Christ in Ezekiel

Ezekiel 1 is the opening vision of the book - the prophet by the river Chebar, an exile among exiles, to whom the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God (v. 1). What he sees he can barely report; again and again he falls back on the words appearance and likeness , as if no plain noun will hold it. Four living creatures move as one, each with four faces - the face of a man… the face of a lion… the face of an ox… the face of an eagle (v. 10) - the…

Ezekiel 2 is a commissioning, and almost everything in it points forward. The LORD addresses the fallen prophet by the name He will use of him again and again - Son of man, stand upon thy feet (v. 1) - and that very title, son of man , the One who is the wisdom and power of God would take as His own favorite self-designation: the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins (Mark 2:10); the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life…

Ezekiel 3 turns on a single strange act: the prophet is told to eat the written word of God - eat this roll, and go speak unto the house of Israel (v. 1) - and though the scroll was full of lamentations, and mourning, and woe , in his mouth it was as honey for sweetness (v. 3). The same paradox runs straight through Scripture. The weeping prophet before him had said, Thy words were found, and I did eat them; and thy word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of mine heart (Jer…

Ezekiel 4 is prophecy made flesh. The LORD does not merely tell Ezekiel to announce the siege of Jerusalem; He commands him to become it - to draw the city on a tile and lay siege to the brick (vv. 1-3), to lie bound on his side day after day, and to eat the rationed, defiled bread of a city under blockade (vv. 9-17). At the heart of the chapter stands a command that reaches further than its own moment: lay the iniquity of the house of Israel upon it… thou shalt bea…

Ezekiel 5 turns on a single sentence: This is Jerusalem: I have set it in the midst of the nations and countries that are round about her (v. 5). The city was placed at the centre of the world not for privilege hoarded but for witness - set as a showpiece where the nations could watch the ways of God lived out. That is exactly why the judgment is so severe. Jerusalem had been given the law, the sanctuary, the covenant, and she changed God’s judgments into wickedness more t…

Ezekiel 6 sounds, four times over, the refrain that beats through the whole book like a pulse: ye shall know that I am the LORD (vv. 7, 10, 13, 14). It is the key to everything else in the chapter. The high places are thrown down, the altars made desolate, the idols broken - not as the end of God’s purpose but as the means to it. When every false god has been proven powerless and the slain lie before the lifeless images they trusted, then Israel will know. The deepest aim…

Ezekiel 7 is the prophet’s great announcement of the end - An end, the end is come upon the four corners of the land… now is the end come upon thee (vv. 2-3) - and the word it sounds is the same word the prophets and the Gospel carry forward: a final reckoning is real, and it is nearer than the comfortable suppose. The day Israel had hoped would be its vindication arrives instead as the day of trouble (v. 7), the day of the wrath of the LORD (v. 19). Amos had heard…

Ezekiel 8 opens the long temple-vision (chs. 8-11) by exposing what the LORD sees inside His own house. The prophet is carried in the visions of God to Jerusalem and led through a sequence of escalating abominations - turn thee yet again, and thou shalt see greater abominations (vv. 6, 13, 15) - until the sin reaches the temple door itself. The hinge of the chapter is a sentence the elders say in the dark: The LORD seeth us not; the LORD hath forsaken the earth (v. 12). It…

Ezekiel 9 sets a pattern the whole of Scripture will follow: before judgment falls, God marks His own. As six executioners wait, a man clothed in linen with a writer’s inkhorn is sent ahead with one charge - set a mark upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and that cry for all the abominations that be done in the midst of the city (v. 4) - and the slaughter that follows spares everyone who bears that mark: come not near any man upon whom is the mark (v. 6). The mark is n…

Ezekiel 10 records the saddest movement in the prophets: the glory of the LORD - the very presence that had filled Solomon’s temple with cloud until the priests could not stand to minister (1 Kings 8:10-11) - leaving its house. And it leaves slowly. It rises from the cherub and pauses over the threshold of the house (v. 4), fills the court with brightness one last time, then departed from off the threshold of the house, and stood over the cherubims (v. 18); the cherubim mo…

