2 Esdras 4

The chapter opens mid-argument. Ezra has been pressing God with the questions that will not let a faithful person sleep - why the righteous suffer, why evil flourishes, why God's justice stays hidden - and the angel Uriel answers him (v. 1). The first words are a rebuke, but a gentle one: Thy heart hath gone too far in this world, and thinkest thou to comprehend the way of the most High? (v. 2). The seer has tried to take the measure of God with a mind sized for the world.

Yet the angel does not simply shut the door. He proposes a bargain: I am sent to shew thee three ways, and to set forth three similitudes - and if Ezra can master even one of them, the angel will show him the way that thou desirest to see, and even from whence the wicked heart cometh (vv. 3-4). That last promise is the very root of Ezra's anguish: where does the evil in the human heart come from?

The angel does not refuse the question. He sets a price on it - a price, it turns out, no one alive can pay.

The genius of the three tasks is that none of them is a trick about something unreal. Fire has heat and force; the wind drives the sea and bends the trees; yesterday truly happened. They are not phantoms - they are realities so near that Ezra has lived inside them all his life. And yet not one of them will sit still on a scale, submit to a measuring-rod, or come back when summoned. He concedes at once: What man is able to do that? (v. 6).

The angel then tightens the point with devastating patience. He could have asked about the depths of the sea, the springs of the deep, the gates of paradise - remote things Ezra might excuse himself from knowing (vv. 7-8). But he asked only about fire, wind, and yesterday: things from which thou canst not be separated, and yet canst thou give me no answer of them (v. 9). The lesson is exact. If the realities pressed up against your own skin defeat you, the conclusion writes itself.

Now the angel draws the line all the way to its end. If you cannot fathom even what is native and familiar to you - thine own things, and such as are grown up with thee (v. 10) - how could you ever comprehend the way of the Highest? (v. 11). The word vessel in that question is doing quiet work: a human being is a small container, and the ways of God are an ocean that no such container can hold.

The angel is naming the architecture of the creaturely condition with precision. A finite mind, lodged in a world that is itself outwardly corrupted, cannot rise to audit the counsel of the One who made it. And Ezra's reply is the cry of every honest sufferer who has heard this and not yet been comforted by it: It were better that we were not at all, than that we should live still in wickedness, and to suffer, and not to know wherefore (v. 12).

It is a hard saying, and the book lets it stand at full weight - the protest of a man who would almost rather not exist than exist without an answer. The chapter has not finished with him; but it does not pretend the wound is small.

Having shown Ezra he cannot weigh the fire, the angel turns to a parable - a story with a verdict built into it. He walked, he says, into a forest on a plain, and the trees held council and resolved: Come, let us go and make war against the sea, that it may depart away before us, and that we may make us more woods (vv. 13-14). At the same hour the sea's floods took the mirror-image counsel: let us go up and subdue the woods of the plain, that there also we may make us another country (v. 15).

Each domain dreams of swallowing the other and expanding without limit. And each is stopped before it begins: the fire came and consumed the woods' ambition, and the humble sand stood up and stopped the floods (vv. 16-17). The picture is almost comic - a forest declaring war on the ocean - and that is the point. The creature that forgets its appointed place dreams absurdities. The fire and the sand are not even great forces; the smallest boundary God has set is enough to turn back the proudest overreach.

Then the angel springs the trap, and it is the same trap a prophet once sprang on a king with a parable about a lamb. If thou wert judge now betwixt these two, whom wouldest thou begin to justify? or whom wouldest thou condemn? (v. 18). Ezra answers without hesitation, and answers rightly: both were fools, for the ground is given unto the wood, and the sea also hath his place to bear his floods (v. 19).

Each was made for its own element; the war was folly because it was a revolt against the order of things. And the angel closes the snare: Thou hast given a right judgment, but why judgest thou not thyself also? (v. 20). The verdict Ezra passed so easily on the trees falls back upon his own head. He has been the forest declaring war on the sea - the earth-dweller demanding to range over heavenly territory that was never given to his kind.

The order the angel names is plain: they that dwell upon the earth may understand nothing but that which is upon the earth: and he that dwelleth above the heavens may only understand the things that are above the height of the heavens (v. 21). To grasp the ways of God, you would have to live where God lives.

Stung but not silenced, Ezra makes a crucial clarification - and it changes the temperature of the whole dialogue. I beseech thee, O Lord, let me have understanding (v. 22): he is not, he insists, prying into the high things, the secret architecture of the heavens. His questions are about such as pass by us daily - the wreckage in front of his eyes. Why is Israel given up as a reproach to the heathen? Why is the people whom thou hast loved handed over unto ungodly nations? Why is the law of the fathers brought to nought, the covenant come to none effect? (v. 23).

This is grief over a covenant that seems to have failed, the most personal of questions, a wound, not idle curiosity. We pass away out of the world as grasshoppers, he says - small, swept off, soon forgotten - and our life is astonishment and fear (v. 24). And then the question beneath all his questions: What will he then do unto his name whereby we are called? (v. 25). If God's own people are destroyed, what becomes of God's own honour?

