Ezekiel

Ezekiel

I. Orienting Data

Let me then start talking about Ezekiel and what we have in the Book of Ezekiel.

A. Overview

It is a big book. It is one of the Major Prophets. It is forty-eight chapters. I am going to summarize it in much greater speed than how carefully, relatively speaking, we looked at Lamentations but I think it is doable.

1. Fall of Jerusalem

The first thing I would say is that we have a special emphasis here on the fall of Jerusalem. Indeed, what Ezekiel does is devote half the book, as we measure it by chapters, to hammering away at basically one message. If you look at chapters 1 to 24 you will see that, for the most part, they have a single theme expressed in many, many beautifully varied ways, but he is on message for those twenty-four chapters and it is—do not fool yourselves, the exile will not be short and furthermore, it will not be partial.

Ezekiel went into exile in 598 BC when King Jehoiachin was exiled. That is a detail, and I know you try to keep all the kings and everything straight, but Jehoiachin was the last legitimate king of the Judeans and he was deposed in 598 BC, after just reigning for a few months, and taken into captivity to Babylon. We talked about him as the king that is featured in that tablet that has the food distribution lists that confirms the ending of the Book of 2 Kings. After him, the Babylonians put a puppet king, named Zedekiah, on the throne. So Zedekiah was really the Babylonian choice for king, but he was a descendent of David and he is the one who is deposed and it is all over as of 586.

Many people hoped that the exile would be brief. Jeremiah encountered a prophet named Hananiah, and descriptions are given in chapter 37 and so on about how he had to deal with this prophet Hananiah. Hananiah was saying, “Two years and then the exile will be over. The Babylonians will be off the scene. Give it two years.” Jeremiah said, “No, it is going to seventy.” That was hard. Most people were thinking it not much. Jeremiah’s seventy starts later. What you had Hananiah saying was, “Oh, it will just be 598 to 596. Jeremiah says, “No, it hasn’t even come yet. When it comes it will last seventy years.” Therefore, people like Ezekiel are up against the same kind of opposition that Jeremiah was up against. People said, “Come on, not for a whole lifetime, you don’t mean that.” So, they are all giving positive words and saying it cannot be that bad and it will be fine and so on and Ezekiel, like Jeremiah, has to preach a very, very unpopular message. A not happy message at all and has to say, “Look, here is the situation; it’s going to be bad, bad, bad.”

2. Oracles Against Foreign Nations

Also, he has oracles against foreign nations, as you might expect by now, especially Egypt, Tyre and a new one, Magog, a nation that does not really exist, a nation that seems to be kind of a composite to speak about all the nations gathering against God’s people.

3. New Jerusalem and New Temple

Then he has visions of the New Jerusalem and the new temple. That is a little overview.

B. Author

He was a priest. His prophesies go from 593 to 571.

C. Emphases

His emphases are as listed here.

1. God’s judgment.

2. The whole idea of the presence of the Lord in His glory, which does leave and then returns in his visions.

3. He describes the idolatry that is all over the place in Jerusalem in the final days and how that just confirms that God’s people are not faithful.

4. He talks about God’s omnipresence and omniscience.

5. Destruction of final world powers.

6. Total final victory of God.

Ezekiel is very helpful for showing how different the age of the New Covenant will be from that of the Old. When you read Ezekiel, he describes the future for the nation of Israel and it does not look anything like actual ancient Israel, nothing like it; geographically it is totally different. He describes Jerusalem; it is nothing like the actual historical Jerusalem. He describes the new temple; it is nothing like the actual historical temple. What he is saying is—in the age to come, there are going to be realities that are totally different from what we are used to. It is not the same. It is not just that we will come back and start up life as it once was. No, what God has in mind after the exile is something much, much better, much bigger, much different, not the same old thing. I think you can see it in Ezekiel even better, more clearly than you can in most prophets and it helps you to understand what the prophets are really doing; they are saying the restoration era is an era of vastly different blessing on a vastly different scale.

