Sermon Tone Analysis

Glory is out

So the glory, again, has left the temple, parked on the cherubim-throne, and that's its final ride.

They're going to depart very soon.

The whole place, the whole complex–Jerusalem is going to be destroyed, the temple is going to be destroyed, and they're going to get out of there.

So what about Ezekiel?

Chapter 11:

Again, “east gate of the house of the Lord” Didn’t we just see that?

That’s where the merkabah is parked.

“They stood at the entrance of the east gate of the house of the Lord,” chapter 10, verse 19.

“The glory of the God of Israel was over them.”

So the Spirit grabs Ezekiel, essentially, and brings him to the same location—the east gate of the house of the Lord, which faces east.

Here we go again!

Back in chapter 8, we can read that the Spirit of God picked him up or that the divine man reached out his hand and picked him up by a lock of the hair.

So is it God as man or is it the Spirit?

And again, they don’t care about distinguishing them.

But here we go… the Spirit again (in the vision) is back in the scene.

He brings Ezekiel to that location.

We’ll just keep reading:

A couple of questions.

One basic one that I think you can pretty well predict at this point: Who is talking to Ezekiel?

Is it the Spirit who picked him up and brought him to the east gate of the house of the Lord (where the glory was and where the divine man was) or is it the divine man now?

We're not told specifically.

In verse 5, the Spirit of the Lord is going to fall upon him and "he said to me," and we'll get into that.

So somebody is talking to Ezekiel.

Which one of the characters is it?

You know what?

It doesn't matter!

They're all God.

That's the point.

Now let's go back to what we actually just read here in chapter 11.

He sees 25 men, and they are these princes.

Two of them at least are princes.

Maybe all of them are princes and these two or just pointed out.

Or maybe these two are the only ones that get that title.

We're not told that, either.

It's a bit ambiguous.

But in chapters 1 through 4, Ezekiel gets taken to the gateway on the east side of the temple.

If you had a model of the temple in front of you, that would be outside the sacred area.

According to other parts of the Old Testament, this is typically a place where people would assemble and you'd have public assemblies.

So they're outside of sort of the "temple proper."

He sees 25 men there.

This is the same number of men that you get from chapter 8, but these are not the 25 sunworshipers of chapter 8. Scholars are pretty much unanimous on that point.

And the reason is that these two guys that are singled out and called "princes" apparently–either they or the whole group, or they're representing this group or they're leaders of this group–are the political elite.

The term here used for "princes" is a term that would be used of nobility.

You'd use this of someone in a ruling class, perhaps, the royal household that had different jobs in the government administration.

They would be called princes.

In other words, they're not priests.

They're not in charge of worship or anything like that.

They're an elite, a ruling-class group, these 25.

So they're probably, again, political counselors, politicians, government officials, maybe some of them are part of the royal household–related to the king.

We're not given a great deal of information.

We are told, though, why God wants them prophesied to or at, and it's because they give wicked counsel.

They devise iniquity.

And here's what they say:

Now to understand this metaphor (and there are lots of different ways to understand it), one of the first things you have to fix in your mind is that the meat... if you're boiling part of an animal carcass–let's say you've slaughtered it for food and you're boiling it–the meat is the part that you're going to eat.

That's the good part.

It's the worthy part of what's in the pot, as opposed to bones and gristle and what-not.

So calling yourself the meat...

When these guys are devising wicked counsel and they say, "this city is the cauldron, this city's in trouble, but we are the meat."

In other words, "We're the good part of the city.

We're the ones in the city that are worthwhile saving."

You get the impression that they're thinking that God's going to spare them because of who they are.

Now the question is, who exactly are they?

Again, they're either home-grown nobility or they might be...

I think it's probable that they're Jews in governing positions.

These are the people who were left behind by the Babylonians to rule the city in their place.

They're the puppet governance of the city.

But we've talked in earlier chapters about how the people thought, "Oh boy, phew!

We've survived two stages of exile.

It's all over now.

We're left here and we're okay."

Well, if you're thinking that, you're also thinking–along with those thoughts—“Maybe we're here because God loves us more.

We're the elect.

We're the ones that God has shown favor to by sparing our lives.

Yeah, Yeah, we have to work for the Babylonians.

They installed us here and we've got to report to them and pay tribute to them.

Okay, we get that.

But we're still here.

God has shown favor to us, hence, even though the city is in trouble, we're the meat.

We're the favored of God.

We'll be okay.”

Basically, Ezekiel says, "Nah, not so much!"

He is told to prophesy to them.

I want to read you an extended section from John Taylor's Ezekiel commentary.

This is in the Tyndale Old Testament Commentary series.

He talks about the different ways you could take this whole thing about this saying they have.

Again, the meat is fairly clear because if you're boiling something to eat, you're not going to eat the bones and the gristle, you're going to eat the meat–that's the good stuff.

But the first part about the building of the houses is a little more obscure and needs a little bit of attention.

So the statement was, again, that God was angry at them.

The time is not near to build houses.

So what does that part mean?

Taylor says:

The possible interpretations of these words are as follows: (a) AV translates, It is not near (i.e. the threatened judgment); let us build houses.

[ The King James here makes it sound like “We’re not in trouble, so let’s do something.

Let’s build houses.”]

This sentiment expresses confidence that all will be well and, if building houses is taken as a symbol of peaceful activity (cf.

28:26), it advocates a policy of ignoring the threat of a further Babylonian invasion.

A variant of this is to interpret houses as ‘fortifications’, but this is not warranted by the ordinary Hebrew word bāttîm, though it would fit a context of warlike preparations.

A more serious weakness of this interpretation is the linguistic one.

The Hebrew reads lō’ bĕqārôb bĕnôt bāttîm, lit.