HE SAID TO ME, “Son of man, stand up on your feet and I will speak to you.” 2As he spoke, the Spirit came into me and raised me to my feet, and I heard him speaking to me.
3He said: “Son of man, I am sending you to the Israelites, to a rebellious nation that has rebelled against me; they and their fathers have been in revolt against me to this very day. 4The people to whom I am sending you are obstinate and stubborn. Say to them, ‘This is what the Sovereign LORD says.’ 5And whether they listen or fail to listen—for they are a rebellious house—they will know that a prophet has been among them. 6And you, son of man, do not be afraid of them or their words. Do not be afraid, though briers and thorns are all around you and you live among scorpions. Do not be afraid of what they say or terrified by them, though they are a rebellious house. 7You must speak my words to them, whether they listen or fail to listen, for they are rebellious. 8But you, son of man, listen to what I say to you. Do not rebel like that rebellious house; open your mouth and eat what I give you.”
9Then I looked, and I saw a hand stretched out to me. In it was a scroll, 10which he unrolled before me. On both sides of it were written words of lament and mourning and woe.
3:1And he said to me, “Son of man, eat what is before you, eat this scroll; then go and speak to the house of Israel.” 2So I opened my mouth, and he gave me the scroll to eat.
3Then he said to me, “Son of man, eat this scroll I am giving you and fill your stomach with it.” So I ate it, and it tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth.
4He then said to me: “Son of man, go now to the house of Israel and speak my words to them. 5You are not being sent to a people of obscure speech and difficult language, but to the house of Israel—6not to many peoples of obscure speech and difficult language, whose words you cannot understand. Surely if I had sent you to them, they would have listened to you. 7But the house of Israel is not willing to listen to you because they are not willing to listen to me, for the whole house of Israel is hardened and obstinate. 8But I will make you as unyielding and hardened as they are. 9I will make your forehead like the hardest stone, harder than flint. Do not be afraid of them or terrified by them, though they are a rebellious house.”
10And he said to me, “Son of man, listen carefully and take to heart all the words I speak to you. 11Go now to your countrymen in exile and speak to them. Say to them, ‘This is what the Sovereign LORD says,’ whether they listen or fail to listen.”
12Then the Spirit lifted me up, and I heard behind me a loud rumbling sound—May the glory of the LORD be praised in his dwelling place!—13the sound of the wings of the living creatures brushing against each other and the sound of the wheels beside them, a loud rumbling sound. 14The Spirit then lifted me up and took me away, and I went in bitterness and in the anger of my spirit, with the strong hand of the LORD upon me. 15I came to the exiles who lived at Tel Abib near the Kebar River. And there, where they were living, I sat among them for seven days—overwhelmed.
Original Meaning
THROUGHOUT HISTORY, mystics have sought to experience visions of God. They have often gone to great lengths in their pursuit of this ultimate experience, subjecting their bodies to innumerable hardships in order to attain to a great spiritual “high.” They have traveled to the ends of the earth and undergone fastings, lack of sleep, isolation, self-denial, and self-flagellation in search of contact with the Divine. In contrast, God comes to Ezekiel entirely unsought and reveals himself to the prophet not for the sake of giving him the quiet time to end all quiet times but rather to commission him for a task and to entrust to him a message. The message that Ezekiel is to proclaim is not his own, but God’s; for that reason, only God can empower him and authorize him to deliver it. On the most basic level, therefore, the call vision and commissioning serve to authenticate Ezekiel’s ministry, both to himself and to his audience.
But in addition to that general authentication, the manner of the prophet’s calling also speaks to his hearers of the task to which the prophet has been called. In Ezekiel’s case, that task will not be an easy one. He has not been sent to the Gentiles, with whom the only problem in communicating his message would have been linguistic (Ezek. 3:4–6). Had he been sent to them, they would surely have listened, even though their speech was obscure and their language difficult (lit., “a people deep of lip and heavy of tongue,” 3:5). Being a Wycliffe Bible translator would have been a straightforward assignment in comparison to what Ezekiel has been called to do.