II. Themes and Issues

A. Major Themes

1. Give Up Your False Hope

There are people, who you will encounter all your life in ministry who have false hope. They will have the notion, for example, that, if they raise their children correctly, their children will be good all through their teenage years and all through college and thereafter and will reflect their values and be nice, quiet, obedient kids, never having a problem. There are people who believe that and it hurts, then, if that is their confidence, if that is what they really believe God owes them, to have that not work out. You will find people who have bought into the line that they will get somewhere, someplace, from some TV preacher or somewhere, that will say if your relationship to Christ is good, you just are not going to get sick; you should not have to be sick. Many people hold that; many people have just gotten that idea. That makes sense to them; it fits, somehow, into their psyche and they are expecting that they are not going to get sick if they know Christ and they just cannot understand it if they get sick; it just does not make sense. There are even groups, as some of you probably know, you have been familiar with them, where people will say, “Haven’t been sick a day in my life, had some symptoms but never really been sick.” They talk about having symptoms. Professor Fee, who taught here for a long time, wrote an article called The Disease of the Health and Wealth Gospel, and in it tried to demonstrate how wrong that way of thinking is but it is very popular in some circles. I could go on and list many kinds of false hopes.

There are many people who are convinced that Christ is supposed to make their life smooth; everything should go well. Often Christian testimonies are this way. Someone stands up in some kind of a church meeting or whatever and says, “I was a bum and a rascal before I accepted Christ, now everything is going just great.” The implication of that kind of mentality is, if everything is not going great for you, you must not be much of a Christian. People need to know that often the proof that you are in God’s will is that you are suffering as He predicts. That is what Paul says. Paul says, “What proof do you want that I am an apostle? Christ came to suffer and did; He is a suffering servant. I am suffering for Him; let me describe my suffering. What more proof do you need?” He gives his suffering as the credential that makes him a true apostle. That is his argument. “My suffering is the proof.” That is just a way of thinking that many people do not have in mind. Ezekiel is really useful for teaching that.

2. Advisor to the Community

Ezekiel is also an advisor to the community. People come to him and they say what about this and what about that and he says, “I don’t know, I’ll go ask the Lord.” He goes and prays and God gives him answers, frequently, and he comes back and says, “Here is what God told me,” so he has that role.

3. Interrelationship of Leader and People

He addresses the interrelationship of leader and people a lot in his foreign nation oracles. Unlike some of the other books, Ezekiel will talk about the Pharaoh more than about Egypt per se. About the king of Tyre, more than about Tyre per se, etc. That is one of his special characteristics. You see in Ezekiel the significance of the government leadership. It is one of his themes and it is very useful.

4. Universal Divine Sovereignty

Also, universal divine sovereignty. Ezekiel starts with a vision that involves the picture of the wheel in a wheel and so on. This really is not mysterious. This is not something that cannot be comprehended. He says in Ezekiel 1:4, “I saw a windstorm coming out of the north, flashing light, brilliant light, the center of the fire looked like glowing metal, then there are four living creatures, each of them has four kinds of things and they have got wings and they all face in different directions, each one goes straight ahead and don’t move as they turn. What can this be?” You go on and see the whole thing and you might say, “What kind of a weird thing is this?” Some people have even tried to argue it is obviously a flying saucer or something. What Ezekiel sees is God’s super fast worldwide chariot. This is a bird’s eye view. He sees this chariot that has the wheels all around but it has wheels in a wheel, not like hubs or something, but rather wheels on different axes so that the wheels do not need to turn. There is a wheel facing this way and a wheel facing that way, like a gyroscope would look. It has got living creatures pulling this and they are facing in every direction so they do not need to turn this chariot around. But, rather, this chariot can just go. It does not even need to turn. He says at the end of chapter 1, “This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord.” That is what God caused him to see. In effect, God suddenly shows up and says, “Hi Ezekiel, here you are along the Chebar Canal, way over here near the Tigris River and I’m just dropping by. How do you like My chariot? Nice, huh? It’s fast. Ezekiel, I want you to preach and just tell people that I’m sovereign over the whole universe. I’m not localized back in Judah like many, many people think. I’m the only God and I’m universal; I’m over it all and I’m commissioning you to preach My word to a bunch of people that will be hard hearted and stiff necked and resist everything you say but that’s your commission. So long,” and off He goes. I know that is a caricature, but that is the idea of what is going on in Ezekiel. In exile, these people are not way off from Yahweh’s influence and control. He does not have any place where he does not have any influence or control. That does not happen; it does not work that way.

