Welcome to the Pauline Family's "Year of the Bible"! I'm reading the Bible clear through this year, and I invite you to read along with me. But first, let us pray:
Everlasting Father,
All time belongs to you, and all the ages. In signs, in songs, in words of promise, you reassured your chosen ones, “I am with you; fear not.” You taught them through the prophets to trust that your saving deeds were not limited to the past.
When Jesus came, he fulfilled “all that was written in the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms.”
The Church has found him everywhere in these same holy books.
Help me to find Jesus in my reading today, to listen to him, and to follow him with all my heart.
Amen.
Today's chapters are Ezekiel 8-10.
In his sixth year of exile, Ezekiel, who by his ancestry would have been a priest of the Temple in Jerusalem, is shown in a mystical vision the depths of depravity within the Temple itself: worship of pagan divinities within the Lord's own house. But before cleansing the Temple, God orders a mysterious servant to go through the city and "mark the forehead" of any person who weeps over the condition to which things have come. These people will be spared, just as their ancestors were spared the death of the firstborn by the sign of the blood of the lamb on the doorposts during the first Passover.
The sign that the scribe is to write on those foreheads? The Hebrew letter taw: a t; for Christians, a cross. We will find similar instructions in the Book of Revelation (Rev. 7:2-4):
[The angel] cried out in a loud voice to the four angels who were given power to damage the land and the sea, “Do not damage the land or the sea or the trees until we put the seal on the foreheads of the servants of our God.” I heard the number of those who had been marked with the seal, one hundred and forty-four thousand marked from every tribe."
No comments:
Post a Comment