Instead, Ezekiel is being sent to the Israelites, who are a “rebellious nation” (gôyim hammôredîm; Ezek. 2:3).1 Notice how the traditional language of election has been reversed here, so that the Gentiles have become ʿam (a “people”) while Israel has become gôyim (“nations”). The chosen nation has become, appropriate to their own action, unchosen. The depth of Israel’s alienation from God further emerges in 3:11, where Ezekiel is sent to “your countrymen in exile.” God is not willing to call them “my people,” a sure sign of disaster to come.2 Nor is this state a temporary aberration on the part of this present generation but rather a continuation of a long history of disobedience. They are simply the “sons of Israel” (benê yiśrāʾēl, 2:3), a term that brings out the hereditary nature of their rebelliousness: They are true children to their rebellious parents (2:3–4).3
The essence of the people’s transgression lies in their rebellion, that is, their refusal to recognize God’s sovereignty over them.4 In that attitude they have hardened themselves, externally and internally, becoming “obstinate” and “stubborn” (Ezek. 2:4). Though language will not be a barrier, they will not listen to Ezekiel because they are not willing to listen to the One who sent him (3:7). If responsiveness is to be the measure of success, Ezekiel’s mission is declared a failure before it even begins. But Ezekiel’s mission will be judged by another standard, for even though the people will not listen to his words, yet “they will know that a prophet has been among them” (2:5). That is, when the predicted disasters befall Israel, they will recognize that God had previously warned them of what was about to happen.
The prophet himself is to provide an alternative model of behavior. Unlike Israel he is to listen to what the Lord says to him and not to rebel as they do (Ezek. 2:8). Throughout the vision, Ezekiel is the very picture of compliant obedience to the Word of God. When he comes face-to-face with the glory of God, he falls face down in humble submission (1:28); he is not obstinate in God’s presence. When God speaks, he listens; when he is commanded to stand, he rises to his feet (2:1–2). However, this obedience comes not because of some special measure of holiness intrinsic to Ezekiel but because of an infusion of divine Spirit (rûaḥ; 2:2). The entry of the Spirit not only raises him to his feet but enables him to hear God’s speech (2:2). God not only hands the scroll to Ezekiel, he causes him to eat it (3:2). He is the One who will strengthen Ezekiel to make him as tough as his opponents.5 When the vision and commissioning are over, the Spirit lifts Ezekiel up and deposits him among the exiles again, where he sits motionless. Without God’s power, Ezekiel literally can do nothing.
This depiction of Ezekiel as the model of Spirit-infused submission suggests that there is more than one dimension to the Lord’s characteristic address to Ezekiel as ben-ʾādām, usually translated “son of man.” This expression occurs over ninety times in Ezekiel, compared to a mere fourteen times in the rest of the Old Testament. As has often been recognized, this form of address sharply distinguishes Ezekiel from the Sovereign God and the divine beings of chapter 1; ben-ʾādām marks him out as a mere mortal.6
But this expression may perhaps also mark him out from all of his contemporaries. They are the “sons of Israel” (benê yiśrāʾēl, 2:3), the true descendants of the one whose nature was to strive with God (Gen. 32:28); Ezekiel, on the other hand, is literally designated “the son of Adam.” Just as the first Adam received the breath of life from God (Gen. 2:7), so Ezekiel as “son of Adam” receives an infusion of divine Spirit (rûaḥ), which raises him, as it were, to renewed “life” by enabling him to obey. This unusual form of address may thus be an aspect of the creation theme we saw in Ezekiel 1. This re-creation theme emerges more clearly in the related passage in Ezekiel 37, where the coming of the Spirit (rûaḥ) into the skeletons brings new life to the dry bones, but what happens later for the community happens first of all here to the prophet.7 Ezekiel himself is to be the founding member of a new community, empowered by the infusion of the divine Spirit to a life of radical obedience.8
Like the first Adam, Ezekiel faces a test of obedience that revolves around the idea of eating, though in his case he is to eat whatever the Lord commands him to (Ezek. 2:8) rather than to abstain from eating what the Lord prohibits.9 In another reversal of the original sin, what Ezekiel is given to eat is anything but “good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom” (Gen. 3:6); rather, it is a scroll covered on both sides with words of lament and mourning and woe (Ezek. 2:10). But though its appearance is unattractive, to the obedient eater it tasted “as sweet as honey” (3:3). Ezekiel’s obedient consumption of the scroll is his only activity in an otherwise completely passive vision. By it, he is equipped as God’s messenger to go and speak the unpalatable truth to his fellow exiles.
