At first glance our text in the book of Ezekiel would appear to be a negative one. Ezekiel was a prophet in the time that I seem to be preaching about a lot lately when God had allowed the majority of the Jewish people to be taken into captivity by the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar. Actually, God allowed the people whom He thought worth saving to go into captivity, and left the evil doers and the "losers" behind in Jerusalem to be destroyed by neighboring armies. God allowed the prophet to prophesy to many of the people that just "didn't get it" how that their sin hurt God. One of the key points about the prophet Ezekiel's life was that God commanded that his wife would die on the very day that the Babylonians began their attack against Jerusalem. God commanded that Ezekiel must not grieve for his wife, but allow his feelings to come forth through his preaching to the people. Through the hurting Ezekiel's words, God wanted to reveal to the people how much that their sins hurt Him. That to continue sinning in God's face and despite God's mercy does the same thing to God as losing a close loved one does to us. The Book of Ezekiel, then, is largely a depressing one, because his primary message was one of judgment upon a rebellious people who refused to listen to God's voice or word. God had gotten so fed up with the people's rebellious ways that He was going to kill them all, and it was too late for even repentance.

I did not choose this text tonight because I wanted to depress you, but rather because I wanted to encourage you. As I was reading this passage last week, something stood out to me in these passages, and it was in the verses that we read as our text. God was telling Ezekiel that He had already decided to slaughter the remaining Jews in Jerusalem and that they had rebelled past a point of repentance. In order to really drive His point home, God told Ezekiel that even if three certain men, "Noah, Daniel, and Job," were there in Jerusalem, that He would not spare the people. Yet, God has to admit in the end, that if those three men could have been there at the destruction of Jerusalem, then He would have saved them, but only those three. God is such a good God, that even when He curses a people, there is some hope for others that slips into His judgment. I preached a message once called "the blessing in the curse" where I talked about that it was after Adam and Eve sinned and God was doling out the judgment to them, that the first prophecy of a Messiah was mentioned! Eve was so focused on the fact that she had sinned and would now bear children in pain and be forced from the Garden of Eden, that she did not at first notice that God prophesied that the "seed of a woman" would stomp the head of the serpent, the devil! Even in His judgment, God is so good, that He could not help but slip in a little hope and promise of the coming of Jesus Christ and His triumphant victory on Calvary!

We ought to learn the lesson of the blessing in the curse. David understood it. Once when he had sinned against God and God gave him the choice of his judgments. David chose the one that was directly from God and said "it is better to fall in the hands of a merciful God, than into the hands of the enemy." There are times that I have sinned against God. There are times when you are going to struggle with your flesh and you feel like the scum of the earth. The devil tries to bring condemnation in your life to keep you away from the house of God and the altar of God. The devil does his best to make you feel unworthy to worship and to be called a child of God. But let me tell you what I have found. If I will push away all of those feelings of condemnation and run to the God that I have sinned against with an honest heart and truly repent to Him, then even if I do receive judgment for my actions, God cannot help but throw a blessing in with it! The devil just wants to heap condemnation upon you, but God will correct you and also throw something good in there with the judgment. He cannot help himself.

In David's case, a horrible plague began to sweep through the land, killing many people. David met the angel of the Lord out on a man named Araunah's threshing floor and begged for mercy. The angel said that if David would offer a sacrifice of repentance there, that God would stop the plague. Araunah offered for the king to take his land and his oxen for sacrifice for free, but David said "I will not offer the Lord anything that has not cost me something." So David purchased the land from Araunah, and there God responded to David's sacrifice of repentance and stopped the plague. By the way, you are very familiar with Araunah's threshing floor that David purchased, because later on God commanded that it would be on that spot that Solomon should build his magnificent temple! We know it today as the temple mount in Jerusalem! Even in reaping what he had sown, because David surrendered himself to the hand of God and did not turn to the world, then God placed a magnificent blessing into the curse! Don't ever let the devil tell you that you should not run to God. Even if you have sinned against Him a horrible sin. Yes, you may reap the effects of your sin, but if you will turn to God, He will cause something great, good, and awesome to come from the situation. "All things work together for the good of them who are the called." God is the true friend of sinners. He even died so that you could find repentance and a place of mercy! Even if you have brought a curse upon yourself through your sinful actions, submit yourself to God and repent to Him and He'll throw a blessing in there for you. He cannot help Himself!

