Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks from Ezekiel 4–5 in this sermon from The Gospel Coalition Library
“ ‘Now, son of man, take a clay tablet, put it in front of you and draw the city of Jerusalem on it. Then lay siege to it: Erect siege works against it, build a ramp up to it, set up camps against it and put battering rams around it. Then take an iron pan, place it as an iron wall between you and the city and turn your face toward it. It will be under siege, and you shall besiege it. This will be a sign to the house of Israel.
Then lie on your left side and put the sin of the house of Israel upon yourself. You are to bear their sin for the number of days you lie on your side. I have assigned you the same number of days as the years of their sin. So for 390 days you will bear the sin of the house of Israel.
After you have finished this, lie down again, this time on your right side, and bear the sin of the house of Judah. I have assigned you 40 days, a day for each year. Turn your face toward the siege of Jerusalem and with bared arm prophesy against her. I will tie you up with ropes so that you cannot turn from one side to the other until you have finished the days of your siege.
Take wheat and barley, beans and lentils, millet and spelt; put them in a storage jar and use them to make bread for yourself. You are to eat it during the 390 days you lie on your side. Weigh out twenty shekels of food to eat each day and eat it at set times. Also measure out a sixth of a hin of water and drink it at set times.
Eat the food as you would a barley cake; bake it in the sight of the people, using human excrement for fuel.’ The Lord said, ‘In this way the people of Israel will eat defiled food among the nations where I will drive them.’ Then I said, ‘Not so, Sovereign Lord! I have never defiled myself. From my youth until now I have never eaten anything found dead or torn by wild animals. No unclean meat has ever entered my mouth.’ ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘I will let you bake your bread over cow manure instead of human excrement.’
He then said to me: ‘Son of man, I will cut off the supply of food in Jerusalem. The people will eat rationed food in anxiety and drink rationed water in despair, for food and water will be scarce. They will be appalled at the sight of each other and will waste away because of their sin.
Now, son of man, take a sharp sword and use it as a barber’s razor to shave your head and your beard. Then take a set of scales and divide up the hair. When the days of your siege come to an end, burn a third of the hair with fire inside the city. Take a third and strike it with the sword all around the city. And scatter a third to the wind. For I will pursue them with drawn sword.
But take a few strands of hair and tuck them away in the folds of your garment. Again, take a few of these and throw them into the fire and burn them up. A fire will spread from there to the whole house of Israel.
This is what the Sovereign Lord says: This is Jerusalem, which I have set in the center of the nations, with countries all around her. Yet in her wickedness she has rebelled against my laws and decrees more than the nations and countries around her. She has rejected my laws and has not followed my decrees. Therefore this is what the Sovereign Lord says: You have been more unruly than the nations around you and have not followed my decrees or kept my laws. You have not even conformed to the standards of the nations around you.
Therefore this is what the Sovereign Lord says: I myself am against you, Jerusalem, and I will inflict punishment on you in the sight of the nations. Because of all your detestable idols, I will do to you what I have never done before and will never do again. Therefore in your midst fathers will eat their children, and children will eat their fathers. I will inflict punishment on you and will scatter all your survivors to the winds.
Therefore as surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, because you have defiled my sanctuary with all your vile images and detestable practices, I myself will withdraw my favor; I will not look on you with pity or spare you. A third of your people will die of the plague or perish by famine inside you; a third will fall by the sword outside your walls; and a third I will scatter to the winds and pursue with drawn sword.
Then my anger will cease and my wrath against them will subside, and I will be avenged. And when I have spent my wrath upon them, they will know that I the Lord have spoken in my zeal. I will make you a ruin and a reproach among the nations around you, in the sight of all who pass by. You will be a reproach and a taunt, a warning and an object of horror to the nations around you when I inflict punishment on you in anger and in wrath and with stinging rebuke. I the Lord have spoken.
When I shoot at you with my deadly and destructive arrows of famine, I will shoot to destroy you. I will bring more and more famine upon you and cut off your supply of food. I will send famine and wild beasts against you, and they will leave you childless. Plague and bloodshed will sweep through you, and I will bring the sword against you. I the Lord have spoken.’ ”
This is the Word of God.
Just over two years ago, I was participating in a mission at Durham University in Northern England. I was only there for a couple of days; the whole mission went on for much longer. One of my bits was to help organize a session that, in England, is often called Grill a Christian. You stick two or three Christians at the front, and everybody who is invited (usually after one of the large meetings) merely fires questions. They can be from all over the map. You try to answer these questions as graciously, as briefly, and as pointedly as possible.
On that occasion, one of the questions ran something like this: “What do you make of the fact that the God of the Old Testament supports war, pillage, hate, and genocide while the God of the New Testament is a gentler, kinder God? Jesus says, ‘Turn the other cheek.’ I don’t see how you can even square this with your claim that the Bible is one book.”
