Introduction to Ezekiel

 Ezekiel 1:1-3
 

Welcome! Today I am excited to begin with you a new series into the book of Ezekiel. Today I want to give an introduction to the book. Ezekiel was a prophet who fit into a very specific point in the era of kings and prophets in Israel’s history, and so the first thing I want to do today is give a bit of an overview of the history of this era so that we can see exactly where Ezekiel’s life and ministry fits in. Now, I am not going to give any dates, because my experience is that any time you mention a date, people immediately become sleepy. And the Bible does not directly give dates either, so any time we give a date we are extrapolating from the Scripture and possibly combining Bible information with what we know from other sources (not that there is anything wrong with doing that). Now, the Bible does often give relative dates, referring to one event as a certain number of years after another. And if you think about it, even our modern dates are all relative, relative to the time of Christ. That is where A.D. (anno Domini – in the year of the Lord) and B.C. (before Christ) come from. (Note that these terms were invented far after the actual time of Christ and may be slightly in error; most Bible scholars think Christ was born in 4 B.C.) But in any case, I do believe there is something about four-digit numbers that makes people instantly sleepy, so I will not use them today.
 
Although I am tempted to start at Genesis and those who have been with us long enough know that that is not an idle threat, as I have done this before. But given our recent series on David, and given key content in the book of Ezekiel, I want to start with Solomon. Recall Saul was the first king of the united kingdom of Israel, but Saul refused to obey God, and after a long struggle, David became king. Under David, the kingdom really established itself, defeating the Philistines and other enemies of the Israelites. Solomon was David’s son and succeeded him as king when he died. Solomon oversaw the building of the Temple in Jerusalem and led Israel in a time that one could characterize as largely peaceful and increasingly prosperous, although most of that prosperity went directly to Solomon rather than to the people. Before we get into the negative stuff, I want to read from the Bible a highlight of Solomon’s reign, the moment that God came to inhabit with His presence the Temple that Solomon had made. This event is pivotal to the book of Ezekiel. Listen to Solomon’s marvelous prayer of dedication from 2 Chron. 6, starting at verse 14:

“Lord, the God of Israel, there is no God like You in heaven or on earth—You who keep Your covenant of love with Your servants who continue wholeheartedly in Your way. You have kept Your promise to Your servant David my father; with Your mouth You have promised and with Your hand You have fulfilled it—as it is today. – 2 Chronicles 6:14-15
 
“Now, Lord, the God of Israel, keep for Your servant David my father the promises You made to him when You said, ‘You shall never fail to have a successor to sit before Me on the throne of Israel, if only your descendants are careful in all they do to walk before Me according to My law, as you have done.’ And now, Lord, the God of Israel, let Your word that You promised Your servant David come true. – 2 Chronicles 6:16-17
 
“But will God really dwell on earth with humans? The heavens, even the highest heavens, cannot contain You. How much less this temple I have built! Yet, Lord my God, give attention to Your servant’s prayer and his plea for mercy. – 2 Chronicles 6:18-19a
 
I encourage you to read the entire dedication but I am going to jump to the end of the prayer, in verse 41:
 
“Now arise, Lord God, and come to Your resting place, You and the ark of Your might. May Your priests, Lord God, be clothed with salvation, may Your faithful people rejoice in Your goodness. Lord God, do not reject Your anointed one. Remember the great love promised to David Your servant.” – 2 Chronicles 6:41-42
 
God immediately answered this prayer, as we see in the very next verses:
 
When Solomon finished praying, fire came down from heaven and consumed the burnt offering and the sacrifices, and the glory of the Lord filled the temple. The priests could not enter the temple of the Lord because the glory of the Lord filled it. When all the Israelites saw the fire coming down and the glory of the Lord above the temple, they knelt on the pavement with their faces to the ground, and they worshiped and gave thanks to the Lord, saying, “He is good; His love endures forever.” – 2 Chronicles 7:1-3
 
This was followed by an extended time of praise and offering sacrifices to the Lord. Soon after, the Lord appeared to Solomon at night and said the following. This too sets the stage for the book of Ezekiel. The Lord said to Solomon:
 
