If you no longer feel at home in a church culture you’ve called your own, you’re not alone.

If you grieve and lament detestable things done in Jesus’ name by people you had thought godly, you’re not alone.

But oh does it hurt! It hurts like exile hurts. Emotionally, physically, or both, you’re paying the price for seeing, and turning from, what others still embrace – yet profoundly deny.

In times when it may seem you’ve stepped out of belonging and into a great void, God has a promise for you. It’s the same promise he has always made to his people who have begun to realize: I do not belong where staying connected with others requires abandoning truth and love.

Seeing the present in the past

Long ago, God promised a traumatized, scattered and grieving people, “I will be a sanctuary to you during your time in exile,” and, “I will gather you back.” Before we look at what God said, let’s look at the people to whom he spoke.

In many ways, their situation looked nothing like ours. And yet, in astonishing ways, it may parallel ours. Let’s glimpse their lives before exile, in the place where they thought they belonged. Let’s see what they had to recognize and let go of, in order to embrace the real belonging the Lord their God held out to them.

Betrayal of God

Centuries earlier, the Lord God had entered covenant with their ancestors, a people he had delivered from slavery in Egypt. He had promised them a land. He had promised them himself. He had delivered on both promises and many, many more.

Sometimes, they rejoiced in him. Sometimes, they kept their promises to him. But collectively, over time, they had not remained faithful to him. Ultimately, they lived before the Lord like an adulterous wife, seduced by every lover that came along. In the end, their spiritual leaders rationalized the infidelity, covered it up and often led the way.

Abuse of people

Refusing to love their God, the people and their leaders lost the capacity to love others. It became accepted – the norm – for God’s people to:

• Pursue what they wanted, regardless the harm it caused others.
• Oppress the forsaken and prey on the weak.
• Abandon truth. Specifically, deal treacherously with their spouses, deceive even the people closest to them and lie to themselves.
• Punish anyone who challenged them on any of the above.¹

Things had gotten so bad that God told the prophet Jeremiah:

Look far and wide for one person, even one who acts justly and seeks truth. (Jer. 5:1 CEB)

Passionately, the Lord cried:

My people are infiltrated by wicked men, unscrupulous men on the hunt. They set traps for the unsuspecting. Their victims are innocent men and women. Their houses are stuffed with ill-gotten gain, like a hunter’s bag full of birds. Pretentious and powerful and rich … they have no conscience. Right and wrong mean nothing to them. They stand for nothing, stand up for no one, throw orphans to the wolves, exploit the poor. Do you think I’ll stand by and do nothing about this?” (Jer. 5:26-29 MSG)

Refusal to see and turn

Yet the more God spoke up, the more the many closed their ears and eyes. They continued to insist that they belonged, in that place, among their people, to their God.

They practiced exploitation, manipulation, coercion and violence in place of love. And if anyone protested – including God – they did that DARVO thing that wrongdoers do: Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.

Still, they believed God would protect them from whatever might threaten them harm. After all, his Temple stood in their midst. His Temple meant his presence. And his presence meant they were A-OK.

They did not listen or repent, even when the Lord asked them:

Do you really think you can steal, murder, commit adultery, lie, and burn incense to Baal and all those other new gods of yours, and then come here and stand before me in my Temple and chant, “We are safe!”? (Jer. 7:9-10).

When they began to reap harsh consequences of their betrayal of God and abuse of other people – more DARVO. They accused God of forsaking them.

As the situation deteriorated, Judah fell prey to Babylon. Some of the people were carried away and scattered. Those remaining – especially those in the walled city of Jerusalem – tried to make the exiles the scapegoats and themselves the good guys. They insisted the worst had passed.

There in Jerusalem with them, Jeremiah kept telling them, “No, no and no! Open your eyes and ears to the truth!”

Grieving as the Lord departs

Meanwhile, a young man named Ezekiel, in exile in Babylon, began to see visions of God. In a vision recorded in Ezekiel 8-11, the Spirit of God took Ezekiel back home, to Jerusalem. There, the Lord showed the prophet scene after scene of leaders and people committing idolatry in the Temple itself.

“Son of man,” he said, “do you see what they are doing? Do you see the detestable sins the people of Israel are committing to drive me from my Temple?” (Ezek. 8:6).

As the vision continued, Ezekiel watched the Lord leave his Temple.

The glory of the God of Israel rose up from between the cherubim, where it had rested [in the holiest place in the Temple], and moved to the entrance of the Temple. And the Lord called to a man dressed in linen who was carrying a writer’s case. He said to him,

“Walk through the streets of Jerusalem and put a mark on the foreheads of all who weep and sigh because of the detestable sins being committed in their city” (Ezek. 9:3-4).

Ultimately, “the glory of the Lord went up” from the Temple and left the city (Ezek. 11:23). But as he exited, God cried out to his people. Angry and anguished, he exposed the depth and breadth of their sin. He described judgments he could no longer postpone.

Yet also, in the midst of his departure, the Lord offered two groups encouragement and hope.² He promised to act on behalf of:

• Those in Jerusalem who mourned over the sins they and their people had committed.
• The traumatized and grieving already in exile in Babylon.

