The Book of Ezekiel

Hebrew Study

Explanation

The book turns a corner here. The long judgments on Judah and the nations are finished; now God re-appoints Ezekiel to the office first given in chapter 3, watchman over Israel, but this time for the phase of rebuilding after the fall. The picture is a city under threat of invasion. The people themselves post a lookout on the wall. If he sees the sword, blows the trumpet, and a man ignores the alarm, "his blood shall be upon his own head", the watchman did his duty. But if the watchman sees the sword and stays silent, and someone dies, "his blood will I require at the watchman's hand." The watchman's faithfulness is measured not by whether people respond, but by whether he sounds the alarm.

Then God applies it: "So thou, O son of man, I have set thee a watchman unto the house of Israel." The prophet is answerable to speak "the word at my mouth", not his own opinions, and to warn from God. The result rests on the hearer, but the responsibility to warn rests on the messenger. If he warns and the wicked will not turn, "thou hast delivered thy soul." This is one of Scripture's clearest statements of the minister's, and every believer's, duty: we cannot make people repent, but we are bound to tell them the truth in love, plainly, while there is time.

Gospel Focus

The watchman's trumpet is a picture of the gospel and of every faithful witness who sounds it. The Lord Jesus came as the great Watchman, weeping over the city and warning it plainly (Luke 19:41-44), and He sends His church to do the same: "Go ye therefore, and teach all nations" (Matthew 28:19). Love does not stay silent while the sword approaches; love blows the trumpet. Paul took this so seriously that he could say, "I am pure from the blood of all men," because he "kept back nothing that was profitable" (Acts 20:20, 26). The warning is not the opposite of grace, it is grace, for it is spoken so that the hearer may "turn from his way and live." And the trumpet still sounds one command above all: "Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out" (Acts 3:19). To hear the alarm and heed it is to "deliver his soul"; to hear it and shrug is to answer for one's own blood. Which will you do with the trumpet you have heard?

Hebrew Study

Explanation

The exiles have hit the bottom of despair: "If our transgressions and our sins be upon us, and we pine away in them, how should we then live?" They feel their guilt as a dead weight and see no way forward. Into that hopelessness God speaks one of the most tender sentences in all the prophets, sealed with His own life as an oath: "As I live, saith the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live: turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways; for why will ye die, O house of Israel?" This is the true heart of the God of judgment. He does not stand over the condemned with grim satisfaction; He pleads with them to come home.

Then He clears away two deadly errors. First, no one is saved by a stockpile of past righteousness: "the righteousness of the righteous shall not deliver him in the day of his transgression." A man cannot bank good deeds and then turn to sin, presuming on yesterday. Second, and gloriously, no one is doomed by a record of past sin if he truly turns: "if the wicked... turn from his sin, and do that which is lawful and right... None of his sins that he hath committed shall be mentioned unto him." God judges "every one after his ways", the road you are actually walking now. When Israel complains "The way of the Lord is not equal," God answers that it is their way, not His, that is crooked. His way is perfectly just and astonishingly merciful: the door of return stands open to anyone who will walk through it today.

Gospel Focus

"As I live... I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked" is the Old Testament's clearest window into the heart that would one day hang on a cross. The same God who swears here that He longs for the sinner to turn and live is the God who "was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself" (2 Corinthians 5:19), and who "will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth" (1 Timothy 2:4). This is not a different God from the Judge, it is the one true God, and Jesus Christ is that very LORD come in flesh to seek and to save. The apostle Peter echoes this chapter exactly: the Lord is "not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance" (2 Peter 3:9). And the answer to the exiles' despair, "how should we then live?", is the gospel itself: turn. "Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins" (Acts 2:38). No pile of past goodness will save the man who trusts it; no weight of past sin will sink the man who truly turns to Christ, for "none of his sins... shall be mentioned unto him." That is the mercy that meets every sinner who comes home to Jesus.

Hebrew Study

Explanation

The dreaded news finally comes: "one that had escaped out of Jerusalem came unto me, saying, The city is smitten." Jerusalem has fallen to Babylon, just as Ezekiel had warned for years. And exactly as God had promised, the prophet's mouth, shut in a symbolic muteness through the long years of siege (Ezekiel 3:26-27; 24:27), is opened the night before the messenger arrives: "my mouth was opened, and I was no more dumb." The warning ministry is finished; the ministry of hope and rebuilding now begins. God's word came true to the letter, and that vindication is itself a mercy, proof that He may be trusted with the promises of restoration still to come.

But two groups still resist the lesson. First, the survivors squatting in the ruined land presume on their descent from Abraham, "Abraham was one, and he inherited the land: but we are many; the land is given us for inheritance", while they eat with the blood, cling to idols, shed blood, and defile their neighbors' wives. God flatly denies them: heritage without holiness is no claim at all; "shall ye possess the land?" Second, and closest to home, the exiles who gather around Ezekiel himself love to hear him but will not obey: "with their mouth they shew much love, but their heart goeth after their covetousness." They treat the word of God as "a very lovely song", moving, enjoyable, admired, and then go home unchanged. God warns that this is no safety; when the word is fulfilled, "then shall they know that a prophet hath been among them", but by then the time to obey may be past.

Gospel Focus

The most searching word in this chapter is aimed not at Babylon or at pagan kings but at the congregation that loves the preaching. "They hear thy words, but they will not do them... thou art unto them as a very lovely song." It is possible to enjoy sound teaching, to be moved by it, even to crowd in to hear it, and still be lost, because the heart "goeth after covetousness" and the life never turns. The Lord Jesus said the same: "Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father" (Matthew 7:21), and He likened the hearer-only to a man who built his house on sand (Matthew 7:26-27). His brother James drove it home: "be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves" (James 1:22). The gospel is not a performance to be admired but a command to be obeyed, "Repent, and be baptized... in the name of Jesus Christ" (Acts 2:38), "Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God" (John 3:5). Do not be a lover of the lovely song who never does the word. Let the trumpet you enjoy hearing become the truth you actually walk in, and turn, today, to the Christ who calls you home.