Tag: Ezekiel

The Bible in a Year – 4 June

If this is your first viewing, please see my Introduction before reading this.

4 June. Ezekiel chapters 16-17

When Ezekiel was not acting out the prophecies he received, he couched them in terms of allegories or parables, much as Jesus did with his teachings.  The first of these chapters pictures the nation of Israel/Judah as a prostitute, or adulterous wife, who left her husband (the true god) who had loved her as an abandoned child, married her as a young woman and brought her up into a royal household.  She left him and slept with all her neighbours and strangers, even paying them for love.  This could be seen as relating to Israel’s political alliances or the people’s worship of false gods – probably both.  The use of this imagery is found elsewhere in the Bible, but never in such an extended form.

 

Chapter 17 pictures those who had been taken into captivity in Babylon in a very different way, as a cutting from a cedar (a very large, useful and long-lived tree, often used in the Bible as another image of God’s love).  The cutting was planted in Babylon by God’s will but tried to transplant itself again to Egypt (with which Judah had tried to form an alliance), but the attempt was doomed to failure.  The only successful transplant would be that initiated by God, who would take a further cutting and re-establish it to become a mature tree back in Jerusalem.

 

Whether you prefer the gentle gardening imagery of a tree and its cutting, or the bloodier and more shocking image of the prostitute, the lesson is clear: unfaithfulness to God is every bit as bad, or worse, than unfaithfulness to your own husband or wife; and no attempt at saving yourself will succeed, as God is the only one who can save you.

 

The Bible in a Year – 3 June

If this is your first viewing, please see my Introduction before reading this.

3 June. Ezekiel chapters 13-15

In chapter 13 the prophecy is against false prophets (both women and men); and against the women who “sew bands on their wrists to hunt lives”- a rather obscure reference, as is the meaning of the ‘whitewashed wall’.

 

The commentary I looked at suggests that Ezekiel is quite a turning point in the Old testament, as it marks the beginning of a new understanding of sin and judgement. Until then sin was seen as mainly a corporate matter – if a lot of people in one family, town or nation were evil, the whole community would be under God’s judgement and suffer the consequences.  Conversely the prayer and actions of a righteous few could avert Gods judgement on all.  But now we read (14:12-20) that righteous people can only save themselves; and elsewhere the emphasis is on people being punished for their own sins.

 

 

The Bible in a a Year – 2 June

If this is your first viewing, please see my Introduction before reading this.

2 June. Ezekiel chapter 12

Chapter 12 contains the second of the acted parables, this time with Ezekiel packing his bags and making as if to leave the city through hole in the wall, as a sign that the walls of Jerusalem were about to be broken down and its remaining inhabitants taken into exile.  He was also told to explain to the people that God’s judgement would be delayed no longer and that his prophecies were about imminent events, not the far future.

 

It is a human tendency to ignore bad news, to put off dealing with difficult challenges, and to hope that something will turn up to prevent the worst from happening  We see that in a big way in our day with climate change: although the vast majority of people accept the need to do something about it, both ordinary people and politicians are slow to make commitments to reduce emissions and pollution, and even when countries do set targets, typically to reach a lower level of emissions within (say)  10 or 30 years, they generally do nothing until the last couple of years, then apologise that there was not enough time to meet the commitment, and postpone the target date.  But the change is here, and the time for action is now!

 

The Bible in a Year – 1 June

If this is your first viewing, please see my Introduction before reading this.

1 June. Ezekiel chapters 8-11

In chapters 8-11 Ezekiel has a vision in which he is transported from Babylonia where he has been living, back to Jerusalem whence he originated.   Such physical transportation from one place to another as a part of extreme spiritual experience is not unique: Elijah experienced it, as did Philip (Acts chapter 8), and Mohammed in his “night journey” to Jerusalem.  Whether such transportation took place literally (and hence miraculously) or was only a transcendental out-of-body type experience may be a matter for debate, but either way it is clearly something well beyond the experience of most people, believers or not.