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So God is describing to Ezekiel how horrible His punishment is going to be and God is really trying to get across to Ezekiel how mad that He is. He is trying to give Ezekiel examples of some great men that God would protect and how that even if those great men were there in Jerusalem, that God would not save the city and the people. Of all the people that God could have chosen, for some reason the ones that came to mind were "Noah, Daniel, and Job. No less than four times God mentions "these three men" and states that "I would not spare the city of my judgment even if these three men were ALL here pleading to me." But then comes the blessing in the curse: God then has to pause in His anger and judgment for a moment and say "well, of course, if those three men were here, then I would have to save them from the judgment." "But I wouldn't save anybody else!"

Maybe this verse does not automatically trigger in you what it did in me. Realize that God is mad. So mad at the people's sins and rebellion that He has allowed His very house and precious city and people to be destroyed by a bunch of barbarians. And yet, even with God's anger as hot as it had ever been, He could still think of three men, that -- even in His hottest anger and judgment -- that He loved and respected so much, that He would have to make special arrangements to at least save them from His judgment. Three men came into God's mind as being the type of people that He would just have to side step out of His anger and His judgment to help. These three men had qualities that caused God to remember them as "now I will not bring judgment upon them." These three men were "Noah, Daniel, and Job." Noah and Job had lived and died long before Ezekiel was ever born. Daniel was alive at the same time as Ezekiel but had gone to Babylon and was serving God in the King's palace. Three men of different times and of different backgrounds. Three men with stories of life that were vastly varied, and yet all three had something in common: they were foremost in the mind of God when it came to protection from judgment and salvation! These three men represent the types of people that God cannot resist saving!

Can I tell you that one day, the Wrath of God is going to be poured out into this world? There is coming a day when God will pour out His judgment upon this world and He will reach a place where He draws a line in the sand and says "enough is enough." We live in a sinful place. So many people care less about what God's Word says and even less about His love. Their lives are a series of days and weeks of trying to keep themselves happy by participating in every vice and sin that they can find. Jesus Christ said that "as in the days of Noah" so shall it be in the end. Our world has reached and in some ways far surpassed that level of unrighteousness that man lived in before the Flood. As wicked as our world is, it is a wonder that God has not already toasted the place and started over. But He hasn't. He is still responding to those who seek Him. He is still answering prayers of the righteous. He is still filling people with the Holy Ghost and washing their sins away in water baptism. God still cares. He is still in the saving business.

But one day, God will have enough. He will pull His righteous people out of this sinful world and then pour out great wrath and judgment upon the earth. The Church will leave via the Rapture of the Church. There will be a way out. But there will not be any salvation and repenting heard after the wrath begins to pour out. The scriptures are very clear that the time of the Gentiles will be over. I don't care what the "Left Behind Series" says. Let God be true and every man a liar. The Bible says that the time of the Gentiles will be over. That Grace will have ended. That there is coming a time when God's mercy will be withdrawn and He will say like He did in the days of Ezekiel: "enough, even if they do repent after I began pouring my wrath upon them, I will not hear." We have not reached that place yet, but it is coming in the future!

And in that day, God is going to provide that escape from judgment for some. He will provide salvation to a select few through the Rapture of the Church. Even though His wrath and anger will be hot, there WILL be somebody on the earth that God cannot help but save and deliver. They will be people that are similar to Noah, Daniel, and Job in God's mind. People who exhibit the characteristics of these three men. God will come back for people whose righteousness that He cannot ignore. If we want to go in the Rapture, we'd better live and respond to life like these three men. We must be in the mind of God like Noah, Daniel, and Job. God remembered their righteousness.

