For the next several weeks we are going to be in the books of Ezekiel and Daniel. I have never studied or taught either of them. Likely, some of you have spent more time in each of them than I have. So, I am a beginner. What Thomas Merton said is true:  We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners, all our life! 

It would be far easier to skip the assignment and tell myself that at this point in my life it makes more sense to go back to what is familiar and work that same vein one more time. I could. But then I would be a hypocrite and, worse, someone turning away from the words of Jesus to his disciples about the temptations of doing something for the sake of appearances. When they wanted to know what it meant to look great but without the challenges he said to them, “Be a neoteros – a beginner.” Be someone who is constantly learning something new in your life.  Barbara Sher said,

You can learn new things at any time in your life if you’re willing to be a beginner. If you actually learn to like being a beginner, the whole world opens up to you.  

Even though it is a command, it is always a risk. Kathleen Norris wrote:

“To be always a beginner, in our competitive culture, is to be a loser. It is to remain continually vulnerable..Patience and discipline are required to appreciate beginnings, and those are qualities I often lack. Because it impedes my illusory forward movement, having to begin again can feel like failure…As a writer I must begin, again and again, at that most terrifying of places, the blank page.  And as a person of faith I am always beginning again with prayer. I can never learn these things, once and for all, and master them.” 

So, I am going to be a neoteros – a beginner. I am not going to pretend that these lessons come from years of study and contemplation. Howard Hendricks at Dallas Seminary once said that a new teacher is always scrambling to stay one day ahead of his students and that is where I am this morning. We are going to be doing Ezekiel and Daniel together for the next several weeks and my hope is to stay one week ahead of you.

We’ll start with the actual text and Ezekiel’s initial vision next week but let’s do an introduction to the book this week.

What do we know about Ezekiel, the author?

We know that he was the son of Buzi, a priest, and born in Jerusalem during the reign of King Josiah and also during the early years of Jeremiah’s ministry. They were in Jerusalem at the same time but we don’t know if they ever met. We know he had a beloved wife who died during his captivity in Babylon. While we know nothing of his death other than he likely died in Babylon we do know that his ministry began when he was thirty years old and lasted twenty-two years. He was a young man training to be a priest in Jerusalem at the very time King Josiah was instituting serious religious reforms. This was after the Law – which had been lost for so many years – had been rediscovered in the renovation of the Temple.

He would have been in training during what must have seemed like a new day in the religious life of Israel. Josiah destroyed the idols but was unable to eradicate the idolatry that remained in the hearts of the people after the influential reigns of two especially wicked kings. Imagine Israel after decades of living without anything but vague memories of the Law. Imagine losing the Constitution and Bill of Rights for decades and we were dependent on the memory of those who had last seen a copy many years ago. No one had a copy to read. Few would have remembered it and fewer still have passed it on.

It would have been a scene from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 where books were outlawed and incinerated while television had replaced reading. But a remnant called the Book People had memorized volumes of great works of literature and philosophy – including the Bible. They were waiting for the return of sanity in society by preserving the values. Maybe there were book people in Israel as well – but most had put the law aside.

But Josiah’s reforms were not enough to save the nation of Israel from destruction and captivity. The Northern Kingdom had been conquered and deported by the Assyrians almost one hundred years before Ezekiel’s birth. This is the first of three deportations. Think of our country being divided into two parts – everything East of the Mississippi and everything West of the Mississippi. In the first deportation everything West of the Mississippi was taken over and the population carried away.

The country that is left under Josiah experiences something of a national revival but the spiritual corruption is too extensive. The young king is killed in a battle with the Egyptians who are working their way toward the Euphrates to fight the Babylonians who were anxious to take territory from Egypt’s ally, a weakened Assyrian empire. Josiah’s son, foolishly rebelled against Babylon and Nebuchadnezzar. The king of Babylon laid siege to Jerusalem and carried off the king and the treasure  to Babylon. All that remains is half what was left from the first defeat. He also took with him the cream of Jerusalem’s society of craftsmen, priests and levites while appointing a weak and stupid king to oversee a defeated Israel.

One of the young men he moved to Babylon was a 25 year old Ezekiel who, five years from then at age 30, would have been a priest in the Temple had he been allowed to stay in Jerusalem. Daniel and his three friends were taken to Babylon at the same time. All their lives are interrupted permanently and everything about their future is changed at that moment. But, had it not been for that change we likely would have never heard of them. It was God’s call and their response to that unexpected and unwelcome change that produced these two books.

It is during this period that Ezekiel begins his ministry as a prophet but not as a priest because he is in exile and the Temple is in Jerusalem. It is in the fifth year of the reign of the last king of Israel when Ezekiel in exile in Babylon – now thirty – and Jeremiah in Jerusalem together predict the fall and final destruction of Jerusalem and all of Israel.

While Ezekiel had trained to be a priest he was called to be a prophet. We forget how radical the differences are between those two callings. They were more often in conflict with each other than in agreement. Prophets targeted priests as much as they did wayward kings and stubborn people. They held them responsible for much of the corruption of both and more often than not the priests were as anxious to get rid of the prophets as the kings. For someone brought up to be a priest it was not unusual to be suspicious of prophets and highly unlikely that one trained as a priest would find themselves in the role of the prophet. It would have been unnatural.

