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Try it free for 30 days! Ezekiel 1 Ezekiel 3. Large Print Edition Retail: Enrich your faith and grow in spiritual maturity with the incredible Bible study and devotional books listed below. Try it for 30 days FREE. Jeremiah, a contemporary of Ezekiel, is heard to say in response to the messages of the false prophets who speak: What was Israel's mistake? Their mistake was they failed to grasp the abominable nature of sin, and the terrible holiness of God almighty. We are saved, and I believe very strongly in the eternal security of the believer, but do you know something?
If any doctrine that we have and believe and hold onto dearly becomes a cloak of false security, of a false assurance that will make us numb to sin and numb to the holiness of God, we must beware! If anything in our lives makes us numb to the awfulness of sin, and to the goodness and the righteousness of God, there may be something wrong with the balance in our doctrine.
For the consequence, as we look at the prophet Ezekiel, is this: Along with the departing of that glory there is a forfeit of reward. Ezekiel was a prophet of judgement but, you know, Ezekiel was more than a prophet of judgement because he brought hope to God's people.
- Ezekiel 2 MSG - It said, “Son of man, stand up. I - Bible Gateway?
- Poetry: The Way I Want It { Inspired by the Pick-up Artist }!
- Ezekiel - MSG - "Son of man, preach. Give them the Message of G?
First of all, he brought judgement to them, but at the end of all the judgements that he pronounces upon the people of God, and then upon the Gentile nations round about them, there is a message of great hope. There is a message of reconciliation, a message of reconstruction of the nation of Israel, of the temple of Israel, of the city of Jerusalem. But the reason why Ezekiel's message was so unpopular was that he brought a message of hope that rested upon the completion of Israel's repentance. All the prophets were preachers of repentance. That probably accounts for why most of them were martyred, including the last great prophet, John the Baptist, who lost his head because he was a preacher who stood in the wilderness - no one else was doing it - and said: What often happens is, when the people of God do not repent, in order that God drives them to that holy act of repentance He must discipline them.
That is what is happening here within Ezekiel: He is disciplining His own people, and in order that Israel would be cured from the sin of idolatry they had to actually enter into the city of idolatry, and be sickened with it all under the judgement of God. So we find Judah in Babylon.
We find them singing the Psalm, Psalm We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? Away from Jerusalem, away from God's physical, visible presence upon the earth, Israel are separated from all that they know to be a closeness and a nearness to God - here they are in Babylon!
But isn't it amazing that, while this remnant of Judah sits by the rivers singing depressing songs, that in verse 1 of Ezekiel chapter 1 you find a man, and while all around is despairing - what a contrast! While these people have already put up their harps on a willow tree and sat down to weep and to mourn and to cry for the loss of Jerusalem, this man Ezekiel is seeing visions of God.
Ezekiel sits by the river Chebar and he sees the Shekinah glory of God leave the temple of Jerusalem. He sees that glory follow the people of Judah throughout their pilgrimage, right down to the land of captivity in Babylon. There they are - God's people and God's prophet in the midst of captivity and bondage - he is seeing that very Shekinah glory of God.
As we go through this book we will see that Ezekiel sees the glory of God in so many visions, so many pictures and allegories throughout this book, and then God takes him to the middle of the book and shows him how that glory, that Shekinah, has departed from the people of Judah. But then - what a message of hope - as we find him coming to the end of this book, in the final chapters, and how he points to a day that is yet to come when that Shekinah glory will return to the people of God.
We must, as we look at this book, realise that everything within it is for Israel. We do not confuse the church of Jesus Christ with Israel, but as we look at Israel in this book, surely we must, as Thomas Watson says: Specifically this message is only to the nation of Israel, but there are spiritual principles within this book that we need to apply to our everyday lives.
As we seek to do that we look first of all, this evening, at the man Ezekiel. It's very interesting to note that there is nothing at all known about Ezekiel in the whole of the word of God, but that which we find in the book of Ezekiel. We find out that he was born just a year or so before the law book was discovered in the temple, as part of Josiah's reforms. In order to turn the tide, good King Josiah decided that he was going to bring the law of God back to the centre of Jewish faith and politics.
He sent servants into the temple to dig deep and to look for the Torah of God. When they found that law it was read out to the whole nation, and a measure of reform and godliness was brought back to Judah. Ezekiel was born into that atmosphere, but we find as we read the historical records of the Old Testament, that when he was barely a teenager, he would have heard the news of Josiah's death at Megiddo. Here is a king of Judah willing to stand for God, willing to stand for what is right, but he is killed. That message of his death must have been devastating to the nation.
Then as that teenager grew, it's most likely that he heard the preaching of Jeremiah. He may even have known the ministries of Habakkuk and Zephaniah. But one thing is absolutely sure: He witnessed Judah's fortunes shifting from godliness, shifting from righteousness to the evil, wicked alliance and allegiance of Egypt. Then as we come to these matters within the book of Ezekiel, we find it moving from the wicked nation of Egypt to great captivity in the land of Babylon.
