Ezekiel 1:1 In my thirtieth year, in the fourth month on the fifth day, while I was among the exiles by the Kebar River, the heavens were opened and I saw visions of God.
“What are you going to be when you grow up?” That is a question commonly asked of people when they are young. It’s a question that we sort of expect to have the answer to when we don’t know the answers to much of anything in our lives! As a person gets older, the answer to that question becomes more important and then there comes a point, in our socie-ty, where the time for answering that has clearly passed. We think.
Ezekiel probably dealt with that question. No doubt he had spent days wondering what his life would be like when he got older. What he would do, where he might live, who he might marry? He probably had made a start at those things since he was thirty. But then the Babylonians came. Then all the dreams turned into nightmares. Then he was forcibly marched away from everything he’d ever known and taken to Babylon. What good were any of those dreams now? His life was over. He was a victim.
But all of that changed one day in the most unlikely place. While he was in exile, prob-ably feeling sorry for himself and his circumstances, the heavens were opened up and he saw visions of God! How could this be? He was in Babylon!? Wasn’t God back in Jerusalem? Exekiel wouldn’t have expected this to happen. But God came to him, an exile, thirty years old, and began to show Himself to him.
If the Babylonians hadn’t come, and Ezekiel hadn’t chosen a profession and was still just bouncing around at age thirty wandering what to do with his life, he’d have been an object of scorn. But he didn’t do that. We have no reason to think that was his prior life. But actually we don’t really know what he was doing before. And it doesn’t matter. What we know is that Ezekiel was a great prophet of God. We know that he was used mightily by God. And we know that all this happened in a place and under circumstances that would have seemed the least likely.
Ezekiel was thirty when God called him. Moses was eighty when God called him to his great work! Age seems not to matter to God. Now I’m not suggesting that we not plan for the future! But I know that God has timetables that often look vastly different from ours! As we consider what the future might hold for us, we should consider what part God will play in that future. If God is always our top priority, we can relax quite a bit when it comes to the future. In fact, if we are following God, it doesn’t matter if we are still in school, in the middle of a career, or in retirement years! God calls people to His service and has a plan for us!
It could be that your greatest adventure is just about to begin!
Blessings
Pastor Russ
