Ezekiel 34:17-19 English Standard Version

¹⁷ “As for you, my flock, thus says the Lord God: Behold, I judge between sheep and sheep, between rams and male goats. ¹⁸ Is it not enough for you to feed on the good pasture, that you must tread down with your feet the rest of your pasture; and to drink of clear water, that you must muddy the rest of the water with your feet? ¹⁹ And must my sheep eat what you have trodden with your feet, and drink what you have muddied with your feet?

Here the Lord is speaking to the flock. Ezekiel 34 begins with a prophetic warning to the shepherds of Israel. They were feeding themselves and not the sheep. To have a proper understanding of any scripture and how it relates to us we need to look to the surrounding passages and put it into proper context. The warnings to the shepherds ends in the preceding passages.

Now we must decide if these passages in any way apply to us. That requires us to determine if our behaviors are directly related to those who are shepherds over us. Their neglect will leave us open to attack as indicated by verse 8; “my sheep have become food for all the wild beasts”.

We must look to our own behaviors to see if we in turn have allow sin to cause us to trodden down the rest of the pasture. This is where the sheep feed and our sins affect others in the flock.

The good news is found in verse 11; “I myself will search for my sheep and will seek them out.”

The only thing left to do now is to determine if we ourselves have muddied the waters.

Psalm 12:5-6 English Standard Version

⁵ “Because the poor are plundered, because the needy groan, I will now arise,” says the Lord; “I will place him in the safety for which he longs.” ⁶ The words of the Lord are pure words, like silver refined in a furnace on the ground, purified seven times.

Proverbs 18:14 English Standard Version (ESV) A man’s spirit will endure sickness, but a crushed spirit who can bear?

Sin is the sickness of the spiritually dead. Sin for a time is fun, physically pleasing but over time it will crush the life out of you. The spirit spoken of here is the life force of mankind, not the Holy Spirit. The only cure for the sin of death is life in Christ. It is then that the Holy Spirit is given and takes over the spirit of life in mankind.

Every sin has its own manifestation of its disease. Greed will manifest itself differently than lust. What will be common among all the manifestations of sin is the wearing down of ones soul with the weight of its insistence. It will become unfulfilling, leaving us with a sense of emptiness.

Things will not buy happiness, no matter how much money you throw at it. Lust is not love and will never satisfy the longing to be loved. These are the easiest sins to example but if one is caught up in one of the others, sin we present itself as insufficient to satisfy what is truly missing.

We miss God if we have never heard of Him. Mankind who have never heard of the one true God has invented idols and vanities to fill that emptiness without properly understanding.

Man has worshipped false gods for a long time. Gods of volcanos, gods of fire, gods of water, gods of the air, god spirits of animals and the vanities of vanities in declaring men to be gods. That is part of mankind’s history. We can make wisdom and knowledge a god if we find that satisfying to the mind, but they cannot satisfy what God has placed in us all.

God placed in us a longing for a relationship with our creator.