AT THE END of seven days the word of the LORD came to me: 17“Son of man, I have made you a watchman for the house of Israel; so hear the word I speak and give them warning from me. 18When I say to a wicked man, ‘You will surely die,’ and you do not warn him or speak out to dissuade him from his evil ways in order to save his life, that wicked man will die for his sin, and I will hold you accountable for his blood. 19But if you do warn the wicked man and he does not turn from his wickedness or from his evil ways, he will die for his sin; but you will have saved yourself.
20“Again, when a righteous man turns from his righteousness and does evil, and I put a stumbling block before him, he will die. Since you did not warn him, he will die for his sin. The righteous things he did will not be remembered, and I will hold you accountable for his blood. 21But if you do warn the righteous man not to sin and he does not sin, he will surely live because he took warning, and you will have saved yourself.”
22The hand of the LORD was upon me there, and he said to me, “Get up and go out to the plain, and there I will speak to you.” 23So I got up and went out to the plain. And the glory of the LORD was standing there, like the glory I had seen by the Kebar River, and I fell facedown.
24Then the Spirit came into me and raised me to my feet. He spoke to me and said: “Go, shut yourself inside your house. 25And you, son of man, they will tie with ropes; you will be bound so that you cannot go out among the people. 26I will make your tongue stick to the roof of your mouth so that you will be silent and unable to rebuke them, though they are a rebellious house. 27But when I speak to you, I will open your mouth and you shall say to them, ‘This is what the Sovereign LORD says.’ Whoever will listen let him listen, and whoever will refuse let him refuse; for they are a rebellious house.”
Original Meaning
AT THE END of Ezekiel’s seven-day waiting period (3:16), the prophet receives a further communication from God. His prophetic commissioning continues in two sections. The first outlines his responsibility as a “watchman for the house of Israel” (3:17–21), while the second unfolds further the limitations that his calling will place on him as he becomes, literally, the mouthpiece of God (3:24–27). The intervening reprise of the vision of chapter 1 in 3:22–23 ties these two sections together with the opening call vision, a link underlined by the common themes of “the hand of the LORD” (3:22; cf. 3:14), the appearance of “the glory of the LORD” (3:23; cf. 1:28), and the Spirit’s setting Ezekiel on his feet.1
The idea of the prophet as a “watchman” is a familiar one in the Old Testament (see Isa. 56:10; Jer. 6:17; Hos. 9:8). A watchman was someone appointed as a lookout to provide the people with advance warning of the coming of an enemy so that they could run to shelter (Ezek. 33:2–3). It was the Old Testament equivalent of the Second World War’s “Air Raid Warden,” the person who sounded the alarm as bombers approached so that the people could flee to the safety of the shelters. In this case, the “enemy” of whom the people have to beware is none other than God himself!
By giving Ezekiel the revelation of chapter 1, where as we saw, the Lord is depicted as the divine warrior coming from the north to judge his people, Ezekiel has been shown the reality of judgment to come. That vision was not given to him for his own personal edification but in order to share it with others. His mission is a matter of life or death. To those who heed his warning of judgment, it will be a message of life; to those who refuse him, it will be a message of death. In either case, his responsibility is the same: to sound the warning note clearly so that he discharges his own obligation. Otherwise, he too will share in the judgment.
The focus of the present passage is not so much on the change that may be wrought in individuals who hear his message, but on the responsibility laid on Ezekiel to preach to all, regardless of their response. The situations proposed (“When I say to a wicked man ‘You will surely die . . .’ ”; “When a righteous man turns from his righteousness and does evil . . .”) are purely hypothetical: Ezekiel is not thereby commissioned to the pastoral care of individual souls.2 Rather, the two classes of people, the “wicked” and the “righteous,” are all-encompassing. Just as a watchman has to shout his message of danger to everyone in the city, so also Ezekiel must address his message of judgment to all, whether righteous or wicked, and whether they listen or fail to listen (cf. Ezek. 2:7).3 Thus, 3:17–21 does not expand the scope of Ezekiel’s ministry beyond what is already required of him in 2:7, where the Lord told him: “You must speak my words to them, whether they listen or fail to listen, for they are rebellious.” What it does is set before him clearly the consequences of any failure to fulfill his responsibilities.
