Fasting to Feast with Our Father (Matthew 6:16-18)

“In spite of errors and abuses, Christians in the past had sound intuitions about the centrality of fasting in the Christian life. In the early Church, fasting was not an isolated practice reserved for a day or a season. It was a clue to all Christian living, a perspective on the whole of discipleship. To be a Christian meant to participate in a great feast. It meant also to observe a great fast.”

—Peter J. Leithart

One Lord Over All (Ezekiel 28:25-26)

“The LORD passed before him and proclaimed, ‘The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.’” 

— Exodus 34:6-7 

“And now the LORD says… 
‘It is too light a thing that you should be my servant 
to raise up the tribes of Jacob 
and to bring back the preserved of Israel; 
I will make you as a light for the nations, 
that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.’” 

— Isaiah 49:5-6 

God Pronounces Judgement Through Ezekiel's Acts and Speech (Ezekiel 7:1-4)

“Who has believed our message and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” 

— Isaiah

The Unbelief of the People (John 12:36-50)

God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform. He plants his footsteps on the sea, And rides upon the storm.

Ye fearful saints fresh courage take, The clouds you so much dread, Are big with mercy, and shall break, With blessings on your head. 

Judge not the Lord by feeble sense, But trust him for his grace. Behind a frowning providence, He hides a smiling face. 

His purposes will ripen fast, Unfolding every hour. 
The bud may have a bitter taste, But sweet will be the flower.

Blind unbelief is sure to err, And scan His work in vain; God is His own interpreter, And He will make it plain.

—Written by William Cowper d.1800; last hymn written before he descended into mental illness, from which he subsequently died.