Righteousness is not easy to define without an example. It is a spiritual concept. One of the main reasons that God allowed the Word of God to be written was so that we would have written examples of men who were righteous and men who were not. By studying their lives, we can find what makes a person "pleasing to God." Abraham was called righteous. In Romans we find out why:

Righteousness is "not staggering at the promise of God through unbelief." Some people stagger at some of the promises that God makes. There are some that say "well, I don't know if God can heal that situation." Or they say, "well God can feel some people with the Holy Ghost, but not my family." Or "well, I don't know if God can use me to perform the miracle in this instance, because it's a really bad deal." But wait a minute! Didn't God say that He is no respector of persons? That what He did for Peter and Paul, He will do for you!? Didn't He say that He is Lord of All!? That He is the Master of every situation!? Didn't He say that He desires to pour out His Spirit upon ALL Flesh!? Didn't He say that it was a promise for those who would repent and be baptized in His name!? Where's your faith!? When you look at God's promises do you believe them enough to walk forward trusting in them? Or do you stagger at the promises and say "well I don't know..."? If you want to be saved and you want to escape God's Wrath in the end, you must be righteous. If you want to be righteous, then you cannot stagger at the promises of God, but must be like Abraham and be "fully convinced that what he had promised, he was able to perform!" Whether you are righteous or not like Noah, Daniel, and Job is determined to how you respond to the promises of God's Word! You either trust Him completely or you don't. You either serve Him or you don't. Either His Word is absolute truth or none of it is. There is no middle ground in serving God in righteousness!

And these three men stand as examples to us for how to live righteously. These three men are the kind of people that God can't help but save. I want to be like Noah, Daniel, and Job to God!

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Do you realize that Noah lived in a time when nobody else on earth was living for God!? Noah taught his family to serve God and be faithful to His Word even though nobody else was being faithful. I've heard people say, well "I'm as faithful as so and so." Or, "if I had more of my family living for God, I could be faithful to God and His house." They really are not righteous like Noah was righteous. If you really get a revelation of faithfulness like Noah had a revelation of faithfulness, then you are not effected in the least bit whether or not somebody else comes to church or not. It doesn't faze you whether or not somebody else in your family has made up in their mind to serve God. Noah preached the truth for 120 YEARS, and never won one convert. The only people that he could get to listen to him was his wife and three sons. Noah did not find his strength to be faithful to God from other people. Get your eyes off of other people. God is coming back for a people like Noah who will say "it doesn't matter what society says is okay." "It doesn't matter what my family thinks is okay or not." "It doesn't matter what others say at all." "I have made up in my mind that I will serve the Lord and that I will be faithful to His Word!" "You can laugh at me for my lifestyle." "You can call me peculiar, funny, stupid, or weird, but even if I am the only person in the WORLD that believes this Apostolic message, then I will stand strong and I will not waver!" "I will hold onto truth with everything in me!" That's the kind of person that God cannot ignore. That's the kind of person with whom God shares His promises and plans. That's the kind of person that even when God is mad enough to destroy the entire earth, yet, He will go out of His way to save them! Are you so convinced of truth, that you would live this way even if you were the ONLY person on the earth!? Noah did.

Noah was righteous because he was willing to spend his entire life throwing himself into hard work because of a promise of God that he had no physical evidence yet that it would happen. God had said it was going to rain and He commanded Noah to build an ark. I want to share with you a powerful verse of scripture and give you some insight into Noah's righteousness and faith. God commanded Noah to build an ark ONE time. God then did not speak to Noah for 120 years. He did not speak to Noah again until the ark was completed and it was seven days before the Flood was about to come. Go read it yourself. And of the most profound passages of scripture is the only verse that describes those 120 years of Noah's life:

It's that simple. Noah heard the voice of God once and he did everything that God commanded him. We don't find Noah whining about the sacrifice that he was having to make to live for God and work on that stupid boat. We don't find Noah needing God to touch him over and over and over and God having to preach over and over and over to convince Noah of His Word! We don't find Noah ever griping about the persecution and ridicule that he received for building a boat in the middle of the wilderness. God had spoken, and Noah obeyed Him. In Noah's mind there was no alternative. He wasn't trying to say, "well maybe God didn't mean that He was going to destroy the whole earth..." He wasn't giving the people false hope: "well maybe if you go to high ground you'll be okay." God said it, that settled it, and so Noah believed it.