Ezekiel 11 sets a doomed confidence beside an undeserved promise, and the promise reaches all the way to the Gospel. The leaders of Jerusalem trust their walls - this city is the caldron, and we be the flesh (v. 3) - and despise the exiles already carried off, telling them, Get you far from the LORD: unto us is this land given in possession (v. 15). God answers by overturning both. To the scattered, He speaks the most tender word in the vision: Although I have cast them fa…

Ezekiel 12 turns on a problem of sight and hearing. The LORD names the exiles a rebellious house, which have eyes to see, and see not; they have ears to hear, and hear not (v. 2) - and that is the very sentence Jesus took up to explain why crowds could watch His works and still not perceive: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not… in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Esaias (Matt. 13:13-15), and to His own slow disciples, having eyes, see ye not? and…

Ezekiel 13 is a sustained indictment of prophets who claim to speak for God when He has not spoken - men who follow their own spirit, and have seen nothing (v. 3), who say The LORD saith while the LORD hath not sent them (v. 6). Their defining work is a smooth lie smeared over a doomed structure: the people build a flimsy wall and the prophets daub it with untempered morter (v. 10), and their one word is Peace; and there was no peace (vv. 10, 16). So the LORD sends the sto…

Ezekiel 14 opens with men who come to inquire of God while idols sit enthroned inside them - these men have set up their idols in their heart, and put the stumblingblock of their iniquity before their face; should I be enquired of at all by them? (v. 3). It is a portrait of worship that is right on the lips and wrong in the heart, the very thing the Lord Jesus names: This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth… but their heart is far from me (Matt. 15:8). The…

Ezekiel 15 takes up an image woven all through Scripture - Israel as the LORD’s vine - and presses it to its sharpest point. A grapevine is good for one thing only: its fruit. Its wood is worthless for any other use - Shall wood be taken thereof to do any work? or will men take a pin of it to hang any vessel thereon? (v. 3) - and a vine that bears no fruit is fit for nothing but the fire (vv. 4-5). So, says the LORD, with the vine that bore no fruit: As the vine tree among…

Ezekiel 16 tells one long story - a foundling rescued, loved, betrayed, and astonishingly remembered - and at every turn it reads like the gospel told beforehand. The LORD finds a newborn cast out to die, polluted in thine own blood , and speaks life over her: when I passed by thee… I said unto thee… Live (v. 6). He chooses her when she is utterly unlovely and can do nothing for herself, which is exactly how the New Testament describes His love for us: God co…

Ezekiel 17 sets a failed king beside a coming one, and the gap between them is the whole point. The riddle of the two eagles and the vine (vv. 1-10) is decoded in plain words: Zedekiah, made king by Babylon under a covenant sealed with an oath, broke faith and reached toward Egypt for rescue - and God’s question hangs over him, Shall he prosper? shall he escape that doeth such things? or shall he break the covenant, and be delivered? (v. 15). The answer is no; the broken o…

Ezekiel 18 is one of Scripture’s clearest windows into the heart of God toward the sinner. The exiles were hiding behind a proverb - The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge (v. 2) - as if their own choices no longer mattered. The LORD overturns it: Behold, all souls are mine… the soul that sinneth, it shall die (v. 4). Every person stands before God for his own life; the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father (v. 20). And…

Ezekiel 19 is a funeral song over the failed kings of Judah, and its sorrow is shaped like a question it cannot answer on its own. The lioness rears her whelps, and two grow into strong young lions - one taken in their pit and dragged with chains unto the land of Egypt (v. 4), the other netted and brought… to the king of Babylon… that his voice should no more be heard upon the mountains of Israel (v. 9) - the historical kings Jehoahaz and Jehoiachin, the roar…

