以西结书

Meditative Reflection
Enduring the Harness of Ministry

“Now son of man, take a sharp sword and use it as a barber’s razor to shave your head and your beard...” (Ezek. 5:1)

We have previously considered how the Lord desires His servant to identity both with His own feelings and the plight of the people he serves. In this latest message of warning, after the warning of the impending besiege of Jerusalem (in chapter 4), the Lord commands Ezekiel to convey the warning of the merciless punishment by the Lord: “I will do to you what I have never done before and will never do again. Therefore in your midst fathers will eat their children and children will eat their fathers.” (5:9).

In so doing, Ezekiel has to shave his head and his beard, which is not only a sign of mourning, but an act of defilement in itself for Ezekiel, because Leviticus makes it clear that, “Priests must not shave their heads or shave off the edges of their beards or cut their own bodies. They must be holy to their God and must not profane the name of their God.” (21:5-6).

Therefore this very act serves two purposes:

(1) To Ezekiel: he should not just shoot the message of punishment and destruction to the people, he has to grieve and mourn for them in the process—that is the heart of God and the plight of the people; and

(2) To the people: for Ezekiel to openly defile himself and to bring open shame upon himself by violating the sacredness of the priesthood, they would understand the seriousness of the message and take particular notice of this message of warning which ends twice with these words, “I the Lord have spoken” (5:15, 17).

If we admire the sacrifice Ezekiel is willing to make, in that he would do almost anything told by the Lord to call his people to repentance, we should note that this particular symbolic act is nothing compared to what he will be asked to do as he continues his prophetic ministry (e.g. in 24:15ff). We might be tempted to ask, what motivates Ezekiel to endure the harshness of his ministry. Apart from his love and fear of the Lord, I have to say that he deeply loves his people as well.

Meditative Reflection
The High Places of Israel

“I will destroy our high places. Your altars will be demolished and your incense altars will be smashed and I will slay your people in front of your idols.” (Ezek. 6:3-4)

The English Bible readers are often bewildered by the regular reference to the ‘high places’ of Israel. The Hebrew word for ‘high place’ is bamah (lit. ‘height’). The term refers to local open-air shrines that were frequently described as being located on a hill but could in reality have been found anywhere, including a city gate or valley (Jer. 7:31)…In Israel’s early history in Canaan, high places became venues for the offering of animal sacrifices and incense to Yahweh (1 Sam 9:12ff). The rationale offered was that people “were still sacrificing at the high places, because a temple had not yet been built for the Name of the Lord (1 Ki. 3:2)…Once worship of the Lord had been centralized in Jerusalem, however, high places came to pose a threat to the purity of Israel’s faith. When Israelites worshipped the Lord away from the temple and its priestly oversight, they were at risk of being influence by local, pagan cults and traditions. Prophets attacked high places for their syncretism. They were all too frequently located at which the gods Molech, Chemosh and Asherah were worshipped, indiscriminately, alongside the God of Israel (1 Ki. 11:7-8; 2 Ki. 23:13). High places were regarded as centers of apostasy because they competed with Jerusalem for Israel’s devotion (2 Ki. 17:9-11).

In the historical narratives kings are routinely evaluated by whether or not they demolished these sanctuaries. Josiah’s reforms dealt a powerful blow to the high places (2 Ki. 23:15-20); even so, attachment to them survived. These locations of temptation are cited specifically as the cause of God’s judgment upon Judah (Ezek. 6:3-7).” (Archaeological Study Bible, 1318).

Meditative Reflection
Sin is Like a Budding Staff

“The day is here! It has come! Doom has burst forth, the rod has budded, arrogance has blossomed.” (Ezek. 7:10)

In pronouncing the inevitable and imminent judgment of His people, the Lord uses a botanical analogy—that of a budding staff. Of course, when the audience of Ezekiel hear this expression, they would immediately think of Aaron’ staff that had sprouted, produced buds and blossomed and was placed in front of ark of the covenant (Num. 17:8-11). As a result, the use of this analogy conveys the powerful message that they are just the opposite of Aaron’s staff—they have been rejected and are no longer part of the covenant. More than that, their punishment is self-inflicted and they should have expected it. Their arrogance in despising the Word of God and His warning has eventually blossomed and is yielding its fruit—complete destruction. However, Calvin is right in pointing out that the use of the rod also depicts God’s patience and forbearing in that only when their arrogance has come into full bloom that it leaves Him with no choice but to inflict the punishment they deserve.

It is the same with us today. If we are bent on living a life of sin in disobedience to God’s will, we cannot blame God for the consequence we suffer. Like the budding of a rod, it is only a matter of time, not only can our sin not be hidden; we have to face the discipline of God’s wrath. However, the good news is, not only is God patient with us, His discipline is meant to produce the fruit of righteousness in us (Heb. 12:11).

Meditative Reflection
It will be Too Late

“When terror comes they will seek peace, but there will be none.” (Ezek. 7:25)

With the emphasis on God’s love these days, there are those who think such a loving God cannot and will not put sinners into hell, and there are also those who think that since God is a God of second chances, perhaps, even Satan could repent and be saved.

The truth of the matter is God is indeed a God of love, but His absolute holiness means that sinners cannot come into His presence. So, it is not so much God is so unloving that He delights in sending sinners into hell. John 3:17-18 has made this clear:

“For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.”