Can I tell you that living righteously is not all that hard or complex? Our response to the Word of God in doubt is what makes things complicated. It's when we stagger at the promises of God and say, "surely He didn't mean that." Actually He did. The Word of God is pretty plain. It's not in Greek anymore. You can read it and you can live it and you can believe it. Our problem is that we are too worried about being different from this world. Some of us are too afraid at standing out. If you are going to be righteous like Noah was righteous, then you are going to have to stand out.

And Noah didn't hear the voice of God again for 120 years! There are so many Christians that backslide or are doing absolutely nothing because they are waiting on a "fresh word from God." I've known people to wait on a "fresh word of God" for thirty years. And the problem is that they usually spend that 30 years doing NOTHING for the kingdom of God. You don't need a fresh word from God, you need to do what He's already told you to do! The reason that God did not give Noah further instruction was because Noah had not yet completed God's first commandment. What some people's problem is that they don't want to obey what God dealt with them at first, and so they think that by ignoring the first command, that they can wait around until they get a second word from God. But it doesn't work that way. You can't pick and choose. What God dealt with you on to change last year, is exactly what He's still waiting on you to change! Do you know what would have happened if Noah would have not acted upon the first commandment of God and not built that boat? God would have never spoken to him the second time. The Flood would have come and Noah would not have been saved and his family would have been lost.

It's time to do what God called us to do in the first place. It's time to get our eyes off of what others are or are not doing and focus on what God called us to do. God has called every person in here to pray and fast until revival comes. He has instructed every person that is filled with the Holy Ghost to be a witness and teach others the scriptures. He has commanded everyone of us to be faithful in attendance and in worship and in our finances. He has commanded every one of us to step out on the promises in His Word and see if He will not do them! He will, if you will be like Noah and not stagger at the promises of God and keep faithful to what God has told you to do! There's something about people who are like Noah that God cannot ignore, and even in His Wrath, He cannot help but save!

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Ezekiel and Daniel lived at the same time. At the time that Ezekiel wrote the Word from the Lord in our text, Daniel had only been in captivity in Babylon for 14 years. That means that he had not yet been thrown in the Lion's Den. The three Hebrew children had not yet been thrown in the fiery furnace. At the time that God made the reference of Daniel to Ezekiel, only the events of the first two chapters of Daniel had taken place. Yet, God was already so impressed with him that Daniel was foremost in God's mind when He was thinking about the kind of people that He would pause to save.

What had Daniel done to be admired by God so much? Nothing as exciting as the den of lions. Daniel and his friends had been taken into Babylon and placed in a school for leaders. They would be taught by the finest teachers of the kingdom and learn the Chaldean language. They were also to be served the king's meat and wine. After three years of such treatment, they would then stand before the king and their fate would be decided. He was in a sinful environment, in a foreign land as a prisoner, but something clicked in Daniel's mind. The scriptures say:

Why did Daniel refuse to eat the king's meat or drink his wine? First of all, the king ate meat that was forbidden by God's Law such as pork. Even the things that were suitable to eat had first been offered to idols before being cooked. To drink wine was to go against God's principles concerning alcoholic beverages. The pressure was on to compromise. They weren't in Jerusalem any more. They felt forced to be like the Babylonians in Babylon. But Daniel would not compromise his principles for fame or position. He refused to bow to peer pressure. He refused to justify going against God's Word even in the least little bit. He was different, he lived different, and there were just some things that he did not do.

God has called us to be separate. When in Rome, we are to do as Christ would do. It doesn't matter what the Romans say is okay. We are to live different, look different, dress different, and respond different than is common in the world. Peter wrote about the church in this verse:

That is almost an exact quote of God's commandments in Deuteronomy 14:2 to Israel. That is the commandment that Daniel was obeying, but Peter said that the same commandment about being different from the world applied to the Apostolic Church.

