Ezekiel's Cure for the Fractured Self

Another day, another chance to mark the ground. Welcome. I was holding my grandfather's old Bible this morning. It's full of his handwriting in the margins, questions, notes, little arrows. He wasn't trying to impress anyone on those pages. He was just… there. And it made me think. We're different people in different rooms, right? We have the work version of us, the Sunday version, the version our parents see. We’re starting to feel the cost of all that code-switching. It’s exhausting. It leaves us wondering which one, if any, is the one that's actually acceptable.

The Briefing

Now check this out… The logic of the Kingdom is so different from the logic of the world. When Ezekiel writes that God will accept us with our 'sweet savour,' it sounds like a transaction. If we can just make ourselves smell good enough, morally, spiritually, then God will let us in. But that's not it at all. Not even close. The 'sweet savour' God is talking about isn't ours. It never was. This is about the staggering merit of Jesus Christ. The commentary on this verse points out that Christ’s entire life was a fragrant offering. His active obedience, the way He perfectly lived out the law, was a sweet smell to the Father. And His passive obedience, the way He suffered and died on our behalf, was also a sweet smell. Think about that. These two things, His doing and His dying, are the only aroma that makes us acceptable to a holy God. It's His fragrance on us. It’s like our lives are a discordant piece of music. We’re all playing on our own scale, hitting wrong notes, creating a mess. We try to fix it, to perform better, but we just can't find the harmony. Then Christ steps in. His life is the perfect chorus. His sacrifice is the final, resolving chord. And God, in His mercy, doesn't just listen to our noise. He hears Christ’s perfect song playing over our lives. He accepts us because of the music he is making. We're not accepted for our performance. We're accepted into His.