It’s a common enough view, isn’t it? Even among many of us who are Christians … although we wouldn’t put it quite as bluntly as my interlocutor in Durham … deep down, we are a wee bit puzzled by this perceived discrepancy. Oh, we know the standard answers, but, well, isn’t God just a tad harsher, shall we say, in the Old Testament? In fact, when we come across one of these passages, we’re likely to say, ever so piously, “But that was the old covenant,” which, being interpreted, means, “Therefore, I don’t have to think about it.”
The passage before us might even be thought to lend classic support to this thesis, might it not? Look at 5:10. “Therefore in your midst fathers will eat their children, and children will eat their fathers. I will inflict punishment on you …” In other words, it’s going to get so bad in this siege that people end up eating each other, and this is part of God inflicting a punishment.
Verse 14: “I will make you a ruin and a reproach among the nations around you, in the sight of all who pass by.” Verse 16: “When I shoot at you with my deadly and destructive arrows of famine, I will shoot to destroy you. I will bring more and more famine upon you and cut off your supply of food.”
This evening, I want to work through this passage with you and listen attentively to what God has to say through it, not only in the context of Ezekiel (that’s first), but then I want to re-read the passage with you in the light of Old Testament history and New Testament history and show you how it contributes to the Bible as a whole.
Doubtless you will recall from yesterday that Ezekiel, born into a priestly family, was transported with other leading citizens to Babylon, 700 miles from home. He turned 30 years of age as an exile in 593 BC, six years before the final destruction of Jerusalem. The rightful king of Judah was also in exile. The puppet replacement, Zedekiah, was as stupid as he was corrupt.
Many in Jerusalem and among the exiles, however, thought that whatever else God had done to inflict punishment, he would never, ever permit Jerusalem to be destroyed. Of course, the 10 tribes in the north had already been transported, a century and a half (or more) earlier, under the Assyrians. They were already scattered, but the remaining two tribes were surely preserved in some sense because, after all, Jerusalem was their capital and this was the place where God had manifested himself in the temple.
This was the place where the glory of God revealed himself perpetually, especially at the high feasts, such as the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur: when the high priest took the blood of a goat and the blood of a bullock, to cover both his own sins and the sins of the people, and offered it before the glorious presence of God in the inner sanctuary of the temple.
To imagine that God could allow Jerusalem to be destroyed was almost like imagining that God could be killed or that God could finally be defeated. That Jerusalem would go down would be a bit like finding the body of Jesus in Jerusalem today for us. It was just unthinkable. When he turned 30 and should normally have been entering the most active part of his priestly ministry, Ezekiel was called to a higher ministry.
Though he would never see the Jerusalem temple again, he was called to be God’s prophet to his people in declining circumstances in exile, just as Jeremiah, his colleague, was called to minister to the people back home. One of the great burdens of Ezekiel’s ministry, as he spoke what God gave him to say, was that Jerusalem and Judah were far more wicked than anyone thought, and, in consequence, God was determined to destroy them.
Can you imagine what that message sounded like to the exiles? Oh, true, at one level, of course, it was a disaster that was being announced on somebody else. They were off in exile. This was a disaster that was being announced on the people back home, but they all had relatives back home. That was home. More importantly, the destruction of Jerusalem would mean that they were cut off.
As long as Jerusalem was still there, the city of the Great King, as long as the temple was still there, as long as the covenant God still manifest himself in the great rites and rituals of the repeated high feasts, then there was surely a hope … from all of those psalms, even from the promises of Deuteronomy … that one day, this covenant-keeping God would bring back his people from wherever they were scattered.
But if Jerusalem was destroyed, not only would it be a religious disaster for which they had no categories, but it would mean that there would be no way home. There would be no home to go to, no covenant-keeping God to bring them home. They would be cut off without hope.
They could still maintain their identity as Jews in the diaspora, scattered abroad, now living in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley system, the elite of their culture now living in mud huts, trying to scrabble a hard existence from the irrigation ditch that we call the Chebar River, but one day, God would bring them home. But supposing Jerusalem and the temple were destroyed. Can you imagine what this message sounded like, then, in their ears?
This doesn’t mean that Ezekiel softens his words. Remember that Ezekiel is under strict restraint from God to speak only what God gives him to say. He says nothing else, for six years, until he hears word that the Jerusalem temple has fallen. He says nothing, but every time he speaks, he pronounces judgment. Even his silences, broken by utterances conveying the truth of God, would add enormous weight to his repeated messages of impending doom.