“I have heard your prayer and have chosen this place for Myself as a temple for sacrifices. When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command locusts to devour the land or send a plague among My people, if My people, who are called by My name, will humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land. Now My eyes will be open and My ears attentive to the prayers offered in this place. I have chosen and consecrated this temple so that My Name may be there forever. My eyes and My heart will always be there. – 2 Chronicles 7:12-16
 
The Lord went on to address Solomon specifically:
 
“As for you, if you walk before Me faithfully as David your father did, and do all I command, and observe My decrees and laws, I will establish your royal throne, as I covenanted with David your father when I said, ‘You shall never fail to have a successor to rule over Israel.’ -  2 Chronicles 7:17-18
 
“But if you turn away and forsake the decrees and commands I have given you and go off to serve other gods and worship them, then I will uproot Israel from My land, which I have given them, and will reject this temple I have consecrated for My Name. I will make it a byword and an object of ridicule among all peoples. This temple will become a heap of rubble. All who pass by will be appalled and say, ‘Why has the Lord done such a thing to this land and to this temple?’ People will answer, ‘Because they have forsaken the Lord, the God of their ancestors, who brought them out of Egypt, and have embraced other gods, worshiping and serving them—that is why He brought all this disaster on them.’” – 2 Chronicles 7:19-22
 
It was a direct and somber warning, one you might think would have stayed with Solomon for the rest of his life. But unfortunately, even with his amazing God-given wisdom, Solomon strayed from God. In I Kings 11 we are told about Solomon’s hundreds of wives and concubines, mostly from the foreign neighboring nations. God had told the Israelites not to intermarry with them because they would turn their hearts towards their false gods. And this is exactly what happened with Solomon. When he became old, he may have followed the Lord in “name,” but he also followed Ashtoreth and Molek and Chemosh, publicly implementing worship sites for them, thereby leading many Israelites to do the same. In reality, Solomon’s faith in the true God waned. He seemingly forgot about that day of dedication, or how, even at that time, the Presence of God continued to reside in the Temple.  In response, God gave Solomon a somber message. He told Solomon that, because of his behavior and the behavior of the people, the United Kingdom would not endure. For the sake of David, Solomon would not himself live to see that day, but that day would surely come.
 
When Solomon died, his son Rehoboam became king. In an assembly, the people complained about the heavy yoke they had been under when Solomon was king, and they asked for relief. The inexperienced Rehoboam made no immediate response but said told them to come back after a time. Rehoboam consulted with the elders who had served his father and they told him to indeed lighten the load because if he did so, the people would serve him faithfully. But unwisely, Rehoboam also consulted with and preferred the advice of his young friends who told him to be even harsher. The outcome was that all but the tribes Judah and Benjamin rejected Rehoboam and made their king Jeroboam, an influencer who had rebelled under Solomon.  From this time forward, the kingdom of David was divided. The tribes of Judah and Benjamin became known as Judah; their territory included Jerusalem and the Temple. The other 10 tribes were collectively known as Israel and they had their own line of kings.
 
Over the next 200 years or so, Israel and Judah remained separate and occasionally fought each other in civil wars. The kings of Israel were Jereoboam I, Nadab, Baasha, Elah, Zimri, Omri, Ahab, Ahaziah, Joram, Jehu, Jehoahaz, Jehoash, Jeroboam II, Zecharaiah, Shallum, Menahem, Pekah, Pekahiah, and Hoshea. These kings were described as almost uniformly terrible. Only of Jehu do we see an example of an attempt to reduce the practice of serving false gods. 2 Kings 10 tells us that Jehu pretended to be a Baal follower and, in the process, got the other Baal followers to come together. He had his men kill them all. Killing people was pretty much the only item on Jehu’s resume, other than being king. But all the kings of Israel, even Jehu, followed other gods and led Israel further and further astray. During the middle part of this period, the prophets Elijah and his successor Elisha served the tribes of Israel, and during the final years of this period, the prophets Amos and Hosea did the same. Amos and Hosea warned Israel that their destruction was imminent. But they did not listen, and Assyria defeated Israel, taking many from the 10 tribes into captivity, killing many others, and eventually repopulating the land with Samaritans.
 
