The Message of Ezekiel

A New Heart and a New Spirit

Christopher J.H. Wright

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780830883226
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblischer Kommentar

Ezekiel comes to us as a stranger from a distant time and land. Who is this priest who, on his thirtieth birthday, has a dazzling vision of God on a wheeled throne? Who is this odd prophet who engages in outlandish street theater and speaks for God on international affairs? Who is this seer who paints murals of apocalyptic doom and then of a restored temple bursting with emblems of paradise? Are we bound to take this literally, reading prophet and newspaper side by side? Or is there a better way? Christopher Wright is a proven interpreter and communicator of the Old Testament, and in this commentary he masterfully opens our eyes to see and understand the message of Ezekiel. Ezekiel's vision of the glory of God--its departure and return--is first set within Israel's history and then in the culmination of God's promises in Christ. Embedded in the pattern of the strange, the bizarre and the wonderful is a word that still speaks to God's people today.

1:1 – 3:15
1. Wheels within wheels: Ezekiel’s call vision

Introduction: Who, when and where? (1:1–3)

As birthday treats go, Ezekiel’s thirtieth birthday1 experience is unsurpassed. He was spending it by the riverside, a location chosen perhaps for prayer and ritual cleansing.2 He may have gone alone, or with his wife, but before it was over he had a visionary experience of the glory of God himself – an experience that left him stunned and shattered for the whole of the following week (3:15).

The place was by the Kebar River, which was probably a canal, part of a complex irrigation system bringing water from the Tigris and Euphrates into the city and region of Nippur. The Judean exiles had been settled in this region, possibly initially in slave camps in abandoned towns, such as Tel Abib (3:15, see below). We have no sure knowledge of the fate of the exiles once they reached Babylon, but some of them may well have had to work in such irrigation projects, toiling in the sticky heat of the Mesopotamian plain far from the hills of Judea. And Ezekiel was among the exiles, a phrase which describes his social, geographical and historical situation. Their suffering, their questioning, and quite possibly their angry complaints (cf. 3:14) were all shared by him. God did not send them a prophet from outside; God took one of their own number and stunned him into a costly but utterly crucial ministry among them.

The date is given with calendrical precision in verse 2, a date which, by external verification, can be fixed as 31 July 593 BC. It was the fifth year of the exile of King Jehoiachin, the king who had reigned only a few weeks in Jerusalem before his surrender to Nebuchadnezzar.3 Even though he was a deposed and deported king, the people of Judah continued to date events by his reign. This particular date comes exactly five years after the first deportation, and five years before the final destruction of the city in 598/597 BC.

For Ezekiel, however, the personal significance of the day was far greater than its place in the exiles’ forlorn royal calendar.4 It was his thirtieth birthday, and he was the son of Buzi, the priest.5 According to Numbers 4, Levites were eligible for their sacred work between the ages of thirty and fifty. Ezekiel would have grown up for twenty-five years in Jerusalem and known the workings of the temple and its priesthood intimately. He had probably trained for the day when he would enter that holy service himself – perhaps on his thirtieth birthday. Now that birthday had come, but where was he? Not in the temple in Zion, but on the other side of the world. Not in the focal point of the holiness of Yahweh’s presence among his people in his own land, but in an unclean land, surrounded by idolatry and polytheism, mocked by his captors. No birthday-party songs were sung by the side of the canal that day. More likely he sang something like Psalm 137:

By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept

when we remembered Zion.

There on the poplars

we hung our harps,

for there our captors asked us for songs,

our tormentors demanded songs of joy;

they said, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’

How can we sing the songs of the LORD

while in a foreign land?

And yet, by the end of this day when he should have become a priest, Ezekiel had been called (if that is not too weak a word for the awesome experience) to be a prophet.

Four expressions highlight the powerful nature of Ezekiel’s experience. The heavens were opened (1) can describe torrential rain,6 which may be linked to the onset of the approaching storm (4). But more metaphorically the expression describes a parting of the invisible barrier between earth and heaven such that the observer can see what is going on in the very presence of God.7 Visions of God, or perhaps better, ‘divine visions’, describes not merely the appearance of God’s glory that was already winging and wheeling its way across the horizon, but the whole experience of seeing divine realities behind the everyday, canalside perspective on events. The word of the LORD came to Ezekiel; this standard expression for the prophetic gifting completes the audiovisual experience. For Ezekiel it was not merely a word that he heard, but one that he absorbed into his whole being (2:9 – 3:3). Finally, the hand of the LORD was upon him. This speaks of overpowering pressure and compulsion, which in Ezekiel’s case seems to have involved physical as well as psychological and spiritual manifestations. He uses the expression seven times in the book.8

A single word, however, captures the amazement of the moment more than any other. It is the simple expression There (3). Emphatic in its position, it focuses on the contrast between what is being described (or about to be), and where it is all happening. Yahweh, the God of Israel, is appearing, is speaking, is putting forth his mighty hand, there, in the land of exile, uncleanness and despair. Ezekiel, with his fellow exiles, most probably believed that God was far away, or to be more precise, that they were far away from God’s presence in the Jerusalem temple. The exiles felt despised and rejected by those who had been left behind in Jerusalem (11:15). Yet even there, in remarkable similarity to Psalm 139:7–12, the powerful presence of Yahweh in all his glory was about to be revealed. God is there in Babylon! What comfort! And yet, as the storm clouds rush in over the plain towards Ezekiel, he knows that God is coming in judgment, terrifying judgment as it will turn out. No wonder he was scared witless for a week (2:15).