For each class of hearers, righteous or wicked, there are the same two potential outcomes to Ezekiel’s preaching: Either they hear and respond and live, or they ignore Ezekiel’s message and perish. Those who respond faithfully to his proclamation will “live,” a term describing not merely physical life but rather the fullness of relationship with the Sovereign Lord that flows from obedience.4 Death, on the other hand, means estrangement from both God and the covenant community. To be cut off from God’s people is to be “dead,” even while physically still alive, for one is separated from the source of life. Indeed, cut off from the Promised Land and the temple, many of the exiles presumed themselves to be effectively “dead” (cf. 37:12).
However, in the message given to Ezekiel the wicked are not closed out from life by their present status; there is still time to hear the word of the prophet and turn and live. Similarly, the righteous cannot presume on their status. They too must listen to the word of the prophet in order to live. In other words, what marks the righteous out from the wicked, what marks out those who “live” from those who “die,” is the fact that they listen to the word of the Lord through the prophet and respond to it. The wicked are wicked precisely because they do not change their ways in response to the prophetic message, whereas the righteous heed the warning and receive life.
Here again, as in Ezekiel 2, Ezekiel himself is the model of what he prophesies. For whether he himself lives or dies depends on his “righteousness”—his faithfulness to the commission he has received. If he obeys the word of the Lord to him and proclaims his warning, then he will live. If he disobeys and fails to give a warning, then the blood of those whom he failed to warn will be required at his hand—in other words, he too will die.5 Ezekiel’s commission is thus an equivalent test for this “son of Adam” to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil for the first Adam (Gen. 2:17). Having swallowed the scroll—for unlike the first Adam, Ezekiel is commanded to eat—Ezekiel is able to speak God’s word, which distinguishes between good and evil. If he is faithful in his submissive obedience, he will himself live and will bring the possibility of life to those who hear and obey the message that comes through him. But if he fails, he and his hearers “will surely die” (Ezek. 3:18; cf. Gen. 2:17).
The depth of the prophet’s self-emptying becomes apparent in Ezek. 3:24–27. Once again, he is confronted with a vision of God’s glory, similar to what he saw before, in response to which he falls to the ground. When he is placed on his feet by an infusion of the divine Spirit, Ezekiel is ordered to remain confined to his house and told that he will be dumb (3:24–26). The completeness of his captivity is underlined by the three different pronouns used in verses 24–26. The prophet is told, “Go, shut yourself inside your house. And you, son of man, they will tie with ropes. . . . I will make your tongue stick to the roof of your mouth.”6 Had his isolation been self-inflicted, he could have ended it when he chose; had it been inflicted by others, he could perhaps have escaped. But since it is placed on him by himself, by others, and by God, there is no escape.
The nature of the prophet’s isolation will be twofold: He is to be confined to his house and he will lose his power of free speech. He is God’s prisoner, a situation vividly depicted by the ropes that bind him.7 Even his tongue is God’s prisoner, bound to the roof of his mouth, except when God frees it to speak his oracles.8 His dumbness is not total; he is still able to warn of the danger to come, as he has been commissioned to do in 3:17–21. But his speech is totally restricted to the reproduction of God’s words of judgment—the words of lament, warning, and woe inscribed on the scroll he has swallowed.9
This restriction on the prophet’s speech will make him unable to function as a mediator (ʾîš môkîaḥ, 3:26; NIV, “to rebuke”; lit., “an arbitrating man”) for the house of Israel.10 He may not intercede for the people, nor may he seek the Lord on the people’s behalf. The time for appeals for mercy is past; the appeals process is exhausted. The prophet’s role, at least up until the fall of Jerusalem, is restricted to the delivery of the divine sentence of judgment: “This is what the Sovereign LORD says.” Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear those words (3:27).