Yet the vision ends on what appears at first sight to be a discordant note in 3:14–15. The prophet who has been called, empowered, and equipped is found sitting down, overwhelmed, filled with feelings of anger. These verses underline, however, the dual nature of the prophet’s task. On the one hand, he remains under “the strong hand of the LORD” and therefore begins to feel the feelings that the Lord has toward the people—feelings of wrath and anger (3:14).10 On the other hand, he sits among the exiles, living where they live, and thus sees the effects of God’s wrath from the other side: the forthcoming overwhelming devastation of his people (3:15).11
Ezekiel’s proclamation is not delivered from the safety and comfort of an ivory tower but flows out of personal experience of the suffering of his people. Indeed, it may not be too strong to say that he has already ingested their suffering, in the form of the scroll covered with words of lament, mourning, and woe, just as in the temple ritual the priests would ingest the sin offering and thus absolve the guilt of the people.12 But in the absence of the temple, there is no sacrifice to take away the guilt of the people, only a scroll that records it. In the meantime, these feelings of wrath and desolation must remain inside the prophet until the Lord opens his lips and gives him the words to say (3:16).
Bridging Contexts
THE SPIRIT IN the old and new eras. In what ways is our task as messengers of the gospel similar to and different from that assigned to Ezekiel? In some ways, as New Testament Christians we live in a different era. The role of the Holy Spirit in particular changes radically from the Old Testament period to that of the New. In the Old Testament the Spirit is given to specific people to accomplish specific tasks, especially the ability to speak God’s word to his people.13 The hope and expectation of a universal outpouring of the Spirit was there throughout the Old Testament, but it remained something for the future (Joel 2:28–29). In the New Testament era, however, the promise is fulfilled. The Spirit has been poured out on all of God’s people, young and old, male and female, influential and insignificant alike, commissioning and equipping them for the prophetic task (see Acts 2). Thus, we now live in the age of “the prophethood of all believers.”
In the book of Acts, a prominent theme is the fact that the coming of the Holy Spirit gives believers power to witness about Jesus Christ. As was the case for the prophet Ezekiel, the major impediment in that task is not merely linguistic (though the Holy Spirit deals with that problem as well in Acts 2:4!). It is the fact that we are trying to communicate the gospel to people who are “dead in . . . transgressions and sins” (Eph. 2:1). What people need is not simply new information but new life. The essence of human sin continues to be rebellion against God’s sovereignty, a state in which people desire to suppress the truth about God (Rom. 1:18).
Whereas Ezekiel was called to bring this message to Israel, God’s chosen people, we bring the message to the Gentiles as well. They too, though once “far away,” now have access to the Father by the same Spirit that Israel does, as Paul reminds us in Ephesians 2:17–18. The process of bringing that gospel to the nations is often a painful one, however. God continues to use as his messengers not the strong but the weak, placing his treasure in clay pots to show that strength really belongs to him (2 Cor. 4:7). Like Ezekiel, we need to fall on our faces in God’s presence, recognizing that we have no strength, no gifts, nothing that we can contribute to the task, and pleading with him to fill us with his Spirit so that we can be faithful servants. Like Ezekiel, we must be willing to die to ourselves and to our desires and comfort to be useful to God. As Paul puts it in 2 Corinthians 4:5, hitting both themes of weakness and self-denial: “We do not preach ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake.”
The Son of Man. That ministry is ours because in the meantime the final “Son of Man” has come, Jesus Christ himself. He is The Human One in fullness, just as Ezekiel was a “mere human” in contrast to the exalted title used for God, “Sovereign LORD.” But Jesus is also the heavenly Christ, the “one like a son of man”—picking up on the majestic imagery of Daniel 7, an exalted, regal figure (see Rev. 1:13). These two aspects seem at first sight incongruous, even contradictory. Yet that is why it was such a perfect title for Jesus to adopt for his incongruous mission.14 In his earthly ministry, it is the “mere humanity” aspect that is prominent. In Eugene Peterson’s words, “this Son of Man has dinner with a prostitute, stops off for lunch with a tax-collector, wastes time blessing children when there were Roman legions to be chased from the land, heals unimportant losers and ignores high-achieving Pharisees and influential Sadducees.”15 Ultimately, he hangs pierced and bleeding on a cross. He dies, the most human and radically undivine of acts.
But his majesty, while veiled, is still present in his earthly ministry. He teaches as one with authority, he speaks of possessing a kingdom. Both aspects are present because Jesus is son of man and Son of Man, very man and very God, taking on our humanity and combining it with undiminished deity. For the first disciples the lesson necessarily focused on his humanity because they had to learn that salvation comes not through the advent of a triumphal heavenly figure bearing a sword, blasting his opponents with fire from heaven, as James and John thought (Luke 9:54). Rather, it came through the advent of a baby in a manger, who grew up to bear a crown of thorns and a cross. The “son of man” had come not (as you might expect from Dan. 7) to be served but to serve and give his life as a ransom for many (Mark 10:45).
