Sermon Tone Analysis

The Christian faith is not a private religion.

The world is fine with us Christians having our private religion, and we have for too long told them that this is primarily what our faith is.

But we have been wrong.

The Christian faith is a very public story.

It is, in fact, the story of human history.

It tells us the true story of the world.

The Old Testament tells us the story of Israel, the story of God’s chosen people.

And it is the story of the world.

In the beginning, the Bible begins, God made all things.

He made all things good.

But when humanity rebelled and plunged the world into ruin, God went to work.

God made a decision to bring rescue to the world through a people he chose for himself.

The prophets of Israel said that Israel was chosen to be a light to the nations, by which they meant that God’s whole point in choosing Israel was that through them rescue would come to the world.

The story of Israel is the story of hope for the world.

So, it is a very public story, though of course there is a private element to it.

We must come to understand our place in the story, just like Ezekiel had to learn in his own day.

I think that is what is happening as we move from chapter 3 to chapter 4. Ezekiel is learning to find his place in the story of redemption, and we find in these next two chapters the initiation he experienced, the lessons he learned, and the judgment he accepted as he did so.

The Initiation He Experienced

We begin with the suggestion that what we are reading here needs to be read as Ezekiel’s initiation into the prophetic vocation.

Before he can go announce the message God will give him, he needs to be immersed in it himself.

Go Home and Shut Up

Let’s go back for a moment to the previous section at the end of chapter 3.

In verse 17, God told Ezekiel that his job would be to serve as something like a sentinel in the army, like a watchman.

The emphasis here is on Ezekiel’s responsibility and culpability.

He must do his job regardless of how the people respond.

And the job of a sentinel is mainly to warn of any danger he sees coming.

Ezekiel is told that the danger he may well see coming is the danger of God’s judgment against wickedness (vv.

18-19) and injustice (vv.

20-21).

Wickedness refers to criminal acts.

God hates all criminal activity and will judge it accordingly.

And God’s concern about injustice shows that God expects his world to be run with fairness and equity.

The two words, then, cover sin from both angles.

We must do no wrong and we must always do what is right.

Just as we’re coming to grips with that, we then read in verses 22-27 that the same God who called Ezekiel to go keep watch for Israel now tells him to “Go, shut yourself within your house.”

He is bound up to keep him from going to the people, and he is tongue-tied so he cannot warn them (vv.

25-26).

So, God has told him his job is essentially the work of a watchman, but then God tells him to go home and shut up.

What’s going on here?

Slow to Speak

We learn from Ezekiel 3:27 that this is a temporary situation.

God will speak and, when he does, he will open Ezekiel’s mouth, and he had better speak.

But until then, Ezekiel needs to keep his mouth shut; he must speak when God speaks, but he must also speak only when God tells him to by giving him the message to speak.[1]

What an important lesson to learn!

Some of us need to be reminded to open our mouths and speak what God has revealed.

Others of us need to learn to keep our mouths shut a bit more often lest our own opinions be confused for what God has said.

Ezekiel needs to learn this lesson, too.

He is not yet ready to begin his work as a prophet or as a watchman of Israel.

His training is not yet complete.

He will certainly need to speak God’s message, but before he can do effectively, he also needs to learn the discipline of being slow to speak so he does not mislead the people he has been sent to serve.

Remember the story of the boy who cried, “Wolf”?

Is it possible that we Christians have failed to be the prophets of God we are meant to be not only because we’ve been silent on matters on which we should have spoken but also because we’ve opened our mouths too quickly and said, “Thus says the Lord,” when God really said nothing?

The State of Liminality

Learning this wisdom takes time, just like it takes time to transition from being a child to being an adult.

The move from adolescence to adulthood is, in virtually every human community, marked with symbolic milestones.

Rites of passage, we sometimes call it.

There is this period in which a person is not easily defined as either a child or an adult.

We understand the significance of this period in a person’s life, and we use rituals to help the person make the transition.