Ezekiel 20 hands Israel its own history as a long, unsparing record of rebellion - in Egypt, through two wilderness generations, and in the land - and through it all runs a single astonishing refrain: I wrought for my name’s sake, that it should not be polluted before the heathen (vv. 9, 14, 22). At every point God had every right to pour out His fury, and at every point He held it back - not because the people had earned mercy, but to keep the honour of His own name. This…

Ezekiel 21 is a chapter of the bared sword, yet at its center stands one of the most quietly hopeful verses in the prophets. The LORD draws His sword against Jerusalem and sings a dirge over it - A sword, a sword is sharpened, and also furbished (v. 9) - and bids Ezekiel sigh with the breaking of thy loins (v. 6) before the people. The king of Babylon halts at the parting of the way and shakes his arrows, and the lot falls on Jerusalem (vv. 19-22). Then to the profane wick…

Ezekiel 22 is one of the gravest indictments in all of Scripture, and at its heart lies a single line that opens straight onto the Gospel. The LORD lays bare the sins of the bloody city (v. 2) - blood shed for gain, parents dishonored, the stranger oppressed, the fatherless and the widow wronged, mine holy things despised and my sabbaths profaned (vv. 6-12) - and declares that the house of Israel has become dross fit only for the furnace (vv. 18-22). Every class has failed…

Ezekiel 23 tells the story of two sisters, Aholah and Aholibah - Samaria and Jerusalem - who were the LORD’s own and yet kept running to the great empires of the age for the security and belonging only He could give: they were mine… and Aholah played the harlot when she was mine (vv. 4-5). The chapter uses the picture of a wronged marriage to name covenant betrayal for what it is, and its sober center is a warning about misplaced trust: the very powers a people cour…

Ezekiel 24 sets two signs side by side on a single day, and both reach toward Christ. The first is the parable of the caldron: Jerusalem is the bloody city, to the pot whose scum is therein, and whose scum is not gone out of it (v. 6), set empty on the coals so that the filthiness of it may be molten in it, that the scum of it may be consumed (v. 11) - a defilement so deep that the fire of judgment cannot reach it, for the LORD says, I have purged thee, and thou wast not p…

Ezekiel 25 turns from Judah to the four neighbors who stood by and gloated when Jerusalem fell - Ammon, Moab, Edom, Philistia - and through each oracle one refrain sounds: ye shall know that I am the LORD. Ammon is judged for the cruel cry Aha over the profaned sanctuary (v. 3) and for the body language of malice - thou hast clapped thine hands, and stamped with the feet, and rejoiced in heart with all thy despite against the land of Israel (v. 6); Moab for the sneer that…

Ezekiel 26 stands at a distance from the cross and yet keeps it in view, for the chapter is about two cities and what they are founded on. Tyre was the merchant capital of the ancient world, rich and beautiful and sure of herself; when Jerusalem fell she gloated - Aha, she is broken… I shall be replenished (v. 2) - pleased at the suffering of God’s people and eager for the trade she expected to inherit. Against that pride the LORD speaks a word that comes to pass: H…

Ezekiel 27 is a lamentation over Tyre, the merchant queen of the ancient world, drawn as a glorious ship freighted with the wealth of every nation - silver and iron, ivory and emeralds, fine linen and wine and gold - made very glorious in the midst of the seas (v. 25). And then, at the very height of her splendour, the east wind takes her: the east wind hath broken thee in the midst of the seas (v. 26), and her riches, her mariners, her whole company fall into the midst of…

Ezekiel 28 sets one sentence at its center and turns the whole chapter on it: thou hast said, I am a God, I sit in the seat of God, in the midst of the seas (v. 2). It is the boast of the prince of Tyre - a man so swollen by his wisdom and wealth that he grasps at deity - and the LORD’s answer leaves no room: yet thou art a man, and not God… thou shalt die the deaths of them that are slain (vv. 2, 8). The lamentation over the king of Tyre that follows lifts the same…

