Doth He Not Speak Parables?

Ezekiel 20:49

“Then said I, Ah Lord GOD! they say of me, Doth he not speak parables?”

Ezekiel was sent by God to the people of God to prophecy unto them the truths they needed to know from God. However, the people did not have a heart toward God. We see in the first verse of this chapter that even when they made a pretense to come and inquire of the Lord, they were not sincere in their desire to hear from Him. As Ezekiel prophesied the truth, the people responded that they believed he was speaking parables. A parable is a fable or a fictional story that is told often in order to reveal a truth. Jesus taught in parables to make the truth relatable to the common man. However, in this case, Ezekiel was giving the straight truth, and the people dismissed it as something that was not true. They considered it to be a fairytale of sorts. 

This began to bother Ezekiel to the point that he came and brought it to the Lord. “Then said I, Ah Lord GOD!” You can see the frustration in the words. I believe that Ezekiel loved the people and desperately wanted the people to turn their hearts back to God, but they would not take his message seriously. Though undoubtedly discouraged, Ezekiel did not give up, and God continued to use Ezekiel to preach to the rebellious people. In the thirty-seventh chapter of Ezekiel, God showed how he could work His power through the preaching of Ezekiel when He raised an entire valley of dry bones to life again. Others may look at preaching as parables of foolishness, but God uses it with His power! “For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God.” (I Corinthians 1:18)

God has called us to preach the Gospel to a lost and dying world. “And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.” (Mark 16:15) Often those to whom we go to take the Gospel will not believe and make little of our message. However, we must not let our hearts get discouraged. God will work His mighty hand through the preaching of the Gospel. Like Ezekiel, we need to determine not to give up and to continue preaching and continue soul winning. Others will see it as foolishness, but God uses it for His glory. Let us determine to continue the labor and let God worry about the results. Even the best soul winners have times that they strike out and fail to see the sinner get saved. Remember Paul and King Agrippa. “Then Agrippa said unto Paul, Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.” (Acts 26:28) Yet the Word that we take and preach to the lost cannot be of no effect on the heart. “So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.” (Isaiah 55:11) 

Dear Christian, we must ignore the nay-sayers who try to discourage us. They will criticize, and they will try to resist the spread of the message, but in the end, if God is with us, who can be against us? Let’s keep up our soul-winning and the preaching of the Gospel!