In Ezekiel 24:1 Ezekiel receives and records a revelation from God in Babylon and dates it to January 15, 588 BC. It had been two years and five months since Ezekiel’s last series of prophetic messages (Ezekiel 20:1). Ezekiel began to receive his next set of messages from the Lord on the very day that Nebuchadnezzar began his siege on Jerusalem (2 Kings 25:1) to begin the fulfillment of Ezekiel’s previous prophecies.

The first words the Lord speaks to Ezekiel in Babylon are:

“Son of man, record this date, this very date, because the king of Babylon has laid siege to Jerusalem this very day.” – Ezekiel 24:2

The Lord wants to explain with a parable what is about to transpire now that this date has arrived
and Nebuchadnezzar is outside Jerusalem’s walls. Actually, the Lord gives Ezekiel three messages on this date which are recorded in Ezekiel 24-25.

This first parable is given to Ezekiel for “this rebellious people.” The parable is acted out by Ezekiel for the captives in Babylon to watch. A bronze (or, possibly a rusty) pot with water is placed on wood and brought to a boil in order to cook the meat off the bones.

Ezekiel 24:6-8 identifies the pot as Jerusalem and claims the reason for Jerusalem’s destruction was the innocent blood shed in the city. The boiling pieces of choice meat taken from the flock represent the people of Jerusalem that will be destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar and consumed by the Babylonian forces.

“Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system...the love of God taught as the Christian ‘conception’ of God. An intellectual assent to that idea is held to be of itself sufficient to secure remission of sins…Cheap grace means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner. Grace alone does everything, they say, and so everything can remain as it was before.”
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer in
“The Cost of Discipleship”
(more quotes here & here)
published in 1937. Bonhoeffer’s radio message criticizing Hitler in 1933 was cut off midway so he fled to London. He returned to Germany to lead a new seminary faithful to the Word of God, but the seminary was shut down. He was imprisoned in 1943 and executed in 1945 at the concentration camp at Flossenburg saying,
“This is the end – for me, the beginning of life.”

According to Exodus 16:31 Manna tasted like honey wafers.