02182018 Ezek 1:1-28 "Then You Will Know . . . "

Introduction

“Then You Will Know . . . (That I am the Lord)”

Introduction

Image Speak (Conveying messages in images)

Imagine for a moment that the year is 3018, one thousand years from now. You are an archaeologist and you have just unearthed a newspaper from 2018. In it you read a stories about bulls and bears fighting on a street called “Wall” in city called New York. You find a drawing of a donkey laughing at an elephant. Are these odd, meaningless images, or did they communicate clearly to the people who first read them? Obviously, they communicated something to someone.

We, today, immediately recognize the symbols of Wall Street in New York City and representation of two political parties. As these images are familiar to us, so the bizarre, seemingly irrelevant images used by Ezekiel must have been familiar to the people of his day.

Read .

Understanding in context

To understand Ezekiel’s images we must place ourselves in his context. The Southern Kingdom – Judah and the city of Jerusalem were to be overtaken in three waves of Babylonian invasions. Ezekiel was taken into Babylon during the second invasion. Jerusalem had not finally fallen – but the destruction of the temple was imminent.

Many of Ezekiel’s hearers were convinced God had abandoned them. They felt dejected and defeated. The Temple (at least for the time being) stood in Jerusalem; that’s where God was, not with them in Babylon. God was in the holy of holies, the central part of the Temple, not here in the midst of the city whose name stands for confusion & sin.

The people were hopeless and helpless. They felt cut off from God and had no sense of His presence.

The images that Ezekiel saw: creatures with parts of many animals, clouds, storms with lightening these images spoke a distinct message to the Hebrews in exile with Ezekiel. They were familiar images that symbolized the presence and glory of God.

We are opening the first large section of Ezekiel, chapters 1-24 that are devoted to prophecies of judgment and divine wrath soon to fall on the God’s people still remaining in Judea and Jerusalem. From the chronological cues Ezekiel gives us we learn that these prophecies cover the six or seven years immediately before the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in 586 B.C.

The first subsection of this large division of the book, chapters 1 through 3, concerns the prophet’s call. Like Isaiah or Jeremiah there is a narrative of the prophet’s call to his ministry at or near the beginning of his book. Ezekiel’s call came in and through a vision of God’s glory high and lifted up so that Ezekiel himself might not despair and so that he himself might know that Yahweh, the covenant keeping God was still with him and would be also with His people.

to his ministry at or near the beginning of his book. Ezekiel’s call came in and through a vision of God’s glory high and lifted up so that Ezekiel himself might not despair and so that he himself might know that Yahweh, the covenant keeping God was still with him and would be also with His people.

Ezekiel’s Vision

Description by Analogy

Ezekiel’s vision is almost impossible for us to visualize. John Calvin, the Protestant Reformer said: “If anyone asks whether the vision is lucid, I confess its obscurity and that I can scarcely understand it. His descriptions help only so much. What Ezekiel saw he couldn’t adequately put into words. What we read here is not exactly what he saw. Did you notice how many times we read that something looked like something, someone looked like something, that what Ezekiel heard sounded like something. This is description by analogy.

Ezekiel is trying to find a way to describe what he saw. It was beyond him and beyond his powers to adequately relate. This is the same sort of thing we hear from the apostle John in his vision of heaven in . We cannot visualize John’s description either. How can you have immensely thick walls that are gold but clear as crystal? What does that mean? What we understand we don’t understand. The vision, as Ezekiel’s before him, overwhelms the imagination.

Very interesting, and important, in chapter 10 we have a similar vision described, one that Ezekiel had some 13 months after this first vision. But there, the text is not so choppy, not so confusing as in chapter 1. Ezekiel was not so stunned the second time; he had a better understanding of what he was seeing. There, in chapter 10, for example, we learn that the creatures he saw were cherubim. The supreme difficulty he faced the first time in attempting to describe what he had seen has been overcome as the images he saw settled in his mind, as he came to understand their meaning, and as he thought about how correctly to describe them. Think how overwhelming the glory of God will be when we first lay eyes on it in heaven; but we will grow more familiar with it majestic and thrilling though it will remain! But this is Ezekiel’s first sight of the glory of the Lord.

