2 And he said to me, “Son of man,1 stand on your feet, and I will speak with you.” 2 And as he spoke to me, the Spirit entered into me and set me on my feet, and I heard him speaking to me. 3 And he said to me, “Son of man, I send you to the people of Israel, to nations of rebels, who have rebelled against me. They and their fathers have transgressed against me to this very day. 4 The descendants also are impudent and stubborn: I send you to them, and you shall say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord God.’ 5 And whether they hear or refuse to hear (for they are a rebellious house) they will know that a prophet has been among them. 6 And you, son of man, be not afraid of them, nor be afraid of their words, though briers and thorns are with you and you sit on scorpions.2 Be not afraid of their words, nor be dismayed at their looks, for they are a rebellious house. 7 And you shall speak my words to them, whether they hear or refuse to hear, for they are a rebellious house.
8 “But you, son of man, hear what I say to you. Be not rebellious like that rebellious house; open your mouth and eat what I give you.” 9 And when I looked, behold, a hand was stretched out to me, and behold, a scroll of a book was in it. 10 And he spread it before me. And it had writing on the front and on the back, and there were written on it words of lamentation and mourning and woe.
3 And he said to me, “Son of man, eat whatever you find here. Eat this scroll, and go, speak to the house of Israel.” 2 So I opened my mouth, and he gave me this scroll to eat. 3 And he said to me, “Son of man, feed your belly with this scroll that I give you and fill your stomach with it.” Then I ate it, and it was in my mouth as sweet as honey.
4 And he said to me, “Son of man, go to the house of Israel and speak with my words to them. 5 For you are not sent to a people of foreign speech and a hard language, but to the house of Israel— 6 not to many peoples of foreign speech and a hard language, whose words you cannot understand. Surely, if I sent you to such, they would listen to you. 7 But the house of Israel will not be willing to listen to you, for they are not willing to listen to me: because all the house of Israel have a hard forehead and a stubborn heart. 8 Behold, I have made your face as hard as their faces, and your forehead as hard as their foreheads. 9 Like emery harder than flint have I made your forehead. Fear them not, nor be dismayed at their looks, for they are a rebellious house.” 10 Moreover, he said to me, “Son of man, all my words that I shall speak to you receive in your heart, and hear with your ears. 11 And go to the exiles, to your people, and speak to them and say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord God,’ whether they hear or refuse to hear.”
12 Then the Spirit3 lifted me up, and I heard behind me the voice4 of a great earthquake: “Blessed be the glory of the Lord from its place!” 13 It was the sound of the wings of the living creatures as they touched one another, and the sound of the wheels beside them, and the sound of a great earthquake. 14 The Spirit lifted me up and took me away, and I went in bitterness in the heat of my spirit, the hand of the Lord being strong upon me. 15 And I came to the exiles at Tel-abib, who were dwelling by the Chebar canal, and I sat where they were dwelling.5 And I sat there overwhelmed among them seven days.
Section Overview
Prophetic call narratives serve two primary functions. First, they authenticate the messenger through his account of his encounter with God. The prophet’s message is never his own; it is given to him, a message often difficult to proclaim. Second, the call narrative introduces the shape of this particular prophet’s message. The first part of Ezekiel’s call narrative focused on who God is and his attitude to his people. The Lord is the divine warrior, coming in power against his own land to bring judgment upon his own people. This second part of the call focuses on who Ezekiel’s audience is and, therefore, who the prophet will need to be if he is to deliver God’s word to them faithfully. The Lord has sent him to Israel, who are true sons of their deceitful and unreliable ancestor Jacob. They are hardheaded and hardhearted, firmly committed to their sinful ways. There is no linguistic barrier to communication; the prophet has been sent to his own people, who speak Hebrew, just as he does. But it would have been far easier if the Lord had sent Ezekiel to speak to a foreign nation, whose language and customs he would have needed to learn from scratch. They would surely have listened to Ezekiel’s powerful words—unlike Israel. God’s own people will, for the most part, refuse to hear. Nonetheless, Ezekiel is called to be faithful, whether or not people listen to him. Then, when the things he is prophesying come about, the people will be forced to acknowledge that God had spoken to them about these things via his prophet in their midst. They will be left without excuse.
Section Outline
I. Ezekiel’s Call and Commissioning (1:1–3:27) . . .
B. The Prophet’s Challenging Charge (2:1–3:15)
Response
We often assume that success in the church can, at least to some extent, be measured in terms of numbers. If someone plants a church that grows to several thousand members, people will flock from all over to ask how he did it. Meanwhile, if someone has only a few people listening to him preach, he is unlikely to be asked to speak at many conferences or seminars. Yet many of the prophets whom the Lord calls, chooses, and empowers by his Spirit are told that very few people will be interested in their message. We love to read the first part of Isaiah’s call vision in Isaiah 6 at mission conferences, focusing on the divine questions “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” (Isa. 6:8). But we generally ignore the rest of the chapter, in which Isaiah is told that he is being sent to people who will remain blind, deaf, and hardhearted toward his message (Isa. 6:9–13). Ezekiel’s call is similar: the Lord tells him ahead of time that he is going to a rebellious house, which will remain stubbornly unrepentant. The measure of the prophet’s ministry is not the number of people who will listen but his faithfulness in delivering the precise message that the Lord gives him to deliver, even though it is an unpalatable word of judgment.
Of course, we should not fall into the opposite error of assuming that the smallness of our impact proves our faithfulness or that only judgment should ever be preached. God sometimes richly blesses the ministry of his Word and brings many to faith through its preaching. Our calling is simply to be faithful to the message we have been given. The Puritan William Greenhill comments:
Sometimes God gives large encouragement, promises, hope, success, providing for our infirmities; at other times a bare commission and command must suffice to do that which would make one’s heart ache: it is his prerogative to send whom he will, and upon what service he will.21
For us as Christians the message is not given in a visionary scroll for us to ingest. It comes to us in the writings of the apostles and prophets, recorded for us once for all in the pages of Scripture. This is the message we are to swallow and internalize, becoming people of the Book. Some parts of the Bible may appear less palatable than others, yet, if we genuinely submit ourselves to the Lord of the Scriptures, we will often find that the parts of Scripture we thought less desirable have a unique sweetness of their own to contribute to our knowledge of God and the gospel. We will see this principle at work even within the pages of Ezekiel.
If Ezekiel was called to identify with both God and his community as a prophet, then the supreme prophet is Jesus himself. As God incarnate, he expresses the Father’s yearning over his rebellious people when he cries out, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” (Matt. 23:37). At the cross he identifies with us and takes into himself the full wrath that God feels toward rebellious sinners, paying the awful penalty that each and every one of our sins deserves. He came as the son of man, not to be served (as one might have expected from Daniel 7) but “to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). And he will come again in glory as the exalted Son of Man to receive his kingdom and to judge the living and the dead (Rev. 14:14).Ezekiel 2:1–3:15
Ezekiel 3:16–27