Yes, there were many, many false prophets who had abandoned their calling of speaking for God but there were a few who risked their lives to call into question the establishment of theology, tradition and ritual. However, what would have been most scandalous would have been priests trained from their earliest years to protect the tradition and rituals going over to the other side and attacking their own. Remember what we said about Paul? It is one thing to be a heretic and hold controversial beliefs and even misleading others. But Paul (and Ezekiel and Jeremiah) would have been seen as much worse – as apostates. They were defectors who had turned their backs on and betrayed their own tribe. They had changed loyalties and attacked their own families.

So while we can value all the positive contributions that Ezekiel’s education and training as a priest brought to his prophetic ministry, we must also appreciate the immense personal, professional and theological shock it must have been to him when, in his thirtieth year, the year he ought to have entered on his ordained priestly career, God broke into his life, wrecked all such career prospects, and constrained him into a role he may himself have viewed with considerable suspicion – the lonely, friendless, unpopular role of being a prophet, the mouthpiece of Yahweh. God would use all that he had built into Ezekiel’s life during his years of preparation, but he would use it in radically different ways from anything Ezekiel had ever imagined. Such is sometimes the way of God with those whom he calls to his service. Chris Wright

Nine years after the first defeat of Jerusalem and the deportation, the puppet king (the son of King Josiah) against the warning of Jeremiah but with the encouragement of Egypt rebelled against Nebuchadnezzar, and Jerusalem was besieged again by Babylonia. They held out over a horrible two years but eventually gave up. The city was destroyed, the Temple demolished along with the palace and the walls.  The King escaped at night but was captured where he was forced to witness the brutal killing of his children and then his eyes put out. He was taken blinded to Babylon where he died. That was the end of the kingdom of Israel. Everything and everyone except the dregs was gone.

Structure of the book

This book may be divided into roughly three parts–or four if we want to make the design of the Temple in Chapters 40-48 a separate secrtion.

Chapters 1 – 24. Testimonies from God against Israel in general and against Jerusalem in particular.  Remember the advice about making a talk? Tell them what you are going to say. Say it. Tell them what you have just said. In some ways that is the structure of these first 24 chapters. They are a cycle of similar prophecies. In the first cycle Ezekiel presents God’s case against Judah and the fast approaching end of the nation. The second cycle contains objections to that message: How could God abandon His people? Yes, it may come but it is a long way off. Ezekiel disputes them all and concludes the first part with the image of the filthy cooking pot:

“Now your impurity is lewdness. Because I have tried to cleanse you but you would not be cleansed from your impurity, you will not be clean again until my wrath against you has subsided. I the Lord have spoken. The time has come for me to act. I will not hold back; I will not have pity, nor will I relent. You will be judged according to your actions, declares the Sovereign Lord.”

Chapters 25 – 32. Judgments denounced against surrounding nations – especially those who had threatened Israel or cooperated with those who did. This includes the Ammonites who clapped their hands and stamped their feet, rejoicing with all the malice of their heart against the land of Israel; Moab who said that there was nothing special about Israel but it was only like the other nations; Edom who took revenge on the house of Judah; Philistia, who also took revenge and with ancient hostility sought to destroy Judah; Tyre, who took the fall of Judah to mean an opportunity for them to prosper. The worst punishment is reserved for them. The greatest commercial power in the world will disappear.

“This is what the Sovereign Lord says: When I make you a desolate city, like cities no longer inhabited, and when I bring the ocean depths over you and its vast waters cover you, then I will bring you down with those who go down to the pit, to the people of long ago. I will make you dwell in the earth below, as in ancient ruins, with those who go down to the pit, and you will not return or take your place in the land of the living. I will bring you to a horrible end and you will be no more. You will be sought, but you will never again be found, declares the Sovereign Lord.”

The people of Sidon who are malicious neighbors; Egypt, who has been an unfaithful ally will be reduced to a minor kingdom and her allies will fall by the sword.

Yes, God will judge Israel but He will also judge the surrounding nations.

Chapters 33 – 48. This is the good news for Israel. True prophets always tell the whole truth and the whole truth always includes redemption and reconciliation. The people will realize the weight of their sins and finally say, “How then can we live?” Ezekiel’s answer is that there will come a time when the exiles will return to their own land and there will be one king over all of them.

“This is what the Sovereign Lord says: I will take the Israelites out of the nations where they have gone. I will gather them from all around and bring them back into their own land. I will make them one nation in the land, on the mountains of Israel. There will be one king over all of them and they will never again be two nations or be divided into two kingdoms. They will no longer defile themselves with their idols and vile images or with any of their offenses, for I will save them from all their sinful backsliding, and I will cleanse them. They will be my people, and I will be their God.”

“‘My servant David will be king over them, and they will all have one shepherd. They will follow my laws and be careful to keep my decrees. They will live in the land I gave to my servant Jacob, the land where your ancestors lived. They and their children and their children’s children will live there forever, and David my servant will be their prince forever. I will make a covenant of peace with them; it will be an everlasting covenant. I will establish them and increase their numbers, and I will put my sanctuary among them forever. My dwelling place will be with them; I will be their God, and they will be my people. Then the nations will know that I the Lord make Israel holy, when my sanctuary is among them forever.”