From the beginning of this ministry, then, Ezekiel pronounces a dominant note of judgment. Later on in the book, it’s almost all hope, and we’ll get far enough in the book in this series to see just the beginnings of the transition toward the hope. We won’t get all the way through the book, but in the two chapters before us, Ezekiel tells us, by parabolic actions and explicit words, what happens when the Lord shoots to kill. We may discern three things.
1. Acted parables of judgment.
Ezekiel 4:1–5:4. The strange acts Ezekiel now performs probably take place outside his house, a mud hut. In the relatively small exilic community, the story of his strange actions, long silences, and mighty words would spread like wildfire through the community.
You can imagine them poking each other on their way out to the fields, trying to get the crops ready to come in. “Let’s go by Ezekiel’s place. Let’s go and see what Ezekiel is doing today. Remember that strange thing that he did yesterday?” The whole community begins to talk about Ezekiel and his strange actions done just outside the door of his mud hut.
Ezekiel 4:1–3. The centerpiece is a large sunbaked clay tablet, we’re told, on which Ezekiel draws the city of Jerusalem (verse 1). Maybe he drew it in profile. If you’ve traveled, you know that certain cities have the kind of profile that everybody recognizes. You recognize New York City’s profile or Heidelberg’s profile or London’s profile. You just recognize it.
So there he is with this large clay tablet, and he starts sketching the profile of Jerusalem. People start looking over his shoulder. “Hey, it’s Jerusalem. It’s Jerusalem. It’s a picture of Jerusalem.” Don’t forget, he’s not saying a thing himself. He’s just drawing a picture. Then he starts playing war games, like a little kid, with soldiers and siege ramps.
You see, in those days, if you were going to attack a walled city, you really only had a few options. If it was really a strong wall and you couldn’t batter it down, then eventually, you did two things. First of all, you tried to starve it out. You put troops all around it, so you didn’t let food in or people out. If the city was large and had a good food supply, a siege could last two, three, four years. They often did in the ancient world. Jerusalem had a good water supply and was big enough to have a fair food supply.
Ultimately, you built siege ramps. If the terrain was good enough, you would actually build ramps right up to the wall. You would have some of your soldiers holding big protections overhead while others worked building these siege ramps, because the people on the wall were shooting down at you with arrows, pouring boiling oil on your head, or otherwise exhibiting fairly antisocial behavior!
If the terrain was really smooth, you would actually build siege ramps on wheels, at some distance, and then you’d shove them up close right at the end. You couldn’t do that with Jerusalem; the terrain wouldn’t allow you to do it. So as a result, you would gradually build siege ramps with some soldiers holding protective gear overhead and other workers gradually building these things up.
In Roman times, they were still doing the same thing. The Roman army gave the equivalent of the Medal of Honor … the corona muralis it was called (the crown of the wall) … to the first soldier of centurion rank or over who was first over the wall at the end of the siege. Usually, it was given posthumously; you can understand why. That is the picture.
Gradually, the city would be dragged down and down and down, until people started dying from sheer hunger. Food supplies would eventually run out. Then maybe they’d make a break and try to flee. Then, of course, there would be a brief, nasty, bloody skirmish, and whatever people were left were sold off to slavery or dispersed in other nations.
What Ezekiel is doing here would have been pretty clear right away because people understood that was how warfare was handled in the ancient world. That’s how you beat a strong-walled city. So he makes a city, and now he starts building siege ramps: little platoons, little flats, with soldiers here and soldiers there. This might have gone on for a week or 10 days; we don’t know. Every morning, the people go to work and watch dear ol’ Ezekiel playing his war games.
Then in verse 3, Ezekiel is told to take a large iron pan, probably the kind of thing that was used for baking barley bread in the ancient world. If I understand the symbolism aright here, Ezekiel represents God. After all, he’s God’s prophet. He’s told to take the pan and hold it over this city that he’s made on this clay tablet. He’s to hold it and stare at the pan as if he’s going to squash it down on the city and wipe it all out.
If people recognize Ezekiel, then, as a spokesperson for God … God’s prophet, representing God … then here is God, staring at the pan, ready to thrust it down and smash the city to smithereens. In other words, the point of the symbolism is not only that the siege will take place but that God himself is behind it.
This is not just an accident of history, one of those regrettable things that take place. This is the judgment of God on the city, and God will destroy it. Apparently, then, the setup described in verses 1 through 3 remains as a kind of more-or-less permanent prop, a visual aid, while Ezekiel, then, performs further actions around it or beside it, all with parabolic intent.
Ezekiel 4:4–8. The drama changes. Here, Ezekiel represents first Israel (that is, the northern kingdom that had already gone off into captivity, because of its sin, about 180 years earlier) and then, later, Judah. Now you must not think that he’s lying there for 390 days without moving. In the first place, that would leave him pretty stiff. In any case, you can see from the following verses that every day, he’s doing other things. But for some period of time every day, he’s there, tied up, lying on his left side.