Now, we know from this book, as we scour through it, that Ezekiel was a contemporary of Jeremiah and Daniel. By this time Jeremiah was an old man.
Ezekiel 30:2
If you can picture this in your mind as we read this book, Jeremiah was ministering to a remnant of Jews in Egypt. Daniel was taken to the court of the king of Babylon and had become the Prime Minister of the whole of that empire. And here is Ezekiel with the captives in the second deportation from Jerusalem, and he is brought down to the river Chebar - the rivers of Babylon. In fact, if you go to Iraq today there is a tomb there which is identified as the tomb of Ezekiel. It probably is because it's round about the same area that Ezekiel ministered. What do we know about this man Ezekiel?
There are three things that I want you to note from these verses that we have down before us. Ezekiel is a priest. Now, as you read verse 1 you find that Ezekiel was a priest. It says it very clearly - and for him to be a priest in Old Testament times it would mean that he came from the upper crust, the upper class of society.
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His father would have been a priest. Like Jeremiah, his contemporary, who was a priest and a prophet, so Ezekiel would be a priest and a prophet. Every eligible man from this upper class would begin his service in the temple. It would be a great honour to come for your first sacrifice, for your first offering at the age of 30 years of age. However, Ezekiel, when he was 30, was in captivity in Babylon. He was unable to fulfil his calling as a priest while living in exile far from Jerusalem. He's away from the temple. He's away from everything that they know of, as Jews, that means 'God' and 'the environment of God'.
But we read that at the age of 30, instead of beginning a priestly ministry, he begins the ministry of a prophet. So he is a priest who ministers as a prophet. But the second thing that we see is that he is a prisoner, and if you know your Old Testament history you'll know that in the year BC the Babylonians came into Jerusalem and they took the first deportation of Jews off to Babylon. We know that in that first deportation Daniel went with that group. Then a few years later there was the second deportation in BC, and this time young Ezekiel was taken at about 24 or 25 years of age.
If you turn to chapter 3 and verse 15 you will see that Ezekiel's home in Babylonia was a place called Tel-Abib. It was to the north of Babylon on the river Chebar, near the river Euphrates. There he settled in a kind of concentration camp of deportee Jews. This young man Ezekiel settles down in the mud huts of exile's Judaism. In chapter 8 and verse 1 you find that Ezekiel had his own house. This concentration camp was nothing like Nazi concentration camps, or concentration camps that we've seen in recent days on our television from Kosovo and places like that.
This was a place where they were looked after rather well, but yet they were away from Jerusalem. It seems that they had their own homes, that they could do their own thing, they could worship their own God. We find as we read the book that not only had Ezekiel his own home, but he was married.
We find that, as we read through the rest of the book, that his wife eventually died in the very year of the final siege that began in Jerusalem.
Ezekiel MSG - “As for you, son of man, you’ve - Bible Gateway
The exiles among whom Ezekiel lived, like him, had come from the upper crust of Judean society. We believe that they were privileged folk, that they had everything they needed. As Dickens says, in some measure: They had all the affluence they needed. They had all the bread they needed. They had all the wealth they needed. They had all the health they needed, but they were out of Jerusalem, they were separated from God - and there was this dichotomy, this contradiction in terms: This group of privileged people was the people that were renowned for not listening to God's prophets in the past, for not heeding the warnings of exiles that would come.
These people were the people who were sitting crying: These were the people who were listening to the false prophets, who were waiting every single day for deliverance from Babylon, and be brought back to their riches, the wealth and their prestige in Jerusalem. As far as they were concerned, Ezekiel's message was a load of rubbish. He was very entertaining in the dramatisations of God's message that he did. In fact, as far as they were concerned all he did was divulge entertaining prattle that was meaningless.
But no matter how much they laughed, the message of Ezekiel is this: God would vindicate His prophet, and God would vindicate His truth. If you turn with me to chapter 33 and verse 33 you see that - chapter 33 and verse 33 - and out of all the crying of the ridicule of pagan Judaism there comes this voice from God: Opposed to the message of the false prophets, the exile would not be short.
They would not be delivered very soon. They would not be spared.
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In fact, many of them would be slaughtered in exile, or would die in exile. But the miracle of this man Ezekiel, as a priest and as a prisoner is this: Not only that, but this prophet of God is inspired to live the message before them. That brings us to how he was a prophet. At 30 years old he begins his prophetic ministry. He continues it for just over 20 years. He preaches this message - a message that no one will listen to, a message that no one seems to take heed to.
His prophetic ministry began in the 5th year after the arrival in the land of exile - verse 2 shows us that. He becomes a preacher in the midst of this concentration camp. He becomes a missionary to his own people, telling them to repent, telling them to turn back to God, that the Shekinah glory might return to His people. Like his New Testament equivalent, John the Revelator in the book of Revelation who also was a prisoner on the isle of Patmos, this man like John, in prison, saw the heavens opened.
They were given visions of God.