It is the cry of Moses and the Psalms - not why do I suffer only, but where is the glory of Your name in this? The angel has heard him. The next movement of the chapter is the answer.

Now the angel answers the grief Ezra named by speaking of time rather than lifting the curtain on the secret things. The more thou searchest, the more thou shalt marvel (v. 26): the deeper a faithful mind goes, the larger the mystery grows. But one thing he will say plainly: the world hasteth fast to pass away, and the present age is so saturated with unrighteousness and infirmities that it simply cannot yet contain the things that are promised to the righteous in time to come (vv. 26-27).

The good harvest cannot ripen until the field of evil has run its course: the evil is sown, but the destruction thereof is not yet come (v. 28). Then comes one of the book's most pondered images: the grain of evil seed hath been sown in the heart of Adam from the beginning, and it has been bearing its bitter fruit ever since, and will keep bearing until the time of threshing come (v. 30).

Here the book is wrestling, in its own apocalyptic idiom, with where the bent toward wickedness comes from. The image is not offered as a finished doctrine of human nature - it is the seer's attempt to say that evil has a root, a history, and crucially a harvest: a fixed end at which the ears, without number, will at last be cut down (v. 32). Evil is vast, but it is not endless. It is a crop with a reaping-day.

Ezra wants the timetable - how, and when, and why must our years be so few and evil (v. 33) - and the angel will not give it. Instead he gives a warning that is also a comfort: Do not thou hasten above the most Highest: for thy haste is in vain to be above him, for thou hast much exceeded (v. 34). To demand the date is to try, once more, to climb above God - to be the forest warring on the sea.

The seer's impatience cannot speed the clock by a single hour. And then the angel says something that must have steadied Ezra more than any date could: he is not the only one asking. Did not the souls also of the righteous ask question of these things in their chambers, saying, How long shall I hope on this fashion? (v. 35). The faithful dead, already at rest with God, ask the very question Ezra asks - how long? Even on the far side of death, the answer is a promise rather than a calendar: Even when the number of seeds is filled in you: for he hath weighed the world in the balance (v. 36).

The harvest comes when the count is full, and not before.

The answer the righteous souls receive is the chapter's deepest steadying word: he hath weighed the world in the balance. By measure hath he measured the times, and by number hath he numbered the times; and he doth not move nor stir them, until the said measure be fulfilled (vv. 36-37). Set that beside Ezra's opening complaint, that he must suffer, and not to know wherefore (v. 12), and something has shifted.

He still does not know the when - but he is told that there is a when, fixed and weighed and numbered, held in a hand that does not slip. The God who could not be audited by a creature is not therefore careless of the creature's pain. He has weighed the world; He has measured the seasons; the appointed end will arrive neither late nor by accident, and it cannot be hurried by despair or delayed by the strength of evil.

This is not the same as knowing the schedule. It is better: it is knowing the One who keeps it. The whole movement of the chapter has been to trade a demand for information for a ground of trust - from tell me why and when to the measure is sure, and it is in good hands.

Ezra makes one more attempt to hurry the end - and this time it is almost a generous one. Perhaps, he suggests, the delay is the fault of the living: for our sakes peradventure it is that the floors of the righteous are not filled, because of the sins of them that dwell upon the earth (vv. 38-39). If we were less wicked, would the harvest not come sooner? The angel answers with an image drawn from the most ordinary miracle there is.

Go thy way to a woman with child, and ask of her when she hath fulfilled her nine months, if her womb may keep the birth any longer within her (v. 40). Of course it cannot, Ezra admits. And the angel turns it: In the grave the chambers of souls are like the womb of a woman (v. 41) - the place of the dead is not a permanent prison but a season of waiting, and like a full-term womb it strains toward its appointed hour of deliverance and cannot hold back the birth past its time.

The image is full of quiet hope: death, in this telling, is gestation. The chambers of the righteous are not hoarding the dead; they are carrying them toward a birth. And just as no anxious mother can either rush or refuse the hour of labour, neither can the world hurry or hinder the day God has set.

Ezra's last question is the natural one: of all of history, how much is left? Shew me… whether there be more to come than is past, or more past than is to come (vv. 44-45). He admits the limit of his sight: What is past I know, but what is for to come I know not (v. 46). The angel answers with two more similitudes - a burning oven and a rain-cloud passing by.

When the flame had gone, only smoke lingered; when the storm had passed, only a few drops remained (vv. 48-49). The lesson: as the rain is more than the drops, and as the fire is greater than the smoke… so the quantity which is past did more exceed (v. 50). The great bulk of the age is already spent; what remains is only the lingering smoke, the last few drops. The end is nearer than the beginning.

Yet when Ezra asks the one question that is most his own - May I live… until that time? (v. 51) - the angel draws a final, startling boundary. He will tell of the tokens of the end in part; but as for the day of Ezra's own death, I am not sent to shew thee; for I do not know it (v. 52). Even the messenger of God has a mensura, a measure he is not given to cross.

The chapter that began by humbling Ezra ends by humbling the angel too - and leaves every reader where it leaves the seer: knowing that the end is sure and near, not knowing the day, and bidden to trust the One who alone holds it.