But for the hearers of the book of Revelation, the lesson is reversed. The return of our Lord will not be the same as his first advent. Christ is not eternally suffering on the cross, but will return (as the Son of Man!) in glory on the clouds, bearing a sword to blast his opponents with fire from heaven. James and John were not entirely wrong, they just had their advents confused; they mixed up the son of man and the Son of Man. The answer to both is “the son of man”—first in his state of humiliation and second in his state of exaltation; as the ancient liturgy puts it: “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.”
The human Christ of the crucifix, the son of man in his state of humiliation, is not all there is. According to Revelation 1, even now in his state of exaltation, the heavenly, exalted, glorious Christ rules and reigns. But he reigns in the middle of the seven golden lampstands, which are later identified as the seven churches. It may seem a strange location for the Glorious One, in the midst of seven small, undistinguished churches, tarnished by sin and weakness. Yet where else should we expect to see the One whose nursery was a cowshed and whose coronation ceremony took place on a cross? He is there in the midst of real, ordinary communities of faith—not idealized, sanitized versions—and he is there dressed in priestly garb, with kingly accouterments and the power of the prophetic word. He is there as prophet, priest, and king, on behalf of his people.
Jesus is also the Second Adam, who by his obedience undoes the effects of the first Adam’s fall (Rom. 5:19; 1 Cor. 15:44–49). He is the one on whom the Spirit rested in fullness of power and through whom the Spirit is poured out on the church, to create the new community of his people. Jesus does not need to swallow the Word of God; he is himself the Word of God, the manifestation of the divine glory (John 1:14). He is the One who came to earth to preach good news to the poor (Luke 4:18); he is also the One who will return to earth to tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty (Rev. 19:15).
The imagery of scroll-swallowing reappears in Revelation 10, where the apostle John is told to eat a scroll that will turn his stomach sour, though, as with Ezekiel, it had been sweet in his mouth. The ingested Word of God will provide him with the material to prophesy about many peoples, nations, languages, and kings (10:11); however, bearing such testimony is frequently a bittersweet experience, as the fate of the two witnesses in Revelation 11 indicates. To some, the message of the gospel is the aroma of life, sweeter than honey, while to others it is the aroma of death, to be opposed and destroyed (2 Cor. 2:16).
Contemporary Significance
CONTEMPORARY EVANGELISM. What do the models of Jesus and Ezekiel tell us about our efforts in evangelism and missions? In the first place, surely they challenge the common notion in the church that “bigger is always better.” There is a lot of pressure from many quarters in our times to measure success in terms of numbers. Whether it is evangelistic crusades that speak of thousands of “decisions for Christ” or popular books that suggest that adopting certain methodologies will inevitably bring church growth, the “bigger is better” philosophy reigns in much of the contemporary church.
In support of this doctrine, the biblical image of the harvest is pressed into service. It is asserted on the one hand that the faithful Christian will inevitably be the fruitful Christian, seeing many people brought to Christ, and on the other hand that fruitfulness should determine strategy, so that the maximum number of harvesters are sent to where the fruit is ripe. On this approach, the primary goal of missions and evangelism is to see the world come to Christ.
The call of Ezekiel (and of some of the other prophets) should challenge this simplistic assumption. He is specifically called and sent to a people who have been unresponsive in the past and will be unresponsive in the future. Not only that, but God tells the prophet that if he had sent him to the Gentiles, a far greater response to his preaching would have occurred. The faithfulness of this man’s ministry cannot be measured in numerical terms. The primary goal of his ministry is not to see people converted but to bring glory to God by preaching (and modeling) the message he has been given. As John Calvin put it: “When God wishes to move us to obey him, he does not always promise us a happy outcome to our labor; but sometimes he wants to test our obedience to the point that he will have us be content with his command, even if people ridicule our efforts.”16
That is not to say that we should adopt a kind of reverse psychology, whereby we assert that we must certainly be faithful if no one is being reached by our message! We must labor to the utmost of our ability to remove any stumbling block that stands in the way of communicating the gospel, becoming “all things to all men so that by all possible means [we] might save some” (1 Cor. 9:22). Yet we do so recognizing that a work of the Holy Spirit is necessary in the hearts of men and women if they are to become Christians, a work that is the sovereign prerogative of God to impart. At times, God opens the hearts of men and women to himself through the most unlikely of messengers, such as Jonah’s concise and not exactly heartfelt preaching to the Ninevites (Jonah 3:4), while at other times the eloquent pleading of God’s messengers falls on deaf ears.
