When you trust in the wrong things

There is a quiet danger that can creep into the life of any believer — not the dramatic, obvious kind of danger, but the subtle kind. The kind where you convince yourself that everything is fine, that you are safe, that God would never allow things to go sideways, all while slowly drifting away from actually listening to what God is saying. This drift does not always begin with outright rebellion. Sometimes it begins with misplaced trust.

The eleventh and twelfth chapters of Ezekiel paint a sobering picture of exactly how this happens, and the lessons that are relevant to us today.

The Pot and the Meat
In Ezekiel 11, God gives the prophet a vision of twenty-five leaders in Jerusalem — men who were steeped in idolatry and leading God's people astray. These leaders had developed a philosophy that they were spreading among the people, captured in a simple but revealing image: we are the meat in the pot, and the city is the pot. As long as we stay inside Jerusalem, we are safe.

On the surface, you can almost understand the logic. Jerusalem had massive, thick walls. More importantly, the temple was there — and the temple represented the presence of God. Surely God would not allow His own city, His own house, to be destroyed. Surely the people inside were protected.

But there is a fatal flaw in the meat-in-a-pot analogy, and God does not let it go unnoticed. Meat is placed in a pot for one reason: to be cooked. The very image they chose to represent their safety was actually an image of their coming destruction. And God makes it plain — the only ones who will remain in the pot are the dead. Everyone else will be driven out.

The walls of Jerusalem did not save them. The temple did not save them. The Babylonians eventually broke through after an eighteen-month siege, the city was destroyed, and the temple was reduced to rubble. The very things the people were trusting in crumbled around them.

What Happens When We Trust What We Can See
This is where the message becomes deeply personal. The people of Judah were not trusting in nothing — they were trusting in something real and visible. They could see the walls. They could see the temple. And because they could see those things, they felt no urgency to listen to the prophets who were warning them that judgment was coming.

We do the same thing. We trust what we can see over what God has said. When God promises to provide for our needs, we look at our bank account and begin to wonder if perhaps we need to take matters into our own hands. When God calls us to wait, we look at our circumstances and decide that waiting is no longer reasonable. Abraham and Sarah knew what God had promised them — a son, an heir, a future. But years passed and nothing happened, and what they could see with their eyes began to outweigh what God had spoken to them. The result was Hagar, Ishmael, and a conflict whose consequences still echo through history today.

Trusting what you can see rather than what God has said will always lead you away from listening to Him. And the longer that pattern continues, the harder it becomes to hear His voice at all.

Selective Hearing and the Proverb of Delay
By the time we reach Ezekiel 12, God addresses another layer of the problem. The people had developed a proverb: "The days go by and every vision comes to nothing." The prophets kept warning them, and nothing happened — so they stopped taking the warnings seriously. A second group had a slightly different response: yes, judgment might come eventually, but it is far off in the future. What does it matter now?

Both responses amount to the same thing: a decision to stop listening because the message was inconvenient.

God's response is direct. He tells Ezekiel in Ezekiel 12:28 that none of His words will be delayed any longer — what He has said will be fulfilled. The day had already been determined. There was no more time.

It is worth pausing here to consider how easily this same thinking infiltrates the modern believer's life. We have been told that Jesus is returning. We have been told that a day of judgment is coming for the whole world. And yet the years pass, and it is tempting to settle into a kind of spiritual complacency — assuming that because it has not happened yet, it must be far off, or perhaps not quite as urgent as we were told.

But the question worth sitting with is this: if you knew with certainty that Jesus was returning on Friday, would you live any differently on Thursday? If the honest answer is yes, that itself is worth examining. The day of His return should not be what determines how we live. We are called to readiness not as a reaction to a deadline, but as a way of life.

The Path Back to Listening
What ultimately brought Israel back to God was the very judgment they had refused to believe was coming. After the exile, after the destruction, after all they endured — they finally abandoned their idols and returned to the Lord. God accomplished what He intended. But the road to get there was devastating.

The warning embedded in these chapters is not meant to produce fear. It is meant to produce honesty. Sin dulls our hearing. Misplaced trust silences the voice of God in our lives — not because He stops speaking, but because we have trained ourselves to tune Him out. And sometimes we are not even walking in obvious rebellion. Sometimes we have simply already decided what we want to do, and we would rather not ask.

The invitation is straightforward: repent of what needs to be repented of, stop trusting in what you can see at the expense of what God has said, and cultivate a heart that genuinely wants to hear from Him — no matter what that hearing might require of you.
The walls of Jerusalem looked solid right up until they were not. Do not put your trust in the pot.