Manna Praxis

The Book of Ezekiel: The Glory of the LORD

Introduction

Today’s Passage: An Overview of the Whole Book

Picture a young priest who will never serve in the temple he was born to serve. His name is Ezekiel, and his life was aimed like an arrow at the altar in Jerusalem, but before he ever reached the age of his ministry the armies of Babylon carried him off, along with thousands of his people, to a foreign land many hundreds of miles from home. There by an irrigation canal called the Kebar River, among captives who had lost their city, their king, and very nearly their hope, something happened that no one so far from the temple had any right to expect. As the book tells it, “the heavens were opened and I saw visions of God.” That is the surprise at the heart of Ezekiel. The glory of the LORD was not chained to a building in Jerusalem. It came to the exiles by a muddy river in Babylon, and it called one shattered priest to speak for God to a shattered people.

As you read, hold this: Carried into exile far from the temple, a priest sees the heavens opened, and through him God unfolds His glory departing in judgment and returning in grace, until at last a shattered people know that He is the LORD.

The book that follows moves in three great movements, and it will help you to see them from the very start. First comes a long and searching word of judgment upon Jerusalem for her idolatry, a judgment that climbs to its terrible height when the glory of the LORD rises up and departs from the defiled temple, leaving the house empty and the city exposed (chapters 1 through 24). Then come oracles against the surrounding nations, for the God of Israel is the God of all the earth and no kingdom stands outside His reckoning (chapters 25 through 32). And finally, after the city has fallen and the worst that Ezekiel warned of has come to pass, the book opens like a floodgate into hope: the watchman and the shepherd, the promise of a new heart and a new spirit, a valley of dry bones raised to living armies, and a vision of a new temple from which a river flows to heal the world, a city whose very name is “THE LORD IS THERE” (chapters 33 through 48). Over the whole of it rings a refrain repeated more than sixty times, “then they will know that I am the LORD.” That is what Ezekiel is finally about: the glory of God, departing in judgment and returning in grace, until every heart knows who He is.

The name and what it means

The prophet’s name in Hebrew is יְחֶזְקֵאל (yechezqel), pronounced yeh-khez-KALE, and it is built from two words joined together. The first comes from chazaq (Strong’s H2388), which means to be strong, to strengthen, to make firm; the second is El, the short and ancient name for God. Put together, the name means “God strengthens,” or “may God strengthen.” It is hard to imagine a name more fitting for the work he was given. Ezekiel would be sent to a stubborn, heartbroken, and often hostile people with words that were heavy to carry and harder to hear, and again and again the LORD would tell him not to be afraid of their faces, for God Himself would make his forehead like the hardest stone. The man who bore the name “God strengthens” would need that strength every day of his ministry, and so, in a different way, do we.

Ezekiel was, first and always, a priest, and you will feel it on every page. He thinks in categories of holy and common, clean and unclean, glory and defilement, sacrifice and sanctuary. When most of Israel’s other prophets speak, they thunder in the streets and the marketplaces; when Ezekiel speaks, he sees the temple with a priest’s trained eye, grieves over its pollution with a priest’s wounded heart, and longs for a restored house of God with a priest’s holy hope. The book is prophecy given through a priest, and that is the secret of its shape.

The world of the book

The world of Ezekiel is the world of exile. In the years around 597 and 587 before Christ, the empire of Babylon came down upon the little kingdom of Judah in wave after wave, deporting its leading citizens and finally breaking Jerusalem itself, burning the temple of Solomon to the ground and carrying the survivors away in chains. Ezekiel was among an earlier wave of captives, settled with his fellow exiles by the Kebar River, and it was there, in the fifth year of his exile, that the heavens opened and his call came. For years he prophesied that Jerusalem would surely fall, and his own people, clinging to false comfort, refused to believe him. Then a fugitive arrived with the news that the city had been struck down, and from that hour Ezekiel’s message turned, as God’s own heart turns, from warning to comfort, from the certainty of judgment to the certainty of restoration.

To understand the book, you must feel what that exile did to a faithful heart. The temple was where God had promised to dwell; now it was ash. The throne of David was where God’s covenant king was meant to reign; now it was empty. To a people raised on those promises, it looked as though God had either failed or forsaken them. Into that despair Ezekiel is sent, not to explain the pain away, but to show them a glory so great that it could not be shut inside walls of stone, a God so faithful that even the death of a nation could not be the end of His covenant. This is a book for people who have lost what they thought they could never live without, and who need to learn that God is nearer to the exiled and the ruined than they ever dared to believe.

The shape of the book

Ezekiel moves in a long and deliberate arc, from a young priest overwhelmed by the glory of God to a healed and holy city named for God’s abiding presence. It unfolds in these movements:

We will walk through all of it in order, the searching and the sorrowful along with the glorious, for the whole of Ezekiel is meant to be received together. The judgment is what makes the mercy shine, and the departing glory is what makes its return so unspeakably good.

The one thread to carry

If you carry one thread through this whole book, let it be the glory of the LORD, departing in judgment and returning in grace. Ezekiel watches that glory leave a defiled temple, and he lives long enough to watch it come home to a temple made new. Between those two visions lies the deepest promise in the book, the promise that God will not merely restore a building or a border, but will reach in and remake the very heart of His people. For no outward mercy can heal a people whose hearts are stone, and so God pledges to give them hearts that can love Him at last.

Ezekiel 36:26 (BSB) — “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will remove your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”

That promise is the hinge on which the whole book, and indeed the whole hope of the gospel, turns. It is the very thing our Lord meant when He spoke to Nicodemus of being born again of water and the Spirit, and the very gift poured out when the new covenant was sealed in the blood of Christ. The heart of stone that Ezekiel’s people could not change, and that we cannot change either, God Himself takes away and replaces with a heart of flesh, tender and alive and able to know Him. And where such hearts are given, God comes to dwell, which is where the book finally lands, on the returned and abiding presence of God with His people forever.

Ezekiel 48:35 (BSB) — “…from that day on the name of the city will be: THE LORD IS THERE.”

That name is the goal of the whole long story, and it is our goal too. The glory that departed a defiled temple has returned in Christ, who is God with us, and it will return in fullness in the city where God dwells with His people and every tear is wiped away. So we come to Ezekiel not as strangers to an old exile, but as people who have known our own distance from God and long for His nearness, ready to watch His glory move across these pages, and to learn, with the exiles by the river, that He is the LORD.