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.