 

The purpose of Ezekiel’s transportation was to show him that those left behind after the first deportation to Babylon – even the spiritual leaders of the community – were not only worshipping false gods, but even bowing down to the sun and allowing prostitution, and all this within the ruins of the temple itself!  Therefore God would allow a second enemy invasion to destroy those people and what was left of the city, until a new and more faithful generation of Jews would be allowed to return and rebuild it.

 

Ezekiel’s vision of the glory of God departing from the temple is another example of a prophet seeing a spiritual reality beyond the physical evidence.  A place is made holy by a continuous period of religious observance and prayer; that holiness can be cancelled very quickly by acts of desecration.  Some people seem to be more open than others to a sense of either ‘holiness’ or the ‘numinous’, or conversely the presence of evil or foreboding spirits; I am not one of them.

 

Ezekiel is not a widely quoted Biblical book – the most well known passage is the valley of bones in chapter 37 – but verse 11:19 is an exception. “I will remove from you a heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” is often used to describe the experience that Jesus called “being born again”, when someone realises that God is not remote but actually lives in them.

 

 

 

The Bible in a Year – 31 May

If this is your first viewing, please see my Introduction before reading this.

31 May. Ezekiel chapters 4-7

Ezekiel was undoubtedly master of the ‘acted parable’ or ‘acted prophesy’.  Using vivid language as Jesus did was not enough for him.  Such was the import of his message that the exile was God’s punishment for Judah’s sins, and that further destruction of Jerusalem would follow (in 586BC, about eleven years after the first siege and exile), that he felt called to go to extreme lengths to demonstrate the message in action.

 

In chapter 4 it meant the physical suffering of lying, bound in ropes, on his left side for 390 days (over a year) to represent 390 years of rebellion against God.  During this time (in which he was brought only flour and water, and baked bread over cow dung) he had to act out the siege of Jerusalem using a model of the city.  All this presumably took place in public so as to attract the attention of passers-by.  The nearest equivalent to this today would be the Greenpeace activists who chain themselves to military installations or invade whaling vessels, or perhaps Brian Haw who protested in a tent outside the UK Parliament for nearly ten years.  Such people disturb the complacency with which most of us meekly accept the injustices that we see around us, even when we know that people will suffer if they are not challenged.

The Bible in a Year – 30 May

If this is your first viewing, please see my Introduction before reading this.

30 May. Ezekiel chapters 1-3

What a dramatic start!  Unlike some of the other prophets of the Old Testament, we hear nothing of Ezekiel’s past, but are presented with both a first-person and third-person accounts of his earth-shaking vision.  Full of vivid imagery of light, noise and motion – wheels, eyes, flashes of lightning, the faces and feet of humans and animals, angels’ wings –  clearly Ezekiel was struggling to put into words what could not really be described. This was the ‘shekinah’ or glory of God, a privilege which few people have ever had (Moses, Jesus and his disciples Peter, James and John among them).

 

The whole of the first three chapters is taken up with his two encounters (or ‘epiphanies’) with this glory. Before we get to read the details of God’s prophecy through Ezekiel to his captive people in Babylonia, we have to understand the instructions given to Ezekiel by God in this vision. Eight times the Jewish exiles are called a “rebellious house”, and it is clear that they are unlikely to act on whatever God’s instructions to them are going to be.  It is also clear that they would oppose Ezekiel, and would be like “briers, thorns and scorpions” to him (those things that prick, scratch and sting).  Nevertheless, Ezekiel would be failing in his calling and duty, and held guilty by God, if he did not pass the instruction on.

 

In a much smaller way, that is the challenge facing all people of faith.  If we believe we have a message for the world from God then we must deliver it, however much opposition we might face.  This week the Archbishops of England have asked all the churches to pray for their communities, and in particular for the spreading of the Christian message among them, under the title “Thy kingdom come” (words taken, of course, from the Lord’s Prayer as taught by Jesus).   Unlike Ezekiel who had no support for his one-man ministry, church members can come together for mutual support in prayer, speaking and action.