Then they will know that I am the Lord.

I just finished reading the book of Ezekiel. While I had read it before, it had been a couple of years since I read it in its entirety. The overwhelming theme, in the midst of a mind-boggling amount of rebellion by the Israelites and a mixture of justified punishment and freely-given mercy from the Lord, is this: that they might know that I am the Lord. Everything God does, He does so that the people might know and understand that He is the Lord. Everything the Israelites do wrong, it boils down to the fact that they are placing themselves or some other idol higher than the Lord.

Is God so egotistical? Does He really have such a petty need for glory and attention that He would act out like an ornery two-year-old? Or is something else at work here? In A.W. Tozer's The Pursuit of God, he writes that "the cause of all our human miseries is a radical moral dislocation, an upset in our relation to God and to each other." We are not God. As long as we live as though we were, we will know a life of deep dissatisfaction, a sense of strangeness and discomfort that comes from trying to be that which we are not and trying to carry a load that we were never meant to bear. How much trouble could be saved if we would simply humble ourselves before the Lord and give thanks for the position He has given us? Let it be enough to be God's dearly loved creation, to live in a right relationship to one another and to Him, and to bear His image humbly as we walk this earth.