During this period, what happened in Judah? The kings over this 200-year period were Reoboam, Abijam (also called Abijah), Asa, Jehoshaphat, Joram (also called Jehoram), Ahaziah (also called Jehoahaz), Athaliah (who was not a king, but was a queen), Joash (also called Jehoash), Amaziah, Uzziah (also called Azariah), Jotham, and Ahaz. Of these twelve kings, most were either completely bad or somewhat mixed. Ahaz was probably the most wicked of these kings. Truly good things were consistently said only of Jehoshaphat and Jotham. During the middle of this time period, the prophet Joel ministered specifically to Judah.     

Following the fall of Israel, the tiny kingdom of Judah miraculously continued on even as the Assyrian empire continued to grow. Over the next roughly 150 years, King Ahaz was followed by Hezekiah, Manassah, Amon, Josiah, Jehoahaz, Jehoiakim, Jehoiachin, and Zedekiah. The prophets Isaiah and Micah ministered to Judah during the first portion of this period, primarily under the reign of Ahaz and Hezekiah. Hezekiah, considered a good king, formed alliances with Ashkelon and Egypt and refused to pay tribute to Assyria. Assyria attacked the fortified cities of Judah in response, and Hezekiah, having no apparent options left, had to empty the treasury and even strip the gold from the doorposts of the Temple in Jerusalem to pay the required tribute and restore peace. The peace was short-lived, as, about 15 years later, the new king of Assyria besieged Jerusalem. However, he was not able to overtake the city.
 
During the long reign of Manassah, Judah had to continue paying tributes to Assyria to keep the peace. Manassah and the next king, Amon, both worshiped the false gods and led the people further and further astray. After reigning only two years, Amon was assassinated by his servants who then were themselves killed by the people of Judah. The people then installed Josiah as king even though he was only 8 years old.
 
During this time, the Assyrian empire was beginning to disintegrate, and during Josiah’s reign, Assyria’s capitol, Ninevah, fell to the Babylonians and Persians, beginning an era in which the Babylonian empire was “top dog”. During this period, the prophets Jeremiah, Zephaniah, and Habakkuk, spoke to Judah.
 
In the middle of Josiah’s reign, Josiah paid the high priest to restore and renovate the Temple. As part of this process, the Book of the Law (of Moses) was discovered, and Josiah responded by tearing down all of the altars to false gods, even the ones set up by Jeroboam in the capitol city of what was Israel. Josiah even went with an armed party throughout Israel (which was now mostly repopulated by Samaritans) to tear down all of the altars he could find (2 Kings 23:19). He reinstituted the keeping of the Passover and did all that he could to get the people to follow after God. Josiah was a truly incredible servant and follower of God. But when Josiah died, every king after him was wicked and the people quickly returned to their rebellious ways. Every king after Josiah is described in the Bible as wicked, with no redeeming features.
 
It's a bit difficult to track the sequence of what happened next exactly, but what we know is that a few years after Josiah died, the Babylonians invaded and took a group of people back to Babylon. There was likely more than one such invasion. In one of these groups was taken a young man named Daniel. In what was likely another such invasion, a priest (not yet a prophet) named Ezekiel was taken.
 
Why did these invasions occur? This can be answered on multiple levels. On a pragmatic level, they occurred because the leaders of Judah were caught in the middle between two very powerful forces, the Egyptian and Babylonian empires, and they vacillated between which of the two they wanted to ally with and pay tribute to (and, correspondingly, which of the two they would end up becoming enemies with).
 
But on a spiritual level, we know that God was in control. He put Judah in this position. He could have easily protected them. But, because of their continued wickedness, He was fulfilling what He had warned them about throughout Israel’s history.
 
Let’s return to Daniel and Ezekiel. Both have been taken, to different locations. Daniel is on some kind of “re-education track,” along with his friends, so as to become well-educated, well-behaved, can I say “reprogrammed”, followers of the Babylonian gods (even being given new names in honor of these gods). They are being trained and are expected to become respected members of society, models for all the rest of the displaced people to emulate.
 