If you can imagine him lying on his left side, lying east-west, with his head toward the Jerusalem that he’s built, then he’s facing north. So on day one, he’s lying there, head toward Jerusalem, facing north toward Israel: a sign of weakness and dejection, tied up, bound up. Day two: same side, facing Israel. Day three: same side, facing Israel. Day four: same side, facing Israel. Day five: same side, facing Israel.
Day after day, week after week, month after month. They come 365 days later, and he’s still on the same side, still facing Israel. Meanwhile, every day he gets up for part of the time and does certain things (we’ll come to those things in due course) with symbol-laden actions indicating destruction, famine, judgment, and so forth.
For 390 days, they watch him do this. Then the next day, they come and he’s facing the other way. You have to be pretty thick not to get the point. You see, the southern people (these were all southern exiles from Judah) understood that God had wiped out the north and sent them off because, after all, they deserved it. They were a bunch of dirty idolaters; what do you expect? But Judah? The Davidic dynasty? The temple?
The 390 days represented 390 years. The count is probably from the onset of the northern rebellion. If you recall your Old Testament history, King David founded the Davidic dynasty, followed by his son, Solomon. Then when Solomon died in 930 BC, under his son, Rehoboam, the nation split into ten tribes in the north and two in the south. So from 930 or 931 BC to the end of the exile represents about 390 years. Now Ezekiel turns, and he faces the south. Now he’s facing the bulk of Judah.
Again, the number is rounded off a bit. There are different ways of counting the years of exile. For example, in Jeremiah 25 and 29, that prophet speaks of 70 years of exile, but not 70 years actually away in exile, 70 years under the Babylonian supremacy. That is, from 605 BC (the Battle of Carchemish when the Babylonians took over from Egypt) to the end of the exile in about 539 BC. But you can calculate it another way: from the time of Ezekiel’s captivity until the end of the exile was 59 years.
From the fall of Jerusalem to the end of the exile was 49 years. I think it’s rounded off to 40, here, simply to call forth the 40 years of wilderness wandering, when the people were entering the Promised Land in the first place, because the prophets pick up on that period as a representative, or type, of God’s preparing the people for entering into the Promised Land. Now he’s going to do it again; he’s going to give them another 40 years, give or take, as he prepares them, once again, for covenantal renewal.
In any case, what Ezekiel does is pretty clear. What he’s prophesying … as he opens up his arm from the ropes and prophesies against Jerusalem, in verse 7, with his arm laid bare … he’s explaining his actions, denouncing Jerusalem, and declaring that the city will be destroyed. Thus, he is insisting, by his actions and his words, that their sin will be requited.
Ezekiel 4:9–17. Now the prophet’s action draws attention to the famine that would take place in Jerusalem under siege and then, later on, in the exile as well. The point is that both Israel and Judah live on famine rations. Verse 13: “The Lord said, ‘In this way the people of Israel will eat defiled food among the nations where I will drive them.’
Verse 16: “ ‘Son of man, I will cut off the supply of food in Jerusalem.” That’s Judah. “The people will eat rationed food in anxiety and drink rationed water in despair, for food and water will be scarce. They will be appalled at the sight of each other and will waste away because of their sin.”
Look at the mix of grains under famine conditions in verse 9. “Take wheat and barley, beans and lentils, millet and spelt …” When you’re going to make bread, you certainly use wheat and barley, but you don’t use beans and lentils. They’re vegetables, but as your food supply is going down, you try to make bread out of anything you can make it with. So you dry out whatever you have, pound it up, mix it together to make a kind of rough flour, and that’s your bread.
How do you cook it? When you start off under siege, you have your stacks of corded wood ready to burn, but eventually, it’s gone. Then you burn your furniture. Then you take down the stairs. Then you take out the timbers of your houses. Pretty soon, there isn’t much left to burn. So you burn cow patties. That’s what they do in India. If you’ve ever been in a really poor part of the world where there are a lot of animals around, you watch them burn cow patties to cook their food.
But eventually, you kill enough of the cattle, and all you have left to burn is your own excrement. You see, all of this is a very vivid vision of what actually does take place under city sieges. You can find all of this described, with respect to the siege of Jerusalem in AD 70 (which was 40 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection), by the Jewish historian Josephus. He describes all of these things in grotesque language.
Eventually, somebody dies. You’re so hungry that you eat them. The only question is whether the father eats the child or the child eats the father. Twenty shekels of grain (about eight ounces) is not enough to sustain you for a whole day if that’s all you eat, day after day. A sixth of a hin of water (a bit over an imperial pint; about one and one-sixth American pints of water) is not, in a hot climate, enough to sustain you.