Ezekiel 29 opens the great series of oracles against Egypt, and it turns on one of the most God-forgetting sentences in Scripture. Pharaoh, drawn as the great dragon that lieth in the midst of his rivers , boasts, My river is mine own, and I have made it for myself (v. 3). It is the creed of the self-made man - the Nile is mine, my power is mine, I made all this - spoken by one who has forgotten that the very breath in him is borrowed. Against that boast the New Testament…

Ezekiel 30 sounds a word the prophets return to again and again - the day of the LORD (v. 3) - and here it falls upon Egypt, the oldest and proudest power of the ancient world. The oracle opens in mourning: Howl ye, Woe worth the day! For the day is near, even the day of the LORD is near, a cloudy day; it shall be the time of the heathen (vv. 2-3). This near, historical day of reckoning against one nation is drawn from the same well as the great and final Day that Scriptur…

Ezekiel 31 sets a single image before Pharaoh and lets it do the preaching: a cedar in Lebanon, the tallest and fairest of trees, his top… among the thick boughs (v. 3), watered by the deep, the envy of every tree in the garden of God (vv. 8-9), in whose shade the birds nested and all great nations dwelt (v. 6). It is a portrait of empire at the height of its glory - and the whole chapter exists to say that such glory falls. The reason is named in a single phrase: h…

Ezekiel 32 is a funeral song over Pharaoh, and its closing movement opens onto one of the most sobering pictures in all of Scripture: the great empires of the world laid down side by side in death. Pharaoh, who imagined himself a sea-monster too vast to be caught - thou art as a whale in the seas (v. 2) - is hauled out of the water in God’s net and left on the open field; and when he falls, even the heavens go dark (vv. 7-8). Then the prophet looks down into the pit and th…

Ezekiel 33 reopens the prophet’s ministry on the far side of judgment, and at its center is one of the clearest unveilings of God’s heart toward sinners in all of Scripture. The LORD restores the watchman image He used at the start: the sentinel must blow the trumpet, and warn the people (v. 3), and if he stays silent his blood will I require at the watchman’s hand (v. 6). Then He turns to the people’s despairing question - how should we then live? (v. 10) - with an oath t…

Ezekiel 34 is among the most directly messianic chapters in the Old Testament, and the Gospel of John takes up its very imagery. The LORD first indicts the shepherds of Israel who fed themselves and not the flock - who did not strengthen the diseased, heal the sick, bind up the broken, bring again the driven away, or seek the lost (vv. 2-4) - the very hireling who, when the wolf comes, leaveth the sheep, and fleeth… because he… careth not for the sheep (John…

Ezekiel 35 is the dark companion to the restoration that follows it: before the mountains of Israel are promised new life (ch. 36), the LORD turns His face against mount Seir - Edom, the people of Esau - and names the sin that has marked them from the womb. Because thou hast had a perpetual hatred (v. 5); the ancient grudge of Esau against Jacob, hardened across the centuries into a settled enmity. Scripture traces that hatred back to its root and out to its end: Esau desp…

Ezekiel 36 gathers the deepest promise of the prophets into a single chapter, and the New Testament draws on it directly. After the long desolation God turns to a people who had profaned my holy name among the heathen (v. 21) and announces that He will act not for your sakes… but for mine holy name’s sake (v. 22) - mercy grounded not in human merit but in His own character. Then comes the gift, all of it in the language of pure initiative, I will… I will&hell…

Ezekiel 37 sets the prophet down in a valley full of bones… and, lo, they were very dry (vv. 1-2), and asks the question the whole chapter turns on: Son of man, can these bones live? (v. 3). The answer comes by a word and a breath - the prophet prophesies, the bones knit together with sinew and flesh and skin, and then he prophesies to the breath until the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army (v. 10). The same…

Ezekiel 38 sets a last great enemy against the people of God - Gog, the land of Magog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal - a vast confederacy gathered out of the far north against a land that dwells safely and without walls (vv. 2, 11). The whole weight of the chapter is that God Himself meets that host: Behold, I am against thee, O Gog… and I will turn thee back, and put hooks into thy jaws (vv. 3-4). His people do not save themselves; their safety is in His ke…

