Stinky Twinkies

At the end of Ezekiel 39 (vs 11-16) we find God commanding the nation of Israel to spend 7 months cleaning up the dead and the remains of the dead of Gog. There was a war between Gog and Israel. God was not digging what how the nation of Gog was living. So he destroyed them in a war between them and Israel.

Of course Israel won. But what I found most intriguing is what God commanded the Israelites to do. He commanded all the Israelites to do this. He told them He will give Gog a burial place. Basically, you have fields peppered with dead people. In fact Ezekiel records, “Men will be regularly employed to cleanse the land.” God destroyed the people of Gog. But guess what? They were still there. Their remains were still in the land of Israel. God wanted the land cleansed.

So for the next 7 months search teams combed the land for human carcasses. It even says that if they saw a bone, they would mark it, and the bone collectors would come to pick it up. It is like the ‘Adopt-A-Highway’ people you see out in the ditches along the road picking up trash and leaving garbage bags along the road for the D.O.T. to pick them up. At the end of this bizarre clean up project God says, “And so they will cleanse the land.”

I wonder how many times we try to just ‘put to death’ or put aside temptations and struggles we have? Then we wonder why do these things keep coming back to haunt us and drag us back down? Maybe Gog is an example of what we need to do after we repent for the millionth time.

When I counsel students who are struggling with, drinking for example. I will ask, “Where are you when you are tempted to drink, who are you with, what time of day is it and what were you doing?” They may say they are with a certain group of friends in a home where parents are absent, usually at night and they may just be bored. Each time they put themselves in those same scenarios, they are reentering the battlefield.

Not an active battlefield, but one where death is spread. Until we consciously decide to bury those bones we will constantly battle with that temptation. Stop hanging out with those friends, if parents are not home, don’t go over. You need to fool proof your environment. If you struggle with over eating, get rid of the Twinkies and Mountain Dew from your cupboards. God calls us to not just repent from our sins, but bury the stink that is tempting us to sin in the first place.

Nowhere in the Bible does God tell us to resist temptation. He does tell us to flee it, though. So check your cupboards, check your friends and your surroundings, get the shovel and bury the stinky Twinkies.