When God says, “Shut up!”

Ezekiel 3:24-27
Then the Spirit came into me and raised me to my feet. He spoke to me and said: “Go, shut yourself inside your house…I will make your tongue stick to the roof of your mouth…but when I speak to you, I will open your mouth…”

One of the hardest things to do when you’re a communicator is to, well, NOT communicate. Can you put yourself in Ezekiel’s shoes here? God has called you out as His chosen messenger, He’s told you exactly who you are supposed to take the message to, and then he’s told you to, well, in a sense, shut up. Sure, He didn’t say it like that because God is able to say hard things without making it sound rude, but He did tell the prophet to go in his house and not come out until he had something to say. It was sort of like how our parents used to tell us not to say anything if we couldn’t say something nice. God knew that the potential for Ezekiel to go off on the rebellious audience was very high, and so He used some kind of spiritual peanut butter to make Ezekiel’s tongue stick to the roof of his mouth.

I don’t think God takes pleasure in making us be quiet. I do believe, though, that sometimes He keeps us silent because He can’t risk us ruining the message He has for the world. Spend time listening to church people talk, and then put yourself in God’s shoes. After the price He’s paid to secure such a great salvation for all who would call on His name, can you imagine how He must feel to hear us speak so lightly about it? “Oh, God loves you and He knows you’re really a good person at heart. No, that’s not really sin. It’s just something you struggle with. My God understands that.” I’m surprised He doesn’t peanut butter more of us!

Perhaps He knew that Ezekiel would be too careless, or too quick, to add his own twist to the message. Who knows? What we do know is that if we don’t have a specific message from God, we’re better off shutting our mouths than running them. God knows how easy it is for us to try to make what He said sound better. Unfortunately, He also knows how quickly His message can lose its power when we do.

Matthew 12:36 says that we’ll all give an account for every careless word we’ve spoken. That alone makes me thankful that I serve a God who is willing to shut me up in order to protect me – and His message – from my carelessness. In fact, if He needs to start a running tab down at Sam’s Club on wholesale tubs of peanut butter to do it, so be it.

It’s a small price to pay to protect a message so precious.

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