This truth should be both a comfort and a challenge to us in our evangelism. On the one hand, sharing the gospel is far easier than we think. God is not limited by the weakness of my efforts; he can, if he chooses, save in spite of my incompetence. As one person put it, passing on the good news is simply a matter of one beggar telling another where to find bread. That should motivate us to witness boldly for Christ wherever we go. On the other hand, however, sharing the gospel is far harder than we think. Even the most brilliant performance on my part may still fail to convince my hearers, not because they are dense but because they are still “dead in . . . transgressions and sins” (Eph. 2:1). That should motivate us to pray far more passionately than we do for those around us—and around the world—who are not Christians.
The missionary task of the church. This perspective should also challenge much of our thinking on the missionary task of the church. Were those pioneer missionaries who died within days or weeks of arriving on the mission field wasting their lives, because they saw no one converted? Are those who today labor for many years in the difficult areas of the Middle East or Japan, while seeing only a handful of converts, operating in the wrong place? If the primary goal of missions is to see the world converted, then the answer to both questions is yes. But if the primary goal of missions is the same as the goal set before Ezekiel—faithfulness to the task to which one has been called, no matter what the consequences, so that God may be glorified—then the answer is different. In biblical perspective, reaching the world is only the secondary goal of missions, behind the primary goal of bringing glory to God through faithful obedience.17
We are, after all, followers of the Son of Man, who came to his own and his own did not receive him (John 1:11). Yet to all those who did receive him, and to all those who will receive him through our proclamation, he gives the right to become children of God (1:12). In this obedient mission, he brings glory to the Father’s name (12:27–29).
In order to carry through such a ministry where there is little success in the eyes of the world, a strong sense of calling is essential. Why should we preach the gospel to those who stubbornly refuse to hear? Because God has called and sent us, and he has the right as our Sovereign King to use us as he sees fit. He is not only the One who calls us to the task and strengthens us for it; ultimately he alone is the One whom we are seeking to please. Thus, in Isaiah 49, when the Servant of the Lord struggled with the idea, “I have labored to no purpose; I have spent my strength in vain and for nothing,” his reply to himself was, “Yet what is due me is in the LORD’s hand, and my reward is with my God” (49:4). The Puritan William Greenhill comments:
Sometimes God gives large encouragement, promises, hope, success, providing for our infirmities; at other times a bare commission and command must suffice to do that which would make one’s heart ache: it is his prerogative to send whom he will, and upon what service he will.18
The role of the Spirit. Moreover, to fulfill that service we must be people of the Spirit and people of the book. Ezekiel could not even stand up without the Spirit’s empowerment, yet we frequently feel able to preach sermons, counsel the struggling, comfort the dying, and equip the saints for ministry in our own strength—or at least we act as if we do. When we neglect to pray in order to get out and do, we are proclaiming a practical theology of self-reliance, whatever our theological formulations may be. It is striking that seminaries typically have few courses teaching future ministers of the gospel about prayer compared to those instructing them how to preach or how to witness. Is it any wonder, then, that we frequently turn out pastors who have not learned how to wait patiently upon the Lord and to seek his Spirit’s power?
Such pastors, in turn, naturally preach more sermons to their congregations on the importance of witnessing than they do on the centrality of prayer. The result is that our churches are frequently intensely busy places, but the busyness is ours, not Christ’s. Christians need to remember that they are founding members of the new Spirit-filled community—or, more precisely, that Christ, the new Adam, is the founding member into whose community the Spirit builds us. This means that our greatest need is not for us to be more active but for the Spirit to be more active in and through us.
Yet that Spirit does not come to draw attention to himself. The Spirit’s work is always to bring Christ to bear on a person’s life (cf. John 16:15). That is why Christians are always people of the book. They are those who have ingested the Word of God in its written form, from which comes their message for the world. That is why our pastors, like the first apostles, need to be freed up from other responsibilities, such as waiting on tables (and serving on committees?), so that they can devote themselves to the ministry of the Word and to prayer (Acts 6). The world may listen—or it may not. It is the Spirit’s prerogative to open and close the doors to the hearts of men and women. But wherever they go, God’s people are witnesses to the truth about God, revealed in his Word and declared in the power of the Spirit.