Bridging Contexts
WE ARE USED to thinking of the offices of priest and prophet in the neat and tidy categories of systematic theology. Thus, Louis Berkhof is expressing a widely held view when he states: “The prophet was appointed to be God’s representative with the people, to be His messenger and to interpret His will. . . . The priest, on the other hand, was man’s representative with God.”11
In our society, when we think of a “prophetic figure,” we think of a wild-eyed man, delivering a message from God in thundering tones regardless of how it is received. In fact, both offices normally had a two-way function. The priest, just as much as the prophet, was the interpreter and teacher of God’s will, while the prophet, just as much as the priest, was the representative of the people, interceding with God on their behalf.12 Because Ezekiel’s ministry fits our preconceptions of what a prophetic ministry “ought” to look like, we may fail to see how unusually restricted he is in his prophetic calling. Further, just as not everyone is called to be a prophet, so not every prophet is called to exercise his ministry in the way Ezekiel did. That means that we will have to be careful in universalizing the principles of Ezekiel’s calling.
On the other hand, the very strangeness of Ezekiel’s behavior tends to make it difficult for us to bridge the gap. Not a few people have sought, if not to tie Ezekiel up with ropes, at least to place a straightjacket on him, arguing that he suffered from dangerous psychoses. Placed on the psychiatrist’s couch, Ezekiel is then analyzed and diagnosed as having suffered extreme problems in his relationship with his mother, probably in addition to serious childhood sexual abuse.13 To those without a relationship with the living God, the idea of someone giving oneself over completely to become God’s slave will inevitably seem nonsensical or abhorrent, the sign of certain mental disorder.
Yet though Ezekiel’s obedience required of him harder and stranger tasks than those who preceded him, his basic orientation was simply that expressed by the prophet Isaiah: “Here am I. Send me!” (Isa. 6:8). Similarly, the apostle Paul persisted in his calling to ministry to the Gentiles in spite of the catalog of hardships he faced (2 Cor. 6:4–10) and the settled conviction from the Holy Spirit that this would always be the way of ministry for him (Acts 20:23). Though his life was dogged by “a thorn in [my] flesh” (2 Cor. 12:7), he had the confidence to pour out his life in the service of God, assured that no matter what happened to him, the gospel was not chained (2 Tim. 2:9). Such total self-sacrifice in the cause of the gospel is undoubtedly rare in our day and age and might well be considered a sign of mental imbalance by psychoanalysts, but we are all the poorer for its absence.
But why is the prophet thus constrained? On the one hand, his bonds bind him even more closely to the exiles, for whom “bondage” was a typical image of their fate (Isa. 49:9; 61:1).14 On the other hand, it serves as a real restriction on his proclamation. He may not go where he wishes to go or speak what he wishes to speak. There is no room in his life for any spirit of independence or for any involvement with lesser tasks. He is entirely shut up to his fate as God’s mouthpiece, proclaiming as a watchman the warning of impending judgment, but unable in any way to avert it.
Contemporary Significance
OUR CALLING. Recently, as my wife and I were driving along the highway, we saw a hand-made road-side sign that read, “Repent, the end is nigh!” Our first thought was to wonder if there was some unseen road hazard ahead into which we were about to run! Perhaps around the corner the road simply ran off the edge of a cliff! That slogan has been so overused as the butt of jokes that it is hard, even for us as Christians, to take its message seriously. It seems old-fashioned and out of date. Nowadays, we are far more likely to say to people whom we wish to reach for Christ: “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life,” or, “Do you know for sure that you are going to heaven when you die?” We like to focus on the “good news” aspect of the gospel.
Yet Ezekiel’s calling, at least during the first part of his ministry, is to be the bringer of bad news, the news of impending judgment. The people need to know that God’s patience with them is running out and the ax is about to fall. So great is God’s determination to judge their sin that Ezekiel is not even allowed to act as mediator between God and Israel, seeking to bring the two parties together. Though it may have seemed for generations that God’s mercy and his love towards Israel was such that he would never judge them, now that the sentence has been pronounced it will fall so swiftly and terribly that it may seem as if God will never again be merciful. Ezekiel would certainly have agreed with the writer to the Hebrews when he wrote, “It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Heb. 10:31). In order that the people may know that this is not just a random event but the bringing of the covenant curses on his rebellious people, God calls Ezekiel to be his prophet and to act as watchman for the people.