You mustn’t think that’s all that Ezekiel is eating. That’s all he eats and drinks in his displays before his mud hut. In the evening, he’s going home and having a meal with his wife. In terms of his prophetic actions, however, this is what he does. Every day, he bakes a little bit of this rough bread on cow patties, and then he eats it.
He doesn’t just eat it once it’s cooked, but at set times, we’re told in verse 11. He’s also drinking a bit of water at set times. That’s what you do under famine conditions. You take a little sip here; you wait for the next two-hour interval, and then you take another little sip. You nurse it along, trying to get by.
Worse is yet to come in verses 12 and 13. The point is that these descriptions pertain not only to siege conditions but to exilic conditions, even after the siege is over. Once the people are scattered in far-off lands, they can’t go to the nearest deli and pick up kosher food. They’re going to be eating an awful lot of contaminated food for a long time. All of their religious scruples are going to be soiled.
When Ezekiel protests in verse 14, shocked at what he is being asked to do, God makes it a little easier for him, but at the end of the day, the picture doesn’t back off much. The point is made in verses 16 and 17. “Son of man, I will cut off the supply of food in Jerusalem. The people will eat rationed food in anxiety and drink rationed water in despair, for food and water will be scarce. They will be appalled at the sight of each other and will waste away because of their sin.”
So get the flow, then: Verses 1 to 3 drive home the inevitability of the siege of Jerusalem. Verses 4 to 8 drive home the duration of the banishment. Verses 9 to 17 drive home the famine conditions of the siege and of the exile.
Ezekiel 5:1–4. Ezekiel depicts what will happen to the inhabitants of Jerusalem. He takes a sword and puts a fine edge on it so that it’s like a straight razor. Now he takes off all of his hair. This isn’t some wimpy little beard; this is a good, solid Jewish beard. He becomes the first Michael Jordan of the ancient world: completely bald. He takes all his hair off.
Now there’s a good crowd all around him. He divides his hair into three parts. He takes one part, one-third, and puts it in this clay model of Jerusalem then drops in a couple of coals. Of course, the hair sizzles, fries, and burns up. Then he takes some more hair and sprinkles it all around the city. Then he takes the sharp sword and whacks it until there are only tiny little pieces of hair left all around the city.
Then he takes the last third and tucks a few strands in his belt. The wind is blowing, and he throws a few strands up. He throws a few more strands up, and they blow away. He does this until there’s nothing left. Then he takes the remaining strands tucked in his belt, takes some of them, puts them back in the city, and they burn up.
The people in the ancient world would have understood, but in case we miss it, it’s all spelled out for us. Chapter 5, verse 12: “A third of your people will die of the plague or perish by famine inside you …” That is, inside the city, from the siege. “… a third will fall by the sword outside your walls …” That is, when they finally try to break out. “… and a third I will scatter to the winds and pursue with drawn sword.” That is, they’re scattered into exile, blown by the wind. These, then, are the acted parables of the judgment.
2. God’s reasons for the judgment.
Ezekiel 5:5–12. In fact, there is one fundamental reason that is developed in a variety of ways. The fundamental reason for the judgment that God gives is that Judah has not only rebelled against the covenant and the covenant’s Lord but has become more wicked than the surrounding nations.
Ezekiel 5, verses 5, 6, and 8: “This is what the Sovereign Lord says: This is Jerusalem …” That is, this clay model, representing the real McCoy. “… which I have set in the center of the nations, with countries all around her. Yet in her wickedness she has rebelled against my laws and decrees more than the nations and countries around her. She has rejected my laws and has not followed my decrees. Therefore … I myself am against you, Jerusalem.”
Is this so very unbelievable? Not for a moment should we think that America, Canada, or any other nation is the equivalent of the covenant people of God in the Old Testament. Not for a moment. Nevertheless, it’s a profound biblical principle that “To whom much is given, from them also shall much be required.”
What language group in the whole world has the most remarkable heritage of Christian preaching, revivals, Christian books, and the availability of open Bibles? Do you realize how fortunate we are? There’s nothing like what we have in English in French or in German. Do I need to say Kikuyu? Or Kamba?
We have a fantastic heritage of solid commentaries, devotional guides, spiritual works, missionary histories and biographies, systematic theologies, and training manuals. Oh, we have a lot of stupid things like Sixteen Ways to be Happy Though Married and books like that. Don’t waste your time with them! But there’s a great heritage out there as well.
Does this mean that the church in the West has used this heritage? For many of us, when we say the word Muslim or Islam, we’re slightly scared, a wee bit nervous, and the first image that crops to mind may be somebody wearing a funny hat and an Uzi machine gun. Of course, Islam has its fundamentalists and its terrorists, but if you walk the streets of Saudi Arabia or if you visit Karachi, and you ask ordinary Muslims what they think of America, what you discover is a remarkable love-hate relationship.
