StephenBarkley.com

Our security rests not in our grip on him
but his grip on us.
— Victor Shepherd (Seasons of Grace)
Jesus accomplished a lot of his teaching—especially to the crowds—by using parables.  He would tell a story about some ordinary event in order to teach a more profound truth.
Once Ezekiel returned from his vision of Jerusalem, God called [...]

The quickest way to the heart is through a wound.
— John Piper (Desiring God)
God wanted nothing less for Israel than to give them a new heart. God demanded to be the sole object of Israel’s affection. He would settle for nothing less than all.
Israel was wounded. The foremost prophet of God questioned whether there would [...]

When I no more can stir my soul to move,
And life is but the ashes of a fire;
When I can but remember that my heart
Once used to live and love, long and aspire—
Oh, be thou then the first, the one thou art;
Be thou the calling, before all answering love,
And in me wake hope, fear, boundless [...]

“Are we on God’s side?”
has always been a better question than
“Is God on ours?”
— Jim Wallis (God’s Politics)
When Pelatiah died, as we read earlier, Ezekiel cried out in grief to God, “will you make a full end of the remnant of Israel” (11:13, NRSV)?
The last time Ezekiel blurted out his emotions before God, God reaffirmed [...]

The demon in power is pride.
— Richard Foster (The Challenge of the Disciplined Life)
In chapter 10, Ezekiel saw how Jerusalem would be destroyed. He witnessed the future. Now we see the present described. Between the time when a number of Israelites were killed or deported (Ezekiel being one of them), and the time when God’s final [...]

Ezechiel, in Chapter 1 and 10,
gives a remarkably accurate description of a flying saucer
which visited him as an agent of God.
— R. L. Dione (God Drives a Flying Saucer).
I was browsing through a second hand bookstore in college when I saw a slim mass-market paperback entitled God Drives a Flying Saucer by R. L. Dione. I [...]

He will have purity.
It is not that the fire will burn us if we do not worship thus;
but that the fire will burn us until we worship thus.
— George MacDonald (Unspoken Sermons)
When Ezekiel first saw a vision of God back in chapter one, he was at a loss for words. The vision was too brilliant and [...]

The great tragedy of life is not unanswered prayer
but unoffered prayer.
— F. B. Meyer
Ezekiel was shell-shocked.  He had already suffered the violence of deportation.  He had already heard God describe the form his judgment would take: now he sees it. The God whom he dedicated his life to serving was now slaughtering his own.
Perhaps it [...]

Love is not blind; that is the last thing it is.
Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.
— G. K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy)
The time for talking is over.  God’s love constrains him to act.
Ezekiel witnessed atrocities that made his priestly blood curdle:

There was a statue in God’s court that provoked [...]