Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hey, Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble, and I'm your host for The Bible Recap. Yesterday, we left off with Ezekiel in the midst of a vision of Jerusalem where he saw all the evil done by the elders and the people. Today, that vision continues with God calling for their deaths. God summons the executioners, who are almost certainly angels, and has them come to the temple. The text describes them as men, but as we've already discussed, angels always appear as men.
There are seven of these men, and six of them serve the purpose of slaughter, while the other one has a different role. He's dressed in linen, and he's got his tool belt on. But his tools are a writing kit, which in that day would have included an ink jar, a pen, and the case itself, which served as a hard surface to write on. His job is to go around Jerusalem marking the people who were grieved over the evil there, because those are the ones God says he's going to spare.
By the way, the word mark here is the Hebrew word tav. It's the last letter of the Jewish alphabet. And in this time period of Hebrew writing, it would have looked like either a cross or an X. We'll link to a resource in the show notes in case you want to see how the letter has changed over the years.
This scene may have reminded you of the Passover, where those whose doorways were marked with blood, which also would have been in the shape of a cross, were saved while the rest encountered the death of the firstborn. Or maybe it reminded you of the mark of the beast from the book of Revelation, except the opposite, obviously. But this also parallels something else we'll see in Revelation, where the righteous will be marked as well with the seal of God on their foreheads.
God tells them that when all the slaughter is complete, they should stack the bodies of the dead inside the temple. Obviously, this is against the cleanliness laws. Dead bodies are unclean. But it fits right in line with what God has said he's going to do, which is leave the temple. In the meantime, Ezekiel is distraught because he knows how wicked the people are and he seems to be nervous that God will end up killing them all because of it, that there won't be any people marked for saving, and that Israel will be wiped out forever.
But God says the people have sinned against him long enough and the days of mercy have passed and it's time for judgment, starting with the leaders of Jerusalem. Not to worry though, the man in linen does his job completely.
saving everyone God commanded him to save. And I want to point out one thing here. There's nothing in the text that indicates that this linen man is a theophany where God the Son shows up on earth like we've seen before. But if you wondered about that, you're not alone. This man certainly is a Christ figure though, even if he's not the Christ.
In chapter 10, Ezekiel has a vision that he compares to his earlier vision in chapter 1, where he sees the four-faced, four-winged creatures attached to gyroscope-like wheels. This time he clarifies that they're definitely cherubim, which is a type of heavenly being that is often seen guarding holy places. And that's exactly what they're doing here. They're carrying the throne that God's presence will dwell on when he leaves the temple. His cherubim chariot is waiting outside the temple as he's ready to go. But first…
God has the linen man send holy fire in judgment on the city itself.
After this, God's presence departs from the temple, rests on the cherubim chariot, and heads east. God has left the building. But God hasn't left his people. Because those worshiping idols aren't his people. They aren't among the remnant. Then God's spirit moves Ezekiel to another part of the city in this vision. And he prophesies to 25 men, including leaders of the city. These men have been acting like they're going to be killed in the city, cooked like meat in a pot.
possibly because of the fires the linen man caused with his coal throwing. But God says, nope, I'm not going to kill you here. I'm going to kill you outside of Jerusalem, where all your fears and more are going to come true. By the way, I don't just know what you do. I know what you think. I can read your minds. And maybe you think you're cooked meat now, but you're about to go out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Ezekiel even specifically prophesies in chapters 11 and 12 about how they'll leave the city and what will happen to them afterward. And it all happens by the book in 2 Kings 25.4. We read about that on day 231, but this prophecy by Ezekiel was written before it actually happened. I just wanted to clarify that point because, again, when we're trying to read the prophetic books as a whole, many of them overlap timelines, and it makes it challenging to keep the chronological order. So, why?
While Ezekiel is delivering this prophecy, one of the men falls over dead. Then in the back half of chapter 11, God sets the record straight on something. He says, in case there's any confusion, the temple isn't actually their sanctuary. He is their sanctuary. He says it in verse 16. And God the sanctuary goes anywhere he wants. He's not confined to a specific spot.
As we've talked about before, the people of that day believed you change gods as soon as you cross the border. They thought Yahweh was confined to Israel and that once they left it, they wouldn't be able to worship him anymore and he wouldn't have any power anymore.
Of course, this is crazy inconsistent with what he's shown them through the years. One of the major things he did for them early on in his relationship with them was rescue them out of Egypt through a series of signs and miracles that put the Egyptian gods to shame. And he was with them in the wilderness, outside the promised land. But just like most, if not all of us, their default mindset is their cultural mindset, not their spiritual mindset. And it's hard for them to adjust, so God keeps reminding them.
Chapter 11 ends with the promise of a new heart for God's people.
Then in chapter 12, we get more street theater. Just a reminder, Ezekiel is exiled during the first round of deportations, so he's either doing this performance in front of the other exiles, or he's transported to Jerusalem to do it there in front of the future exiles. Regardless which set of exiles it's in front of, their response is nonchalant. When they're unmoved by this, God has Ezekiel add some emotion to it to show them the kind of fear and trembling the future exiles will be going through.
But they seem to be calloused by years of false prophecies and even as yet unfulfilled true prophecies. So God lets them know that this is going to happen soon. My God shot was just a little blip in 1019 where the glory of the Lord is leaving the temple with the cherubim. This wrecked me. I choked up every time I tried to write this section. The verse says that God and the cherubim stood at the entrance of the east gate of the house of the Lord.
The word stood in this passage implies that God lingered there at the threshold before leaving through the eastern gate. It's almost like that final look back, feeling the grief over what's been lost, the pain over the way his people have broken his heart, the loss of the land he promised them and the blessings he gave them. But all is not lost because then the presence of God heads east toward Babylon.
God follows his people into the land of their exile, pursuing them still. Even in exile, he's our sanctuary. Even in exile, he's where the joy is.
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