There’s a part of them that admires the technological advance and the relative wealth, and many of them would like to come here. There’s another side, however, that despises our immorality. Are they so wrong? Do we maybe hear the voice of God saying to us, “With all the heritage that you have received, you are worse than the nations around you”?
Isn’t that what Jesus says to the Jews in Galilee in his day? He says, “Woe to you, Korazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! If the miracles done in you, if the sermons preached to you, if the gospel declared to you had been done in Tyre and Sidon …” Pagan cities up to the north. “… or even in Sodom and Gomorrah …” Proverbial for wickedness. “… they would have remained to this day.”
Is it just possible that the voice of God still rings through the centuries, today, and says, “Woe to you, Chicago! Woe to you, New York! Woe to you, South Bend! If the sheer luxury of gospel richness and heritage that you have received had been given to Kabul, Afghanistan, it would have been a light to the world”? That’s God’s reason for judgment on Jerusalem.
3. God’s purposes in the judgment.
Ezekiel 5:13–17. We’ll go through them very quickly. There are four.
A. God does this to vent his anger.
Ezekiel 5:13a: “Then my anger will cease and my wrath against them will subside, and I will be avenged.” You are not to think that this means that God has a bad temper. One day he woke up and just couldn’t take it anymore. He had a nasty fit and exploded, and that the result was the destruction of Jerusalem.
However, the principle of God’s holiness means that if he does not respond to sin, then he himself is either immoral or amoral. Would you really prefer a God who looked at Hitler or Stalin and said, “Well, frankly, I don’t give a rip what you do. It’s no skin off my nose. I don’t care”? Would that make God superior?
If he is a holy God and if he made us for himself, he must respond with judgment against us. Otherwise, his own nature, his own character, his own holiness is called into question and he destroys himself. God will be angry, not with the anger of an unbridled temper but with the inevitable result when holiness confronts rebellion.
B. God does this to make his people realize that he has done it.
Ezekiel 5:13b: “When I have spent my wrath upon them, they will know that I the Lord have spoken in my zeal.” In other words, he not only is going to destroy them, but he wants them to know that it is he who is destroying them. There is a pedagogical function to it all. He wants them to understand that this is not an accident of history or some distant happening that God barely acknowledges, but this is his action. Nebuchadnezzar may be the means, but this is God’s doing.
C. God does this to make his people a reproach and, thus, to humble them.
Ezekiel 5:14–15: “I will make you a ruin and a reproach among the nations around you, in the sight of all who pass by. You will be a reproach and a taunt, a warning and an object of horror to the nations around you when I inflict punishment on you in anger and in wrath and with stinging rebuke.”
D. God does this, quite frankly, to destroy them.
Ezekiel 5:16–17: “When I shoot at you with my deadly and destructive arrows of famine, I will shoot to destroy you. I will bring more and more famine upon you and cut off your supply of food. I will send famine and wild beasts against you, and they will leave you childless. Plague and bloodshed will sweep through you, and I will bring the sword against you. I the Lord have spoken.”
If it is important to understand these two chapters in the context of Ezekiel, then it is no less important to understand them in some broader biblical frameworks. Let me suggest several.
1. Set this passage within the framework of Old Testament history.
In the beginning, God creates the heaven and the earth. He makes us in his own image, and he declares us good. Then we rebel. The result is hate, animosity, blame, and, in the second generation, fratricide (a brother kills a brother). There is such a decline in the entire social corpus that eventually, God pronounces judgment in terms of the flood. Noah is saved. By God’s intervening mercy, Noah and his family are saved.
Then Noah gets drunk, and the wearisome cycle begins again. You move on until there is idolatry everywhere. Then God calls out Abraham, who sires Isaac, who sires Jacob, who sires the 12 brothers. Jacob and Esau are scarcely a pair of godly young men. The 12 brothers? Talk about a dysfunctional family! One is sleeping with his daughter-in-law, the other is humiliating his father sexually. Most of them want to kill one of their brothers, but they settle with a higher moral standard and sell him into slavery instead. There is nothing but moral degradation.
Eventually, God calls the nation out of Egypt. Within a month, they have erected a golden calf. Not long after that, they are brought up to the Promised Land, but 10 out of 12 spies see only the giants. They don’t remember all that God did to get them out of Egypt in the first place, which generates 40 years of wilderness wandering where the Lord teaches them some more lessons. You must understand. This is not because Israel is worst but because Israel is typical. We wouldn’t have done any better.
Then they enter the Promised Land. Read the book of Judges. By the time you get to the final chapters it’s scarcely stuff that you can read in public, the prose is so purple. Even their moral solutions to the terrible slavery and sexual perversity are corroded and corrupt. Oh, again and again, God intervenes with a prophet or a prophetess, but it’s only a generation or two every time. It just slides irresistibly toward muck again and again and again.
