- Jeremiah, Ezekiel
Jeremiah, for example, was given the difficult task of bearing word of God’s impending judgment to Judah and Jerusalem. It would be an unwelcome message to those for whom it was destined:“Who will have pity on you,O Jerusalem? Who will mourn for you? Who will stop to ask how you are? You have rejected me,” declares the Lord. “You keep on backsliding. So I will lay hands on you and destroy you; I can no longer show compassion.” (Jeremiah 15:5-6)
Jeremiah was a willing messenger, but he was under no illusion concerning the response God’s message would meet—or of his own vulnerability as the bearer of such tidings:
You understand, O Lord;remember me and care for me.Avenge me on my persecutors.
You are long-suffering—do not take me away;think of how I suffer reproach for your sake. (Jeremiah 15:15) Then Jeremiah added this interesting statement: When your words came, I ate them; they were my joy and my heart’s delight, for I bear your name, O Lord God Almighty. (Jeremiah 15:16) Ezekiel had a similar experience when God commissioned him to prophesy to rebellious Israel:
[The voice] said to me, “Son of man, stand up on your feet and I will speak to you.” As he spoke, the Spirit came into me and raised me to my feet, and I heard him speaking to me.
He said: “Son of man, I am sending you to the Israelites, to a rebellious nation that has rebelled against me; they and their fathers have been in revolt against me to this very day.”
Then I looked, and I saw a hand stretched out to me. In it was a scroll, which he unrolled before me. On both sides of it were written words of lament and mourning and woe. And he said to me, “Son of man, eat what is before you, eat this scroll; then go and speak to the house of Israel.” So I opened my mouth, and he gave me the scroll to eat.
Then he said to me, “Son of man, eat this scroll I am giving you and fill your stomach with it.” So I ate it, and it tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth.
He then said to me: “Son of man, go now to the house of Israel and speak my words to them.” (Ezekiel 2:1-4) The word God asked Jeremiah and Ezekiel to deliver was a bitter warning of divine judgment. But Jeremiah testified that as he “ate” God’s words they were “my joy and my heart’s delight.” And Ezekiel, with similar reaction concerning the scroll he had ingested, said, “It tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth.”
Similar terminology
Returning to John’s account in Revelation 10, we find similar circumstances and terminology. God has a prophetic word for John to convey. It is a bitter word of impending divine judgment. As he ingests the word, it is honey sweet, but it turns his stomach sour.
Perhaps we have lost something in getting away from the old King James’s “bitter belly”—”As soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter.” There are “happy-happy-happy” people in our churches who will insist that the Word of God can never be anything but honey sweet. It is my contention, however, that the Christian believers who are intent upon being faithful witnesses for Jesus Christ are not destined to always find sweetness and light in their contacts with evil, rebellious people. When we digest, absorb, soak up the Word of the Lord, it becomes part and parcel of our daily lives. It is our delight. It is honey and sweetness. But as we share that same Word in our witness to lost men and women, we will know something of the bitterness and hostility—even enmity—that was the experience of John and Jeremiah and Ezekiel. There have been times when I have had to counsel believers who had become discouraged to the point of despair because of the treatment they had received at the hands of those who hated their witness.
There is another sense in which the Word becomes bitterness within us. It becomes bitterness to our sinful nature, because the sinful nature “desires what is contrary to the Spirit” (Galatians 5:17). There are people within our Christian fellowships who have determined to set their own agendas—to live their lives as they please. They expect to be recognized as Christians, but they will not bow to the controls God has built into His holy Word and will. They read their Bibles—they even buy a new Bible every few years. They have enough spiritual knowledge to know that the commitment of their spirit, soul and body to the standards of God’s Word will mean some bitter housecleaning within. But they have decided to take no step that will bring pain or sharpness or harshness into what is now for them a soft and easy profession of the Christian life.
These people are determined to manage the influence of the Word of God in their lives rather than to allow the Word of God to manage them day by day, hour by hour.