Ezekiel has not been given this special treatment. He is older than Daniel, probably considered too old to “reeducate”. He, along with the people he is with, are expected to simply behave like the Babylonians around them, completely forgetting their heritage, their past, and their gods.
 
The Babylonians over time had become experts in this sort of thing. They were really good at it. They had “absorbed” countless peoples, including the Assyrians. They were practical about this. Sometimes they would add the other people’s gods to their list, making it easy for them. The Israelites were a bit more difficult, in that, at least historically, they believed that there was only one god. But, thanks to all these years of also paying homage to Baal and the other gods, they were well on their way to being absorbed as well. It was just a matter of time until the Israelites were completely assimilated and their past forgotten. This was the Babylonian plan. And I do not need to tell you that this was Satan’s plan. Satan has always wanted to wipe out any people that follow the true God. But this was especially the case with the Jews, because Jesus was yet to come from their line. I believe that Satan was smart enough to know this was coming, even if he did not know what would happen after that.
 
How did the story of God’s people end up here? What a contrast from the event I read to you from back at the time of Solomon, where there was that incredible experience when the Temple was dedicated to God and the Spirit of the Lord filled the Temple. At that time when the future looked so bright! 
 
But the people were warned. The kings were warned. Throughout these roughly 350 years, God had called prophets again and again to warn the people that these very things could happen. It had been nearly 150 years since Israel had fallen. The people and leaders of Judah knew these things could happen to them. Just a short time ago, Josiah had done amazing things to try to restore in the people a love of and holy fear of the Lord. And perhaps it worked, for some, for a short while. But, amazingly, after Josiah died, the people quickly returned to idolatry and countless other kinds of evil even though the precariousness of their position as a tiny nation among battling superpowers was clear for all to see. They needed God’s miraculous protection. Only God could protect them. But they seemed oblivious, like how pigeons return to a location after something disrupts them, even after one or more are killed.
 
I want to now return our point of view to that of Ezekiel. He has been relocated after the siege, swept up to a strange location in the Babylonian empire, among other people of Judah, not really knowing what happened or was continuing to happen in Judah, in Jerusalem, at the Temple. We, with the benefits of the Scriptures and history, know what happened, but I’m not going to tell you today. I want you to feel the tension, the uncertainty, the plight of being a worshiper of God, of being a former servant at the Temple, now far from home, worried about home, taken far away to a strange place, an outcast among an outcast people.    
 
The map shows the likely journey the exiles were forced on as they were taken and resettled. The Kebar river is shown on the map. This river is specifically mentioned by Ezekiel as to his location after resettlement. He is truly very far from home.
 
Let us now look at the first 3 verses of Ezekiel.
 
In my thirtieth year, in the fourth month on the fifth day, while I was among the exiles by the Kebar River, the heavens were opened and I saw visions of God.  On the fifth of the month—it was the fifth year of the exile of King Jehoiachin— the word of the Lord came to Ezekiel the priest, the son of Buzi, by the Kebar River in the land of the Babylonians. There the hand of the Lord was on him. – Ezekiel 1:1-3
 
What an exciting opening! Why is it so exciting? Well, it is always exciting to read of God calling someone to be a prophet, a spokesperson for God, one who speaks the very words of God. Now, we don’t yet know that this is what is happening, but it seems likely, because people who see visions in the Old Testament don’t normally just see them for their own benefit; they see them because God has a message for the people around them, and they are to relay that message. And seeing the birth of this process is exciting, at least to me, because I am always excited by seeing the work of God.
 
But what is even more exciting to me is the fact that this is happening, at this time, and at this place. God seems to be done with Israel entirely. They have been “lost” for about 150 years! And now, God is on the verge of abandoning Judah too. God actually told Josiah through a prophet that it was “too late.”
 