In other words, we are all born with the same fate as sinners: we are condemned already, except that God, in His great love, has provided us a way out in His Son Jesus Christ. The choice is ours, whether to “believe in Him (and) shall not perish, but have eternal life” (Jn. 3:16), or not believe in Him and continue to “stand condemned”. But this choice is only confined to this life, and if we die without making that choice to repent and believe in Christ, it will be too late. The warning by Ezekiel to the people of Israel about their “doom’s day” powerfully conveys this message when he warns, “When terror comes they will seek peace, but there will be none” (Ezek. 7:25), or Keil would translate, “Ruin has come, they seek salvation, but there is none.” (K&D, Ezekiel, 64).

Meditative Reflection
The Wholesale Rebellion of a Nation

“In the sixth year, in the sixteen month on the fifth day, while I was sitting in my house and the elders of Judah were sitting before me, the hand of the Sovereign Lord came upon me.” (Ezek. 8:1)

“Ezekiel, by laying 430 days on his two sides, acted out the siege which would come upon the city. One year and two months has passed (cf. 1:1-3; 8:1) and now Ezekiel was fulfilling the picture lesson of forty days on his side for the iniquity of Judah…It is not by chance that this vision occurred during the time in which Ezekiel was lying on his right side depicting the judgment for Judah’s iniquity. As this time only Judah was left in the land of Canaan, and the forth coming vision would concern Judah’s capital city, Jerusalem, the city chosen by God for His habitation (cf. 2 Sam. 7; Ps. 132), was the central sanctuary of Israel, her unifying center where the tribal units were to express their obedience and loyalty to Yahweh. But in Ezekiel’s day this city center has become the rotten core of Israel’s apostasy. The corruption of the leaders and the sanctuary itself (cf. 9:6) had to be exposed and judged as the major problem of the nation” (Alexander, 29); hence the revelation of the several scenes of blatant acts of idolatry.

These scenes combined to show

- Idolatry is not only practiced by a certain segment of the nation but it involves the king (who, like Manasseh, is responsible for bringing Canaanite idol image into the inner court of the temple), the people (as represented by the 70 elders), the priests (as represented by the 25 priests who alone could have access to the place between the portico and the altar) and the families (as represented by the women who mourned for Tammuz). Everybody in Judah is guilty of these detestable practices, and thus none can be spared;

- The increasing degree of their idolatrous acts, highlighted by the repeated statements, “You will see them doing things that are even more detestable” (8:6, 13, 15). The reason for their increasing wickedness is captured by the words of the 70 elders: “The Lord does not see us; the Lord has forsaken the land” (8:12). The defeats in the hand of Nebuchadnezzar have not awakened them of their need to return to the Lord, but served as their excuse to increase their wickedness—kind of like a rebellious child seeking revenge against the chastisement of the parent; and

- The inevitability of the wrath of the Lord as depicted by this vivid metaphor: “Look at them, sticking the branch up my nose” (8:17, NICOT, 297); the Lord could not help but sneeze His wrath at them without pity!

At the reading of this vision, one cannot help but think of the world today and recognize that the world is also “sticking the branch” up the nose of our Lord with its wholesale rebellion against Him!

Meditative Reflection
A Prayer of Repentance

“Have you seen this son of man? Is it a trivial matter for the house of Judah to do the detestable things?” (Ezek. 8:17)

In the midst of his commentary on increasing rebellious acts of the house of Judah in chapter 8, instead of having a sense of indignant righteousness, Calvin could not help but see how we should focus on our sins, and not on the sins of the Israelites and offers this prayer of repentance:

“Grant, Almighty God, since Thou hast treated us so indulgently and when provoked by our iniquities, hast yet shown Thyself a propitious Father to us, that we may no longer abuse Thy patience, but return directly to Thy way and submit ourselves to Thee — and, being humbled by a true sense of penitence, grant that we may be so dissatisfied with our sins, that we may devote ourselves to Thee with our whole heart, and follow the direction of Thy holy calling; until after finishing the pursuits of this life, we may arrive at that happy repose which Thine only begotten Son has acquired for us by His blood.—Amen” (Calvin’s Commentaries, IX, 283)

Meditative Reflection
The Sign of the Cross?

“Go throughout the city of Jerusalem and put a mark on the foreheads of those who grieve and lament over all the detestable things that are done in it.” (Ezek. 9:4)

In view of the blatant and widespread despise of God and His Word in our culture today, we often feel disheartened, thinking, “What can we do?” or “What is the use of grieving over the wickedness around us?” The vision of the angel with the writing kit in Ezekiel 9 gives us great encouragement to know that not only does the Lord see and hear our grief, but it serves to be our protection in the time of God’s judgment. However, it is interesting to note that in the original Hebrew language:

“Those who exhibit this response (in Ezek. 9:4) are to be marked with a taw on the forehead. Taw is the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet. In the archaic cursive script it had the shape of an X or a cross, a form that remained essentially unchanged from the early stages of the evolution of the alphabet until the adoption of the square Aramaic script. It is preserved to this day in Western script as T.” (NICOT, Ezekiel, 307)

And thus, Keil opines that

“And this was the reason why ‘taw” was to be marked upon the forehead, the most visible portion of the body; the early Christians, according to a statement in Origen, looked upon the sign itself as significant, and saw therein a prophetic allusion to the sign of the cross as the distinctive mark of Christians. A direct prophecy of the cross of Christ is certainly not to be found here, since the form of the letter taw was the one generally adopted as a sign…Nevertheless, as Schmieder has correctly observed, there is something remarkable in this coincidence to the thoughtful observer of the ways of God, whose counsel has carefully considered all beforehand, especially when we bear in mind that in the counterpart to this passage (Rev. 7:3), the seal of the living God is stamped upon the foreheads of the servants of God, who are to be exempt from the judgment, and that according to Rev. 14:1 they had the name of God written upon their foreheads.” (K&D, Ezekiel, 75-76)

Food for thought, indeed!