Ezekiel 39 brings the great enemy of God’s people all the way up to the mountains of Israel only to lay him low there - I will smite thy bow out of thy left hand, and will cause thine arrows to fall out of thy right hand (v. 3) - and it ends with the deepest promise in the whole book. The decisive, total ruin of Gog, the cleansing of the land, and the summons of the birds and beasts to a great slaughter all read forward into the final victory of God over everything that wa…

After the long chapters of judgment, Ezekiel is carried in vision to a very high mountain and set beside a man, whose appearance was like the appearance of brass, with a line of flax in his hand, and a measuring reed (v. 3), who measures a temple cubit by cubit, gate by gate, threshold by threshold. The point is not the architecture but what the architecture carries: a God whose holiness is exact, whose dwelling is no vague idea but a place laid out by an unbending standar…

Ezekiel is led through the temple of his vision to its very centre, where the guide speaks the words the whole survey has been climbing toward: This is the most holy place (v. 4). In the worship Israel knew, that innermost room was entered by one man, the high priest, on one day a year, and never without blood - the writer to the Hebrews remembers it exactly so, into the second went the high priest alone once every year, not without blood (Heb. 9:7). At the heart of this v…

Ezekiel 42 looks at first like a builder’s survey - chambers in three stories, a walk of ten cubits, five hundred reeds on every side - but its heart is a single concern that runs straight to Christ: the holiness that drawing near to God requires, and the access He alone provides. These are holy chambers, where the priests that approach unto the LORD shall eat the most holy things… for the place is holy (v. 13). And before a priest may go from that holy place out to…

Ezekiel 43 is the homecoming the whole book has been waiting for. Chapters earlier, the prophet had watched the unthinkable: the glory of the LORD departed from off the threshold of the house , lifted up and went out by the east gate, and stood upon the mountain east of the city (Ezek. 10:18-19; 11:23) - God leaving His own temple. Now that same glory comes back the same way it left: the glory of the God of Israel came from the way of the east: and his voice was like a noi…

Ezekiel 44 opens at a gate that is shut, and shut for a reason that turns the whole chapter toward worship: This gate shall be shut… because the LORD, the God of Israel, hath entered in by it (v. 2). The way God Himself came in is made holy by that entering - a picture of the holiness of every way God consecrates, and of the wonder of the King who comes through it. The New Testament speaks of One who is Himself the door (John 10:9) and the way (John 14:6), the King…

Ezekiel 45 lays two things side by side - a portion of the land lifted up and set apart for God, and a demand for justice from those who govern - and both open toward Christ. The chapter begins by marking off an oblation unto the LORD, an holy portion of the land (v. 1), with the sanctuary in its midst, before any tribe receives an acre; the first claim on everything is God’s. Folded into that survey is a sentence that exposes how rulers had failed: my princes shall no mor…

Ezekiel 46 turns the great temple vision into the ordinary week of a worshipping people, and at its center stands a gate. The gate of the inner court that looketh toward the east shall be shut the six working days; but on the sabbath it shall be opened, and in the day of the new moon it shall be opened (v. 1). Access to the holy place is not seized at will; it is appointed, and it is granted - the gate stays shut through the working days and swings open on the day of rest.…

Ezekiel 47 is among the richest images in all of Scripture, and the New Testament gathers it up at the very end. From under the threshold of the house water begins to flow eastward (v. 1), and a man with a measuring line leads the prophet into it and marks how it deepens - the waters were to the ankles , then to the knees , then to the loins , and then it was a river that I could not pass over… waters to swim in, a river that could not be passed over (vv. 3-5). Life…

Ezekiel ends where the whole story of redemption is heading. The land is parcelled out to the twelve tribes in long even strips, and at the heart of it lies the holy oblation - the portion set apart for the priests, the Levites, the city, and the prince - with the sanctuary in the midst (vv. 8-10, 21): God set at the center of the land and the people. Then the city: the gates of the city shall be after the names of the tribes of Israel - three gates north, three east, thre…