In 2 Kings 22, after Josiah finds the Book of the Law and summons a prophetess about this, she says the following:
 
This is what the Lord says: I am going to bring disaster on this place and its people, according to everything written in the book the king of Judah has read. Because they have forsaken Me and burned incense to other gods and aroused My anger by all the idols their hands have made, My anger will burn against this place and will not be quenched.’ Tell the king of Judah, who sent you to inquire of the Lord, ‘This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says concerning the words you heard: Because your heart was responsive and you humbled yourself before the Lord when you heard what I have spoken against this place and its people—that they would become a curse and be laid waste—and because you tore your robes and wept in my presence, I also have heard you, declares the Lord. Therefore I will gather you to your ancestors, and you will be buried in peace. Your eyes will not see all the disaster I am going to bring on this place.’” – 2 Kings 22:16-20
 
To Josiah’s great credit, he did everything he did to educate the people, get them to repent, tear down all the idols, and so on, after receiving this hard, hard response from the Lord. He served the Lord with everything he had despite knowing that, even so, it would not avert the calamity that was coming. He served the Lord because, well, because it’s the Lord. He is holy, and He is worthy of all our praise and all our efforts to serve Him and help others find Him. We do not serve Him only for results. We serve Him because He is the Lord.
 
Here is how the account of Josiah ends in 2 Kings 22:
 
Neither before nor after Josiah was there a king like him who turned to the Lord as he did—with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his strength, in accordance with all the Law of Moses. Nevertheless, the Lord did not turn away from the heat of his fierce anger, which burned against Judah because of all that Manasseh had done to arouse his anger. So the Lord said, “I will remove Judah also from my presence as I removed Israel, and I will reject Jerusalem, the city I chose, and this temple, about which I said, ‘My Name shall be there.’” – 2 Kings 22:25-27
 
It all seems so final. So – here is the exciting part – why is God still speaking to someone of Judah? And why is He doing so all these miles away from the Promised Land? Isn’t it all over?
Listen: with God, if you are alive, it is never over! Yes, the people were going to pay the consequences for their centuries of disobeying God. Yes, they were losing the land. And yes, He had promised to reject the city, to abandon it, and to bring “disaster” on the place. But He had not abandoned His people, those who still believed in Him, those who sought to follow and obey Him. He is not the God only of the land of Israel. He called Abraham in Ur. And today, He calls people in every corner of the world. And if you believe in Him, and you are trying, day by day, to keep Him on the throne of your heart, then He is calling you.
 
Let me be clear: Ezekiel is a difficult book. I do not feel like I chose it. I feel like God chose it and I am obeying Him in us going through it over the next several months. If I chose our topics based on my own preferences, we would probably alternate between the gospels and what I consider to be the “easier” epistles forever. But I believe that God has something to show us, to encourage us with, in this difficult book, a book that is filled with harsh prophecies but also with beautiful promises. I feel like I have been betrayed on many levels over this past year. I have been betrayed by institutions I trusted, by individuals, and even by believers. I am deeply concerned over the future of evangelical Christianity in America. Churches are failing at an unprecedented rate. Fallen leaders are being exposed. And heresies of many kinds are infiltrating churches that I would have never thought could succumb. And yes, secular culture and government are also becoming ever more hostile to Christianity, but honestly, that doesn’t bother me anywhere near as much as these other things. Historically, the church has always done better when it is opposed. What bothers me most is that we are just beginning to reap what we have sown. And one of big lessons of the fall of Israel is that God will defend His Name, even if it means destroying what those who falsely or shallowly claim to follow Him have built.   
 
I believe the times ahead will be unprecedented for the church in America. They will be tough. The wheat will be separated from the chaff. (And there is a lot of chaff.) The church is failing. And the blame is shared between the followers and the leaders, just as we have seen in our bleak history of the kings of Israel and Judah.
 
But it is never over. Institutions may fall, but God will continue to build His church, His body, the Body of Jesus. And if you follow Him, He will build you. Listen: Ezekiel was a priest, not a prophet. But an exiled priest is no priest at all. Ezekiel had lost everything. And it is was then that God really began to use him.
 
If you are feeling lost, or discouraged, if you feel like everything has been taken away from you, or even if you just feel exhausted because of all the unprecedented experiences of the past year, I believe that God is really going to use you too, if you continue to seek Him first.