God is not one to be so easily dissuaded. Once God’s fire has subsided, then God will scrub us clean. 

Doesn’t sound like fun. Sounds more like a trial by fire. But sometimes the crud gets so sticky and crusty that it’s just gonna have to burn itself out. Maybe we will actually face such a trial in our world, our country, our personal lives. Maybe we already are. Perhaps your life has boiled over and left you with only the burnt remains.

God’s not through with us yet. Somehow, God scrapes that pot or cookie sheet back to pristine condition. (How’s that for an act of God?) Through our New Testament eyes, we see that as a sign of Grace, as shown to us through Jesus Christ.

This year’s Superbowl is coming up, and Jan and I may just get a hankering for those little smokies again. We’ll see. This time I hope we’ll have learned our lesson and pull back a bit on that sinful brown sugar. I hope we’ll be a little more careful and repentant when we’re facing the heat.

Also, Jesus is invited to join us for the game…

but I hear he’s a hockey fan.

Have a great week,

Mitch