We said above that not all are called to fulfill the distinctive kind of prophetic ministry to which Ezekiel was called; yet as Christians, we too have a calling from God. According to Paul, we share in the work of reconciliation that God is doing in the world: “We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us” (2 Cor. 5:20). We are God’s messengers, just as the Old Testament prophets were, taking God’s Word to the world. The Spirit of God that inspired the prophets now indwells us; only instead of swallowing a scroll, as Ezekiel did, we imbibe a book, the Bible, through whose pages God continues to speak to his people and to the world. This is the message we have been given to communicate and to which we are confined. Though we may be creative in the way we communicate the message, we are not free to be creative in the content of the message that we are to deliver.
God’s message to the world. God’s message to the world contains both good news and bad news. Naturally, we prefer to tell people good news. After all, which job would you prefer: to be the one who goes around telling people they have won millions in the lottery, or the bailiff who goes around telling the bankrupt person he is here to take away one’s possessions?
The first challenge that this passage presents to you and me, then, is to present a balanced picture of who God is and who we are in relation to God. We must tell people that by nature, we are in rebellion against God and objects of his wrath (Eph. 2:3); we are darkened in our minds, separated from the life of God and hardened in our hearts (4:18), sinners deserving eternal death (Rom. 6:23). Indeed, the bad news of the Bible is far worse than the average person believes. Forget the problems of global warming and the world economy; left to ourselves we face the certainty of eternal judgment. The bailiff is at the door, waiting to strip God’s rebellious subjects of even the few possessions they have and drive the unrepentant out into outer darkness.
But the good news of the gospel is also far better than the average person believes. Some churches have spent so much time proclaiming hellfire and damnation that they never got around to the positive message of the gospel. God loved the world so much that he stepped into the midst of our rebellion to bring about reconciliation. By his great love and rich mercy, he has intervened on our behalf in Jesus Christ, transferring us out of the family of the evil one and into the family of God. Jesus went to the cross to make our bad news his, and the good news concerning him ours. Through his death he not only paid off the debts that would have forced our bankruptcy, but he also endowed us with all spiritual riches through his perfect life. The gospel is thus both good news and bad news for the world, and we are called to proclaim both clearly.
We are also called to bring the news to everyone, without distinction. Ezekiel was not to seek out a congenial audience of the righteous, who might be expected to give his message a fair hearing. He was to proclaim it to righteous and wicked alike and to let God sort them out. The watchman must proclaim his message to everyone, without distinction. Like the sower in the parable of the soils (Matt. 13:1–23), Ezekiel was to scatter his seed all over the field.
Here too there is a challenge to you and me. We tend to sort our friends and family into “likely prospects” and “hard cases,” focusing our efforts on those who we think are most likely to listen. But who are you to say that one person is more likely to listen than another? The Bible is full of “hard cases” who have come to faith in Christ, like the apostle Paul, formerly the great persecutor of the church. Equally, it records the cases of those who are “not far from the kingdom,” like the rich young ruler (Matt. 19:16–22), who turn and walk away. Thus, our calling as watchmen is not to engage in endless soil analysis so that we can deliver the gospel with pinpoint accuracy to those who we think are ready to receive it. Rather, we are to be faithful shouters of the Word, proclaiming the good news and bad news faithfully into the lives of all those around us.
Suggestions for ministry in our day. To my mind this is one of the advantages of what may be considered the rather old-fashioned practice of taking the gospel from door-to-door in the neighborhood of the church. Almost no other form of witnessing enables you to meet such a complete cross section of the community who live next door to you. Not everyone, of course, will appreciate your efforts: To those being saved the gospel is the aroma of life, while to those who are perishing it is the stench of death (2 Cor. 2:15–16). The four kinds of soil that receive the seed in the parable of the sower display the differences of their nature by their responses. The result of the sower’s sowing is not that the whole field bursts into fruitfulness, but that the good soil bears fruit. As with Ezekiel, some will hear your message gladly and turn and live; others will fail to hear your message and consequently will die. But at least they will never be able to claim that no one loved them enough to tell them about Jesus.
For the preacher, this kind of door-to-door witness has the added advantage of bringing you face-to-face with real people and their real objections to the gospel. In consequence, if you are willing to listen to what these men and women tell you of their struggles, you will not be so likely to waste your sermons answering objections with which no one wrestles. Instead, you will have a store of real-life questions to answer from the Scriptures in a way that rings true to people in the pew, who are frequently far more in tune with their non-Christian neighbors than their pastors are.