You get this repeated refrain in the book of Judges: “In those days, everyone did what was right in his own eyes. There was no king in Israel.” The people cried, “Oh, God, we need a king!” but they wanted a king for all the wrong reasons. They got one, but God intervenes again and provides a man like David, a man after his own heart.
Yet this man after his own heart commits adultery and murder, and he doesn’t know how to bring up his kids. I’d hate to see what a man without God’s heart looks like! You see, he’s a man after God’s own heart because he really is focused on God, does repent, does come back to God, is sorry, and has a passion for God. But even the best, even the Davids, are a pretty wretched lot!
Does this provide the solution? Two generations later, the nation splits. The northern tribes have to erect their own little gods up in Dan and then farther to the south near Samaria as well. After all, the northern king, Jeroboam, doesn’t want his people to go back down to Jerusalem to the temple, so Jeroboam becomes proverbial for wickedness. Again and again, he’s described in the Old Testament as “Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, who made Israel sin.” How would you like that as your epitaph?
The Davidic dynasty lasts a little longer, but this is what’s happening to it here in Ezekiel’s day. Eventually, in God’s mercy, because God intervenes again, the people do come back (about 42,000 of them). It takes them a long time to have the courage to build a wall and rebuild the temple. God has to raise up prophets like Zechariah and Haggai, and leaders like Ezra and Nehemiah. Half the time, they’re reforming the people for more sins that they’ve fallen into.
Why have I told you all of this? If you don’t remember anything else from this week, remember this: You can never define the solution unless you agree on the problem. If the heart of the human dilemma is sickness, what we need are doctors. If the heart of the human dilemma is economics, what we need are economists. If the heart of the human dilemma is alienation, God help us, we need psychologists. If the heart of the human dilemma is marriage breakup, we need marriage counselors.
But if the heart of the human dilemma is rebellion against God, we need something to reconcile us to God. You will never get agreement as to what the gospel is, what the good news is, unless you see, with utmost clarity, what the problem is. The problem is deep-seated, race-inscribed, anarchy against God. It’s rebellion. It’s sin, in which I wish to be the center of the universe, and so do you! But only God is God.
Thus, these pictures of judgment that come, again and again, do teach us this: that there is no hope for us apart from God’s intervening renewal. Apart from God’s intervening grace, there is no stable fidelity. That’s what Old Testament history teaches us.
2. Set this passage within the framework of New Testament history.
It goes on, you know. Jesus himself predicts the fall of Jerusalem because of sin in his day. In fact, in Matthew 24:21, he actually quotes a passage from here in Ezekiel (chapter 5, verse 9), which reads: “Because of all your detestable idols, I will do to you what I have never done before and will never do again.”
Jesus says, with respect to the fall of Jerusalem in his own day, “For then there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now—and never to be equaled again.” Don’t let the math bother you. This is a prophetic way of saying, “This is as bad as it gets,” and now it’s happening again in Jerusalem; 40 years after Jesus, it’s happening again.
It’s as bad as it gets, and it has happened again and again and again. This has been a bloody century. It has happened when 50 million Chinese died under Mao Zedong. It has happened in the Holocaust. It has happened in Rwanda. This has been a bloody century.
3. Set this passage in the framework of New Testament warnings.
A. Warnings against churches.
As in Revelation 2 and 3: “Unless you repent and get your house in order, I will take away your candlestick.” It’s a way of saying, “I will remove you as a church; you won’t be a church anymore.” Peter reminds us that judgment begins with the house of God (1 Peter 4:17). If you do a historical survey, remind yourself how strong the church in North Africa was in the first centuries of the church. How strong is it there today?
There was some form of Christian witness in what was Asia Minor, what is now the western third of Turkey, all the way until 1923, the so-called Greco-Turkish population exchange that ended the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I.
But then up until about 25 years ago, in Turkey, a country of 60 million people, there weren’t more than about 15 to 18 known evangelicals, and most of them had been converted in international Bible studies that we ran in Cambridge with Colin Hemer and a few others. Nowadays, there’s a church in Turkey about the size of 1,200. That’s it. The candlesticks are removed.
B. Warnings against nations.
Read this within the context of warnings against nations that are nothing more than historical manifestations of antichrist. I wish I could expound Revelation 13 and 14, but I don’t have time.
C. Warnings against individuals.
Read this judgment passage within the framework of warnings against individuals. Do you know who it is in the New Testament who speaks most colorfully of hell? Jesus. Not least, if you please, in the Sermon on the Mount. Listen to these words from Revelation 14: “I looked, and there before me was a white cloud, and seated on the cloud was one ‘like a son of man’ with a crown of gold on his head and a sharp sickle in his hand.