There are some that say it doesn't matter how you dress or what you look like. Some say that you don't have to guard what you digest mentally. That it does not matter what you take into your thoughts by watching and reading and experiencing. But those are people who are conforming to the pressure of this world. They are not like Daniel. Daniel did not justify God's Word but rather obeyed it and told the Babylonian leader that God had a good reason for it. To convince their leader, Daniel suggested that they perform a 10 day trial. In those ten days Daniel and his friends would drink water and eat vegetables. At the end of the ten days the counselor could compare them with the others who compromised and see who was stronger and healthier. I want you to realize that the other people were also Jewish, but those who had compromised their lifestyle by choosing to get their nourishment from the table of idolatry. After the 10 days, Daniel and his friends were healthier and stronger, they were promoted and blessed, and God was bragging on Daniel to Ezekiel back in Jerusalem.

God is coming back for people like Daniel who refuse to fill their life with the filth and junk of this evil kingdom of Satan. There are some things that a Christian has no business watching or doing. We must be separate and different from the rest of the world or else we become just like them in God's eyes. But God is looking for someone like Daniel who will not bother trying to justify sin, but will stick to God's will for their live even when everybody else will not. It will be people like Daniel that God will remember to save from judgment, not the compromisers. It is people like Daniel that God will promote!

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Noah, Daniel, and Job. Every time that God mentions these three men, He says them in a particular order. Noah, Daniel, and Job. That is no accident. Noah had 7 other people stand for God with him. Daniel had three others stand with him: Meschach, Shadrach, and Abednego. Job stayed faithful for the longest time without ANYONE serving God with him until finally one friend, Elihu, stood by him at the end. Most of you have heard a sermon or two on Job. God allowed him to go through the worst test that any human being ever endured in the Old Testament. All of his children were tragically killed at once when the house where they were sitting collapsed. All of his livestock and animals, which represented his wealth, were destroyed in one day. He lost his health and developed painful boils all over his body. His wife decided to leave him. The only friends that stayed around cursed him to his face and talked about how that he must have sinned terribly against God.

The book of Job begins in chapter 1 by telling us that God and Satan had a little discussion and that God was pleased with Job and was using him for bragging rights to Satan. God allowed Satan to bring all of these things into Job's life to prove to the devil that Job loved God with all of his heart and not just because of the blessings. The point is this: Job did NOT know about that conversation in heaven. Job did NOT know that God was pleased with him and that the calamity was a great test. Job did NOT know that his story would be recorded for the world to read and learn and preach. To Job it looked like God had forsaken him. He didn't know what he had done wrong or what was happening. He had been doing everything right and all of a sudden his world fell apart!

Some so-called Bible scholars have tried to say that the story of Job is a fictional story. They say that no man could be that faithful to God despite the horrible things that he had to endure. But Job was a real man. God mentioned him to the prophet Ezekiel in our text. Job really lived and he really was that faithful.

What was it about Job that got God's attention? Job stayed faithful to God even when it seemed that God was against him. He refused to get bitter. He refused to curse God and die. He refused to blame God and "sin with his mouth" by "charging God foolishly." Job had more trust in God than anyone that has ever lived. He trusted God even when it looked like GOD was trying to kill him. Job realized that because of his faithfulness, God would eventually turn the circumstances around. And God did, for Job was blessed twice as much in the end as he was to begin with.

God is looking for and coming back for people like Job. People who will trust God through every situation. Who will serve God even if it seems that God is against them. Even when they have no explanation for the wicked, they will bless God and be faithful to Him and His Word. Even if it seems that they are deriving no blessings, they will still love God because they love Him with all of their heart, soul, mind, and strength. We need to be thankful for the blessings of God, but don't serve God for the blessings. In fact, God will allow you to go through a dry time just to make sure that you love Him for who He is and not just because of the blessings that He gives you. He desires people like that; people like Job. And if you are like that, God cannot help but save you out of whatever situation that you may find yourself in. God cannot help but bless you doubly!

Through His words to Ezekiel, God gave us great insight for the kind of people that He will go out of His way to save and bless. Noah, Daniel, and Job: we must be like these three men.