The perseverance of the saints. Moreover, the good soil continues to bear fruit. The distinction between the righteous and wicked, between good soil and bad soil, is not a matter of past history but of inward response to the Word. It doesn’t make any difference whether you have lived a notorious life of sin or have been a pillar of the Sunday school all your days; what counts to God is your response to his Word. Do you receive the gospel, turning away from your sins and trusting in what Jesus has done for you on the cross as your only hope in life and death? Do you accept fully the bad news, that you are indeed a sinner, by nature a rebel against God, deserving of eternal judgment? Do you delight in God’s righteousness and holiness, which is too pure to coexist with sin? Do you see the good news of the gospel not only as a good idea in general, but personally good news for you? Is your present trust not in any goodness of your own, but solely in the righteous life and atoning death of Jesus as your substitute? That is the key test of whether you are a Christian.
Nor can we make premature assessments of where others stand. It is possible for the seemingly righteous to fall and the defiantly wicked to repent, just as it is possible for the seed that sprang up quickly to wither through the absence of depth of soil or being choked by thorns. In high school, I helped lead a Christian club with two other young men, both of whom seemed at the time far more committed in their love for the Lord than I. One of them is now a pillar in his church, still passionately devoted to following the Lord; the other has not, to my knowledge, darkened the door of a church in years. To be righteous in the Old Testament means to be in right relationship with God; this is not something that can be stored up for a rainy day, but must be a constantly renewed reality.15 Thus the biblical doctrine of the perseverance of the saints is not a kind of cosmic ski lift, which once you are seated carries you all the way to your destination without effort. Rather, it is the truth that those who are indeed saints will actually persevere.
God’s preservation of the saints. The reverse side of that doctrine is its partner, the preservation of the saints. This encourages believers that what counts in our persevering is not our weak grip on our heavenly Father, but his strong grasp on us. This twofold combination of human responsibility and divine assurance is brought out clearly in 2 Timothy 2:19. There Paul, having mentioned the apostasy of Hymenaeus and Philetus, concludes: “God’s solid foundation stands firm, sealed with this inscription: ‘The Lord knows those who are his,’ and, ‘Everyone who confesses the name of the Lord must turn away from wickedness.’ ” So the saints are those who persevere to the end, but they do so because of God’s preservation.
This is good news for the weak sinners that we are. As I write this, I am shortly to go to a church where I will meet with an elder, a man I love and respect, who has abandoned his family and gone off with another woman. He knows that what he has done is wrong, but does not seem to know whether it can be put right. The good news of the preservation of the saints is that even those who have made shipwreck of their faith can be rescued and brought safely home to their heavenly Father. The Lord knows those who are his, and even in their attempts to flee from him, they cannot escape his loving embrace. I hope to be able to tell this man that those whom God loves, he will not let go.
But to be such a channel of God’s good and bad news is often a costly, self-denying business. If you say to God, “Here am I, send me,” frequently he will! Sometimes, God sends his children to be his witnesses in uncomfortable situations—whether halfway around the world, to preach to villagers in Irian Jaya, or round the corner, to speak God’s word in the jungles of corporate America. Such total yieldedness to God will often be regarded as certifiably foolish, or perhaps even worse, by a world that does not know God, especially when there seems little fruit to show for the sacrifice. But who is really the one being unwise? Jim Elliot, who met his death at the hands of the Auca Indians with whom he had planned to share the gospel, once wrote in his journal: “He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.”16
Our example in all of this is the self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Was Ezekiel confined to his house? Jesus was “despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering” (Isa. 53:3). Was Ezekiel made dumb? Jesus was “led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth” (Isa. 53:7). Was Ezekiel bound with ropes? Jesus was nailed to the cross and suffered there not for any transgressions of his own but for ours. The shackles of death designed for our wrists were placed on his. Thus has the greater “Son of Man” fulfilled the ministry of the earlier “son of man,” giving us the good news of the gospel, which is the antidote to the bad news of our natural state. What price, then, can be too great for us to play our part in the great work of the triune God, bringing to himself a harvest of men and women from every tribe, nation, and language group, that they too might receive eternal life in Christ Jesus?