Not one of them had been forgotten by God.

Receiving what God says

First the Lord addressed those who mourned in Jerusalem, the people whose broken hearts echoed his. He saw each one who admitted and grieved “the detestable sins being committed in their city” (Ezek. 9:4).

He knew how many of the people around them vilified and shunned them for it. In a very real sense, those mourners were exiles too.

As the glory of God hovered at the Temple entrance, he marked each mourner as his own. He promised to keep and protect them through the days of reckoning ahead.

Then, the Lord gave Ezekiel a message for the scattered and exiled. He knew what the unrepentant back home were saying about them, and about him. He wanted to set the record straight.

Receive the hard stuff – don’t reject it

To start, God told Ezekiel and all those in exile:

Son of man, the people still left in Jerusalem are talking about you and your relatives and all the people of Israel who are in exile. They are saying, “Those people are far away from the Lord, so now he has given their land to us!” (Ezek. 11:15).

The people not grieving their sins, instead, minimized, rationalized and denied their sins. The more they did, the more deceiving and deceived they became.

• They spread lies about the people who’d had to leave. Their disdain for people they’d so recently counted as “us” sounds eerily like the Pharisee’s prayer: “Lord, I thank you that I am not like those people. They are far away from you.”
• They lied about God, declaring, “The Lord has given us the land that those people owned (and don’t deserve)!”
• They lied to themselves about themselves. The latest truth the majority did not own and would not face? “Without one iota of shame, we will take what belongs to others who cannot defend themselves, and we’ll use the Lord’s name to justify the theft.”³

Oh, dear one!  

Not seeing what is,
does not make it go away.

Quite the opposite, in fact! Throughout Ezekiel’s vision, God spoke to all his people quite pointedly about that. At the end, he warned:

As for those whose hearts continue to go after their disgusting and detestable things, I will hold them accountable for their ways. This is what the Lord God says! (Ezek. 11:21 CEB)

And with that, God left that place.

Receive the promises – don’t rewrite them

Ah, but before he gave that final warning, God finished his message of hope to the exiles.

In the first part of his message, he’d said, in essence: “You need to know what the people are saying about you back where you thought you belonged.”

In the same breath, God also told them: “This is what I say.”

Although I have scattered you in the countries of the world, I will be a sanctuary to you during your time in exile. I, the Sovereign Lord, will gather you back from the nations where you have been scattered, and I will give you the land of Israel once again.”

Reading those promises, we may tend to skip over the “time in exile” part. We may want to jump to the words, “I will gather you back from where you’ve been scattered.”

Yet both Jeremiah and Ezekiel rebuked false prophets who told the people, “The exile will be short. In fact, it’s almost over!”

For the exile itself had purpose. And while that purpose played out, God would be their sanctuary, their Temple, their sacred place.

Letting exile fulfill its work

Before they were scattered, the exiles had lived among a people who identified as God’s yet continually defied and dishonored him. In the crucible of exile, they would have the time, space and incentive to cultivate faithfulness to their Lord. They could begin to experience the real belonging he had offered them all along.

With so many unhealthy soul ties severed, they could abide in him as he softened and purified their hearts. Those who did so would finally learn to separate out the precious from the worthless. They would begin to discern genuine love and to recognize all its counterfeits. Spirit-to-spirit, God would teach them to see and turn from what is not him, and to know and love him as never before.

If they regrouped and returned too soon, they would, instead, pick up where they had left off – calling abuse love; worshiping hidden idols, instead of God alone.

Belonging in God’s love

Only when the exile had fully done its work would the “gathering back” fulfill the Lord’s astounding promise of belonging recorded in Ezekiel 11:18-20.

When the people return to their homeland, they will remove every trace of their vile images and detestable idols. And I will give them singleness of heart and put a new spirit within them. I will take away their stony, stubborn heart and give them a tender, responsive heart, so they will obey my decrees and regulations. Then they will truly be my people, and I will be their God.

Long ago, the Lord made a promise that he still makes today to every person from every nation, race and language who will let go of the counterfeits and let God give them a heart wholly his.

He will make the way for belonging as we’ve never experienced it – with him, with others.

No longer ripped apart by our divided hearts, we will walk together in one purpose and one spirit, in his love.

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The original version of this renovated repost was published August 22, 2018, under the title, “A Promise of Real Belonging.”

Unless otherwise noted, Scriptures quotations are from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, © 1996, 2004, 2007 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

Image: (c) Ann Kathrin Rehse / freeimages.com

Other posts in the series, To the exiles scattered

• To the exiles scattered by toxic church
• Recognizing the world in church clothing
• Shunning in the church
  
  
• The most freeing thing
• A future filled with hope
• And the future starts now

Footnotes

1. See, for example, the Lord’s indictments of his people in these passages, just from chapters 5-9 of Jeremiah: 5:1, 7-8, 26-28; 6:13-14; 7:5-10; 8:6, 10-11; 9:3-8. ↩︎
2. See Ezekiel 9:1-6; 11:14-20. ↩︎
3. Second Thessalonians 2:10-11 says: “Because they refuse to love and accept the truth that would save them … they will believe these lies.” ↩︎