But I will spare some, for some of you will escape the sword when you are scattered among the lands and nations. – Ezekiel 6:8

Today's Scripture Reading (June 14, 2023): Ezekiel 6

A friend tells a story about the day he got delayed on the way to a meeting. It wasn't like he had time to spare; he was already late for the meeting when a problem that had to be immediately handled came up at home. Frustrated, he put his briefcase on the counter and went to address the issue. It wasn't that the task would take him a long time to fix; five minutes later, he was already out the door, briefcase in hand, and heading for his meeting. But the problem was that the whole morning had seemed to feature one delay after another. The latest delay was just making him even later for the meeting.

He got into his car and headed for the meeting. The drive would take him almost an hour, so maybe he could still make up some time. And so, he started the journey. He had been driving for about twenty minutes when he came upon a severe traffic accident. An SUV had blown through a stop sign, T-boning a car in the intersection. The scene was fresh; the accident probably occurred in the last five minutes. Emergency vehicles could be heard in the distance, but none had arrived on the scene yet. My friend got out of his car, along with a few other onlookers, wondering if there was something that he could do to help. The meeting was no longer at the top of his agenda, life had intruded, and his priorities had changed. And as he watched and helped some of those involved in the crash out of their cars, he thought back to that last-second task that had delayed him. Five minutes. He could have been involved in the accident if he had not been forced to wait. What he had seen as a terrible delay had become a blessing. A five-minute emergency task had saved him.

Ezekiel wrote his prophecies in exile in Babylon. Taken into captivity in the first exile, Ezekiel was ministering to a series of people who had been uprooted from their homes and forced to live in a foreign land, away from everything they had known. It was probably the worst moment that they could imagine. And if Jeremiah was right, they were never coming back. The hoped-for return to Judah would belong to their children and grandchildren, not to them. Life as they knew it had changed forever, and the change was not a positive one.

But Ezekiel reminds his listeners that they might have been the lucky ones. The very people who had gone into exile with Ezekiel were some of the ones who would live. More exiles would come, but these exiles were not the unlucky prisoners who had lost everything; they were the lucky survivors of the disaster that was on its way. If not for the captivity, they would have died in the war with Babylon or from the disease and famine that would follow the Babylonian attack. They needed to count their blessings because what they saw as a horrible situation was actually going to be their salvation.

Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Ezekiel 7