Then another angel came out of the temple and called in a loud voice to him who was sitting on the cloud, ‘Take your sickle and reap, because the time to reap has come, for the harvest of the earth is ripe.’ So he who was seated on the cloud swung his sickle over the earth, and the earth was harvested.
Another angel came out of the temple in heaven, and he too had a sharp sickle. Still another angel, who had charge of the fire, came from the altar and called in a loud voice to him who had the sharp sickle, ‘Take your sharp sickle and gather the clusters of grapes from the earth’s vine, because its grapes are ripe.’
The angel swung his sickle on the earth, gathered its grapes and threw them into the great winepress of God’s wrath. They were trampled in the winepress outside the city, and blood flowed out of the press, rising as high as the horses’ bridles for a distance of 1,600 stadia.”
Make all the allowance you like for the apocalyptic language. Nevertheless, everybody would see that this is a pretty bloody picture. In the ancient world, you would dump your grapes into a stone vat with littles holes at the bottom and channels. Then you would put in your servant girls with their dresses rolled up a bit … without their sandals, just in their naked feet … they would just squash down the grapes. Out would come the juice, from which you made your wine.
Now the final harvest is depicted as the time when people are thrown into the “winepress of God’s wrath” and their blood flows out. That’s the image. Now tell me that in the New Testament, God is a gentler and kinder God.
Let me put it this way (now we’re coming to the point): As the picture of God’s grace becomes clearer as one moves from the old covenant to the new, so the picture of God’s judgment becomes clearer as one moves from the old covenant to the new. Oh, it’s true that the New Testament is clearer as it presents the grace of God, but it’s also clearer as it presents final judgment and destruction.
In other words, as the picture of God’s grace becomes clearer as one moves from Old Testament type and historical pattern to ultimate fulfillment, so the picture of God’s wrath becomes ever clearer as one moves from Old Testament type and historical pattern to ultimate fulfillment.
That’s why the earliest Christians could preach and warn people to flee from the wrath to come and, especially, to pay attention to the gospel. That’s what Hebrews says. Hebrews 2:1–3 says, “We must pay more careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away. For if the message spoken by angels was binding, and every violation and disobedience received its just punishment, how shall we escape if we ignore such a great salvation?”
In other words, when we hear a passage like this, our first response … not our only response, but our first response … ought to be, “God help us. Grant us repentance that we may not fall under such well-deserved wrath.”
4. Set this passage within the framework of the cross.
You see, the focus of this passage is judgment, but we’ve already seen from our brief historical scan that while human beings descend and descend and descend, God intervenes, again and again and again, with grace. He raises up a Noah. He raises up an Abraham. He raises up a David. He raises up those judges to restore the people to himself. Again and again, God intervenes by grace.
Then the Old Testament prophets begin to announce a time when the Great Priest will come, when the Great King will come, and when the Great Kingdom will come. These two themes, then, barrel through the Old Testament with accelerating pace. On the one hand, there is no hope; there is only sin and degradation. No matter what God does, there is only more rebellion and judgment. On the other hand, God keeps intervening and intervening and promises, yet again, to intervene with a final Savior.
Finally, these two themes barrel toward each other and collide in the cross. That is the whole Old Testament background to Romans 3. God determined that now, apart from the law covenant, God would establish a righteousness that is secured because he sets forth his son to be a propitiation for our sins. God, in his mercy, sets out a sacrifice that also turns away God’s wrath. God is both the giver of this sacrifice and the one whose wrath is appeased, that he might simultaneously be just and the one who justifies the ungodly.
Or to change the metaphor, justice and mercy charge toward each other and kiss. Do you want to see the love of God? Look at the cross. Do you want to see the wrath of God?
Come and see, come and see
Come and see the King of love
See the purple robe and crown of thorns he wears
Soldiers mock, rulers sneer
As he lifts the cruel cross
Lone and friendless now he climbs towards the hill
We worship at your feet
Where wrath and mercy meet
And a guilty world is washed
By love’s pure stream
For us he was made sin
Oh, help me take it in
Deep wounds of love cry out “Father, forgive”
I worship, I worship
The Lamb who was slain
Come and weep, come and mourn
For your sin that pierced him there
So much deeper than the wounds of thorn and nail
All our pride, all our greed
All our fallenness and shame
And the Lord has laid the punishment on him
Man of heaven, born to earth
To restore us to your heaven
Here we bow in awe beneath
Your searching eyes
From your tears comes our joy
From your death our life shall spring
By your resurrection power we shall rise
We worship at your feet
Where wrath and mercy meet
And a guilty world is washed
By love’s pure stream
For us he was made sin
Oh, help me take it in
Deep wounds of love cry out “Father, forgive”
I worship, I worship
The Lamb who was slain