Anthropologists call it a state of liminality, “a process of separation and transition from a previous identity or role to a new one.”[2]

Ezekiel is going through this transition in these chapters, forced to abandon his old state as a priest and take on a new identity as a prophet.

God is going to make sure that Ezekiel is ready for this task by teaching him to speak God’s truth, his whole truth, and nothing but the truth.[3]

And by the way, to be a Christian we must go through the transition as well.

We must eliminate this idea that being a Christian means merely believing something or affirming a set of propositions.

No! We must learn to be a Christian since the whole point of being one is to take up our place in God’s world as his image bearers.

This will take some serious effort on our part.

In his book, Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis argued:

God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than of any other slackers.

If you are thinking of becoming a Christian, I warn you, you are embarking on something which is going to take the whole of you, brains and all.

But, fortunately, it works the other way round.

Anyone who is honestly trying to be a Christian will soon find his intelligence being sharpened: one of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself.[4]

The Lessons He Learned

Let’s look now at what specific education Ezekiel is getting as he is initiated into the prophetic office.

What are the lessons he had to learn?

In chapters 4 and 5, we see Ezekiel going through various sign-acts which are the rites of passage that move him, fully immersed, into his prophetic vocation.

Yes, he does some strange things here, but, looked at from the outside, every rite of passage is a bit bizarre.

We just had a wedding in our church this week, and we are all familiar with that rite of passage, but if you were an alien from out of space you might be confused by why we get dressed up and walk down an aisle and stand at the front and say certain things and put rings on our fingers.

So, yes, the following things look a bit bizarre, but let’s see if we can understand what these things meant.

A Map of Jerusalem

In 4:1-3, Ezekiel is told to engrave the city of Jerusalem on a brick, a practice which was common, as archaeology has confirmed.[5]The

reason for Ezekiel’s portrayal of the city is so that he can “play army” with it, enacting the ancient warfare strategy of a siege.

In verse 3, Ezekiel is instructed to represent an iron wall between himself and the city, and then to set his face toward it, letting “it be in a state of siege.”

The purpose of this is stated explicitly: “This is a sign for the house of Israel.”

A sign of what?

A sign of the coming Babylonian siege of Jerusalem in 587BC.

But the lesson Ezekiel was to learn here was not just that God can predict the future.

The lesson was that when this all took place, it would not be because the Babylonians were more powerful than the people of Israel.

It would all happen because God would be Israel’s aggressor in the armies of Babylon.

Yep, God would be on the side of the Babylonians against his own people!

That is what is meant by the iron barrier.

Something had come between Israel and her God.

His face set against the city means he is an active agent of the city’s destruction.[6]

As a private event, the impact on Ezekiel is that he is to take the posture that God’s word was a word of destruction of the great city.

To be on God’s side is to now be against God’s city, a risky theological position to be sure.

Imagine someone saying today, “God is against America, there is no hope, the country needs to go down—such a position would sound like treason, and plenty of American Christians would denounce it as such.

I’m not suggesting this is the prophetic view to hold; I’m saying this is how it sounded to Ezekiel’s audience.

Bearing the Iniquity

But there’s more.

Next, Ezekiel is told to lie on his left side for 390 days and then on his right side for 40 days.

God explains that these numbers represent the number of years of Israel’s punishment, a total of 430 years, since Ezekiel makes no distinction between Israel and Judah.[7]

Now everyone wants to know what date the 430 years stands in reference to, and understandably so.

I think the key to the calculation is to understand that the word punishment in verse 4, used over 200 times in the OT, usually means “iniquity or guilt,” in other words, looking back to the wrong done rather than forward to the punishment to be served for the wrong that was done.

Ezekiel is here called to, first, represent the years of Israel’s wrongdoing, and if we add 390 years to the time of his prophecy, we land right around the time that Israel’s monarchy began, or when Solomon’s temple was built and the glory of God settled in the temple.