5. Hope in Hopeless Situation

The need to have hope in an otherwise hopeless situation comes partly from that divine sovereignty.

6. Individual and National Responsibility

Individual responsibility, we have said. Also national responsibility, he does not drop that as a concept.

7. Unification, A Prelude to Eschatological Fulfillment

He talks about the fact that Israel and Judah together, all of God’s people must be unified. That is a great theme in Scripture, the unity of God’s people.

8. Corporate Leadership of the Holy Spirit

This is a big theme for him.

9. Certainty of Fulfillment of God's Word

It will happen, so do not have false hope. If God says He is going to punish, He is going to punish. You cannot naively figure that something will not happen if God has said it will.

10. Transformation of People Prior to Eschatological Fulfillment

That is important. Ezekiel wants everybody to understand that they need to become a new people. You do not just say, “Make me Lord. Force me to be part of your New Covenant.” No, there has to be a will to get into that. It just does not automatically happen.

11. Transformation of the Temple

12. Transformation of the Promised Land

13. The Presence of God

A great sense of the theme of the presence of God, if God is not present we are in trouble. If He is too present, and we are sinful, we are in trouble too. So you have the beneficent limited presence of God that reflects itself in Ezekiel. Some of these things we have already covered so they are not brand new.

B. Highlights

1. First half of this bifid book, this two-part book, Jerusalem must fall. That is woe.

2. Then come the more positive stuff. The oracles against foreign nations are positive, from the point of view of God’s people, because they all say these oppressor nations must decline and God’s people must rise.

3. Hope after the fall.

4. And then the great visions of the future; nothing like the present.

C. Other Issues in Ezekiel

1. The Turning of History

Ezekiel reflects the sense of the turning of history, which is what the exile period is.

2. Apocalyptic

Also apocalyptic, I am going to talk about apocalyptic when we get to Daniel and explain that, say a little bit more about it than we have said in the past. Ezekiel has plenty of examples of it.

3. Lament Form

Plenty examples of the lament form, he is a lamenter, too, but it is not the lament form as we have it in the Psalms. It is another kind of lament, which is more like the funerary lament, where you are imagining what you say at the death of somebody. You are imagining the funeral of someone who is now in a very sad position. He does that in a lot of his foreign nation oracles.

4. Dated Prophecies

The dated prophecies, we have already said.

5. Prophecies Not Materialistic

Just to say this, it can seem, when you read the Prophets, that they are talking materialistically, just as it can seem in the New Testament as you read about streets of gold in Jerusalem and so on, and you say, “Oh gee, it is all materialistic.” That is a misunderstanding. With Ezekiel, when you read about the supposedly material restoration, like you will get your land back, but it is not the same land. You will get your city back but it is not the same city. You will get your temple back but it is not the same temple. Everything changes. What he is really saying is, “We prophets do give our predictions in what sounds like material terms, land and vineyards and abundance and all that. But if you really examine what we are doing, we are using that as a means of conveying the fact that there is something ahead that we don’t even understand. It is beyond; it is great. You don’t understand it; we don’t understand it. It is something fabulous in the plan of God. We can only describe it from the point of view of the material but that is not really what we are thinking.” If you understand that, you can see it so well in Ezekiel 40-48. It will be like a prism through which you can, also then, suddenly understand what Amos means, for example, when he says, “The days are coming when the person trying to plant his field will tell the person who is still harvesting, 'Would you please get out of the way, I need to plant the crops',” because the harvest will be so abundant that they will go right around to planting time again. That is just crazy in any agricultural society; you do not have harvests like that. It is a way of saying, using material terminology, something great and wonderful is ahead that we do not really have any ability to portray as well as we would like to.