What he sees

Here is what Ezekiel sees: amazing creatures, the cherubim, in their nature and their activity beyond our understanding, bearing an immense and blazing chariot that flies effortlessly through the air, moving at the request of the King of Kings himself, who sits enthroned above, blinding glory radiating from him, surrounded by unapproachable but supremely beautiful light, and all touching down at the remote town of Tel Abib on the Kebar Canal in Babylon to speak to a Jewish exile, an exiled priest who would never serve at the temple in Jerusalem.

This prophet, this spokesperson of God needs to experience 1st hand the power of the presence of the glory of God before he could go as a prophet powerfully preaching this message to the people.

Looking at the Big Picture

There are many things that could be said about all the details, but stepping back – looking at the big picture what do we see?

Ezekiel sees two things

Now there are two things we need to see as we look with Ezekiel at this vision - things that are fundamental to all that follows in the book of Ezekiel. This is the experience, the vision that Ezekiel was given when he was called to be God’s prophet to the Jews, and that will become clear as we move into chapter 2 and the account of what Yahweh said to Ezekiel at this moment. But this vision is also the introduction to the book.

1. The first concerns the reality of the divine rule and sovereign “power hidden behind the curtain of earthly reality.” [Eichrodt, 58]

Here is a community of exiles, far from home, powerless, their nation and their citizenship taken from them, uprooted by a foreign power that crushed Judah like a bug. Where is the Lord God, who brought Israel out of bondage in Egypt on eagles’ wings? Where is the Lord who parted the waters of the Red Sea and then, again, at the Jordan; who brought down the walls of Jericho and by whose power Israel went in conquering her enemies? Well, he is here. He is as surely here in Tel Abib as he was at the Sea or at Sinai, or at Jericho! The power and authority of God are impressively symbolized in this glittering vision of overwhelming brilliance, of servant creatures more powerful than anything man has knowledge of, and of a glory more terrible than men can conceive.

God is still God. His glory has not changed in any way. Yahweh is still the King of Glory. Babylon may not know that, but Babylon did not see what Ezekiel saw!

2. The second implication of this impossibly great vision is that God, by revealing himself to Ezekiel in Babylon, is declaring that he is sovereign everywhere and can help and bless his people wherever they are.

We learn in Jeremiah’s prophecy that, no matter the teaching of God’s Word, the Jews had a very pagan view of God. They thought of Yahweh very much as other nations thought of their gods, as though they were tied to a particular place, their influence limited to their particular territory, to the location of the temple where they were worshiped. But here, far away from Jerusalem and Judea, Yahweh reveals himself to his lost and banished people as the sovereign Lord. He can reveal his glory in Jerusalem or in Babylon, it matters not: they both are his and he rules over both. He commands the whole universe. [Eichrodt, 59]

and banished people as the sovereign Lord. He can reveal his glory in Jerusalem or in Babylon, it matters not: they both are his and he rules over both. He commands the whole universe. [Eichrodt, 59]

The conquest of Jerusalem and Judea does not mean the end of his rule as Sovereign King but rather a new development in his plan and purpose for his kingdom – at least from the view of his people.

Israel’s understanding of God, of Yahweh, was far too small. They did not comprehend the extent of his glory as it really is, they did not worship him as the one living and true God, the Almighty, who dwells in unapproachable light and who inhabits eternity. They treated God, as long before the Lord himself had accused them of doing, “as if he were altogether like themselves” [] or “as if the potter were thought to be like the clay!” [] They did not fear the Lord! It was because of this defective view of God, this altogether too human-like view of God, that they found it so easy to dismiss his laws and commandments, to live without fear of his judgment, and, to take so lightly and make so little of his salvation and the promise of his presence with those who trust in him.

Then, in addition, they imagined that being cut off from home by the Babylonian conquest and their exile, Yahweh was lost to them. They were without God and without hope in the world. Again, they were selling terribly short the God who had revealed himself to them in Egypt, at Sinai, in the conquest, by his law and through his prophets. It is, in a psalm of David that we read:

Psalm 139:7–10 NASB95

Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend to heaven, You are there; If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, You are there. If I take the wings of the dawn, If I dwell in the remotest part of the sea, Even there Your hand will lead me, And Your right hand will lay hold of me.

“Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.” [139:7-10]

Then You will know...

A repeated phrase throughout Ezekiel’s prophecy is the number of times he says “Then you will know that I am the Lord” or something similar to that phrase appears. We will read such a statement scores of times as we make our way through this book.

Israel had forgotten that Yahweh is the Lord. She ought to remember, but she doesn’t and this is the source of all her problems. She has forgotten the Lord her God. She has forgotten who he is and what he is like. Yahweh is at work to put Israel’s sinful ignorance right and Ezekiel will be one of his instruments.

Remember in the New Testament we are over and over again taught that the glory revealed in the theophanies – the divine appearances – of the glory of God was seen in the glory of none other than Jesus Christ. It was the glory of Jesus, John tells us in his Gospel, that Isaiah saw when he was given a vision of the Lord at the time of his prophetic call. It was the glory of Christ that Moses and the elders saw at Sinai and that the people saw to a lesser extent.

This strange and wonderful vision that Ezekiel was given of the mighty cherubim, the chariot wheels, the firmament, the throne, and the figure sitting upon it, all of that is a description in images and analogies of the glory of Jesus Christ. This is how great, how majestic, how awe-inspiring, how fearful, and how wonderful beyond the power of words to describe is the Son of God.

Man’s Chief End...

Almost all our failures in life, to one degree or another, come home to roost right here:

we are not overwhelmed in our daily lives with the glory of the living God!

We do not remember that our lives are lived before this Lord of unspeakable majesty, that all that happens in the world and all that happens to us is his will, that we are always in his hands, and that there is but one thing, only one, that matters in all our life: that we are right with him and honoring him with our lives.

You and I – let’s be honest with ourselves – you and I would think differently about everything, we would measure everything differently, we would care about things so differently than now we do, if only we could be confronted as Ezekiel was by a vision of the glory of God.

The New Testament is just as adamant that we remember the glory of the God we trust and serve.

“Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory for ever and ever.” []

That text – the text that was instrumental in convincing Jonathan Edwards of his Christian faith, by the way – in its context is a reminder to us that Jesus Christ the loving Savior whom we trust for deliverance from our sins, is at one and the same time, the mighty God before whom all mankind stand as grasshoppers.

In and 12 we are warned not to forget that our God is a consuming fire and that it is a dreadful thing to fall into his hands. And, of course, in Revelation we are given new visions of Christ in his all-consuming glory as the Judge of the earth. The apostle John, who once laid his head upon the Savior’s chest, is now on his face, like Isaiah and Ezekiel before him, before the Lord Jesus Christ in all his glory.

And once we remember this we can and will appreciate more than ever we have before, what a condescension our Savior took to leave that glory, that majesty to come to earth as a mere man, to be unrecognized as the King of Kings and the Creator of the universe, and to suffer horribly at the hands of his creatures and then submit to the cruelest death. It is in the distance between his throne as Ezekiel saw it – resting on the glittering firmament held up by the cherubim – and the cross of Calvary that you and I find our salvation. It is in that distance that we find the humiliation that was the just punishment for our sins and the price of our forgiveness and eternal life.

We will never understand the cross unless we have had some sight of the sapphire throne. You will never measure the love of the one who hangs on that cross unless and until we have seen the figure, like that of a man, full of fire and surrounded by brilliant light, like a rainbow larger and more beautiful than you have ever imagined reminding us of God’s covenant promises: that He will preserve his covenant people as a remnant even through judgment.

You and I, of course, will never see Jesus as he was seen in this world during the days of his ministry. But we will see the Jesus whose divine glory is not hidden. We will see him, not as John did in the Upper Room, but as he saw him in ! That the one who was and is and is to come, the Almighty – the same yesterday, today and forever.

All of this is given to us as it was given to Ezekiel that we might know the reality of God’s sovereign rule and power as He preserves and governs all his creatures all their actions.