God Plants a Cedar Shoot
Ezekiel 17:22 – This is what the Lord GOD says, “I’m also going to take a shoot from the top of a cedar and plant it. I’ll pluck off its delicate twigs and transplant it on a high and lofty mountain. 23 – I’ll transplant it on Israel’s land, and it will grow branches, bear fruit, and become a majestic cedar. All sorts of birds will rest under it, and they’ll settle down in the shade of its branches. 24 – Then all the trees of the fields will know that I, the LORD, bring down the lofty tree and exalt the lowly tree. I dry up the green tree and cause the dry tree to bud. I the LORD have spoken this, and I will fulfill it.”
There’s great power in the LORD to make the impossible happen. We use our human reasoning to determine whether a garden will grow with the proper care – but, in reading this chapter – that’s exactly what God did for Israel. He gave her the proper treatment in order to grow but the king rebelled and broke the covenant with God. Why do any of us think we can get very far without God in our lives? So God makes it a point to turn things around, to demonstrate His power by doing things in an out of ordinary way. We will see the lofty tree brought down and the lowly tree exalted. We will see the green tree dry up and the dry tree bud and know God has done this.
“Who has believed our message, and to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed? For he grew up before him like a tender plant, and like a root out of a dry ground; he had no form and he had no majesty that we should look at him, and there is no attractiveness that we should desire him. “He was despised and rejected by others, and a man of sorrows, intimately familiar with suffering; and like one from wom people hide their faces, and we despised him and did not value him. “Surely he has borne our sufferings and carried our sorrows; yet we considered him stricken, and struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, and he was crushed for our iniquities, and the punishment that made us whole was upon him, and by his bruises we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned, each of us, to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” – Isaiah 53:1-6.
May the crushing blows against Jesus and His separation from the Father at the cross bring healing from our wounds of sin and establish a connection with God that can never be broken.
Who will separate us from the Messiah’s love? Can trouble, distress, persecution, hunger, nakedness, danger, or a violent death do this? As it is written, “For your sake we are being put to death all day long. We are thought of as sheep headed for slaughter. In all these things we are triumphantly victorious due to the one who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor anything above, nor anything below, nor anything else in all creation can separate us from the love of God that is ours in union with the Messiah Jesus, our Lord. – Romans 8:35-39.
Where two are gathered 