God is there. There are times when our doctrinal conviction of God’s omnipresence needs to become an experienced reality again. Whether through geographical distance, like Ezekiel’s, or through more spiritual or emotional alienation, the experience of exile from the presence of God can be dark and terrible. We may not be privileged with an overwhelming vision like Ezekiel’s, and most of us will be grateful to be excused the privilege, but we can certainly pray for the reassurance of the touch of his hand reminding us that God is there, even there.

1. The vision of God’s glory (1:4–28)

‘If someone asks whether the vision is clear, I confess it is very obscure and I do not profess to understand it.’ Such was Calvin’s humble opinion,9 shared by many before and since. With the help of vastly increased knowledge about the cultural context of Ezekiel’s ministry, unavailable to Calvin, we may fare better in understanding it, though we will do well to follow his example in avoiding some of the wilder attempts to give meaning to all its details – attempts which, as he put it, are ‘better buried immediately than rebuffed at great effort’.

a. The broad structure

Although it is possible, as we shall see, to follow a broad sequence in Ezekiel’s description of his vision, we are dealing here with an account that bears all the marks of an excited eye-witness. Fourteen months later Ezekiel was able to write some clearer explanations of the things he saw (in ch. 10), but this account is full of hasty, disjointed and ungrammatical language, tumbling along as the words struggle to cope with an overwhelmingly awesome confrontation with the majesty of God.

The vision begins with a storm (4) and ends with a throne (26). It has thereby combined two very powerful theophany10 traditions that are found in Israel’s worship. One describesYahweh as ‘riding on the wings of the storm’, and includes such features as strong wind and lightning.11 The other describes him as ‘enthroned above the cherubim’, or simply as seated on a throne above a heavenly platform.12 The combination of both kinds of theophanic imagery into one massive multimedia experience must have been virtually beyond description. Whereas the throne imagery spoke of static power and authority, the storm imagery transformed it into dynamic movement and freedom.

At the start of the vision, Ezekiel may have thought he was simply observing the approach of yet another normal thunderstorm across the sweltering Mesopotamian plains (4). But as it rushed closer he could see that it was far from ‘normal’, with its pulsating, flashing core, and its brilliant effulgence. Once it was close enough to see the details, there were three things that took his attention in turn, providing some structure for our analysis of his vision: the four living creatures (5–14); the wheels beneath them (15–21); and the platform and throne above them (22–27).

b. The four living creatures (1:5–14)

Starting in the middle of the storm vision, Ezekiel sees in its fiery heart four upright living creatures. Their appearance is, for many of us, the stuff of bizarre fantasy movies, but in the world Ezekiel had been forced to inhabit – the heart of the Babylonian empire – they were a kind of mutated variation on images he would have seen in religious painting and statues all around him. In 10:20 he explains that these living creatures were in fact cherubim, though that term is not used in the immediate description of them in chapter 1. ‘Cherubim’ in western art have been portrayed as cute flying babies hovering around scenes of religious devotion. Nothing could be more removed from the biblical picture, where they seem to have been related to the massive statues of guardian creatures that stood outside Mesopotamian temples, or were portrayed in paintings as holding up the sky, as the home of the gods. Solomon had installed two in his temple,13 though their appearance differs from Ezekiel’s vision. Ezekiel’s description has features that were common in such paintings and statues: the upright humanoid form (5), but with multiple heads or faces and wings (6); the legs and/or feet of a bull (7); the particular animals whose heads were included along with the human one (lion, ox and eagle, 10). Such composite, winged ‘bullmen’ are found in various postures over a wide spectrum of ancient near-eastern cultures and historical eras. Typically they are seen in several main roles, either supporting the throne of a god, or guarding his temple or the palace of a king. They were the attendants of deity, supporting his majesty and defending his empire.14 From his cultural surroundings, Ezekiel would have recognized such creatures as indicating the presence of deity, even if it did not immediately dawn on his terrified mind that it was indeed Yahweh they were attending (not until v. 28 is this identification made).15

Closer inspection gives an idea of the posture and relationship of the four creatures. They were vertical, with one of their two pairs of wings upraised and touching the wings of the others overhead. The only way this can be envisaged is that they were arranged in a square (not a straight line), with the human face of each creature facing outwards to each point of the compass. So they would have seemed to have their backs to each other, except that at the back of each was the eagle’s head, with the lion’s head facing right and the ox’s head facing left.

Ezekiel notices that each creature had four wings (unlike Isaiah’s vision of six-winged seraphim), but tells us little about what they did with them, except to cover their bodies with one pair and make a lot of noise with the other (25) when they moved. Nor does he tell us anything about the actions (if any) of the human hands he sees beneath the wings (8). Hands, however, in biblical imagery normally signify ability, power and competence.

More significant is the symbolism of the four heads or faces – those of a man, a lion, an ox and an eagle. Again it is vital to remember that what seems strange and arbitrary to us was familiar and immediately symbolic to Ezekiel and his contemporaries. Individually or in combination, these four creatures are to be found in religious art and statuary all across the ancient world, and in Israel too they had symbolic or proverbial significance.

The lion was renowned for its strength, ferocity, and courage (Judg. 14:18; 2 Sam. 1:23; 17:10), and served as a symbol of ...