THE WORD OF THE LORD came to me: 2“Son of man, speak to your countrymen and say to them: ‘When I bring the sword against a land, and the people of the land choose one of their men and make him their watchman, 3and he sees the sword coming against the land and blows the trumpet to warn the people, 4then if anyone hears the trumpet but does not take warning and the sword comes and takes his life, his blood will be on his own head. 5Since he heard the sound of the trumpet but did not take warning, his blood will be on his own head. If he had taken warning, he would have saved himself. 6But if the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet to warn the people and the sword comes and takes the life of one of them, that man will be taken away because of his sin, but I will hold the watchman accountable for his blood.’
7“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. 8When I say to the wicked, ‘O wicked man, you will surely die,’ and you do not speak out to dissuade him from his ways, that wicked man will die for his sin, and I will hold you accountable for his blood. 9But if you do warn the wicked man to turn from his ways and he does not do so, he will die for his sin, but you will have saved yourself.
10“Son of man, say to the house of Israel, ‘This is what you are saying: “Our offenses and sins weigh us down, and we are wasting away because of them. How then can we live?” ’ 11Say to them, ‘As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live. Turn! Turn from your evil ways! Why will you die, O house of Israel?’
12“Therefore, son of man, say to your countrymen, ‘The righteousness of the righteous man will not save him when he disobeys, and the wickedness of the wicked man will not cause him to fall when he turns from it. The righteous man, if he sins, will not be allowed to live because of his former righteousness.’ 13If I tell the righteous man that he will surely live, but then he trusts in his righteousness and does evil, none of the righteous things he has done will be remembered; he will die for the evil he has done. 14And if I say to the wicked man, ‘You will surely die,’ but he then turns away from his sin and does what is just and right—15if he gives back what he took in pledge for a loan, returns what he has stolen, follows the decrees that give life, and does no evil, he will surely live; he will not die. 16None of the sins he has committed will be remembered against him. He has done what is just and right; he will surely live.
17“Yet your countrymen say, ‘The way of the Lord is not just.’ But it is their way that is not just. 18If a righteous man turns from his righteousness and does evil, he will die for it. 19And if a wicked man turns away from his wickedness and does what is just and right, he will live by doing so. 20Yet, O house of Israel, you say, ‘The way of the Lord is not just.’ But I will judge each of you according to his own ways.”
21In the twelfth year of our exile, in the tenth month on the fifth day, a man who had escaped from Jerusalem came to me and said, “The city has fallen!” 22Now the evening before the man arrived, the hand of the LORD was upon me, and he opened my mouth before the man came to me in the morning. So my mouth was opened and I was no longer silent.
23Then the word of the LORD came to me: 24“Son of man, the people living in those ruins in the land of Israel are saying, ‘Abraham was only one man, yet he possessed the land. But we are many; surely the land has been given to us as our possession.’ 25Therefore say to them, ‘This is what the Sovereign LORD says: Since you eat meat with the blood still in it and look to your idols and shed blood, should you then possess the land? 26You rely on your sword, you do detestable things, and each of you defiles his neighbor’s wife. Should you then possess the land?’
27“Say this to them: ‘This is what the Sovereign LORD says: As surely as I live, those who are left in the ruins will fall by the sword, those out in the country I will give to the wild animals to be devoured, and those in strongholds and caves will die of a plague. 28I will make the land a desolate waste, and her proud strength will come to an end, and the mountains of Israel will become desolate so that no one will cross them. 29Then they will know that I am the LORD, when I have made the land a desolate waste because of all the detestable things they have done.’
30“As for you, son of man, your countrymen are talking together about you by the walls and at the doors of the houses, saying to each other, ‘Come and hear the message that has come from the LORD.’ 31My people come to you, as they usually do, and sit before you to listen to your words, but they do not put them into practice. With their mouths they express devotion, but their hearts are greedy for unjust gain. 32Indeed, to them you are nothing more than one who sings love songs with a beautiful voice and plays an instrument well, for they hear your words but do not put them into practice.
33“When all this comes true—and it surely will—then they will know that a prophet has been among them.”
Original Meaning
AFTER THE JUDGMENT oracles of Ezekiel 1–24 and the oracles against the foreign nations in chapters 25–32, we finally get to the good news in chapters 34–48. The turning point in the saga is chapter 33, and it comes with the arrival among the exiles of the news of Jerusalem’s fall. That bad news clears the ground for the proclamation of something new. Ezekiel 33 is a carefully constructed whole, with a chiastic movement that hinges around the confirmation of the fall of Jerusalem (33:21–22). Verses 1–11 find a counterpart in verses 30–33, with their emphasis on hearing or not hearing the prophetic word, while verses 12–20 share similar emphases on moral behavior with verses 23–29.1 The whole chapter should thus be seen as a response to the news of that central event of Jerusalem’s fall.
In that respect, this chapter continues logically on from the end of chapter 24, where Ezekiel was told to expect a survivor (pālîṭ)2 to come bringing news of Jerusalem’s demise (24:26). In chapter 33, the survivor arrives. Similarly, the removal of the prophet’s dumbness, anticipated in 24:27, becomes a reality in 33:22. These references bracket off the oracles against the foreign nations (chs. 25–32) as a separate section that completes the judgment oracles of the prophet. In chapters 34–48 the prophet’s focus is placed on oracles proclaiming the salvation and restoration of Israel. These distinctions are not absolute, of course; there is hope of salvation in chapters 1–32 and words of judgment in chapters 34–48. But the whole tenor of the prophet’s ministry undergoes a dramatic paradigm shift, now that Jerusalem has fallen.
Ezekiel 33 opens with the depiction of the prophet as “watchman,” just as did his oracles of destruction in chapter 3. On one level, this functions as a means of renewing the prophet’s commission for his new ministry.3 However, the similarities between the two sections should not be overpressed. In chapter 3, the image functioned as part of a private message to the prophet, pressing on him the importance of taking his task seriously. In chapter 33, it is part of a public proclamation (33:2, 7), pressing in on the people their own responsibility for their fate and the real possibility, even now, of repentance and return.
The proclamation starts from the general statement of a commonly accepted fact, that when the Lord sent a judgment against a land, the watchman was responsible for the consequences only if he did not warn the people (33:2–6). From this general principle, Ezekiel moves to the specific case facing the people in verses 7–9: Clearly the Lord has sent judgment against his people, and Ezekiel was appointed as his watchman (33:7). No one who has read chapters 4–32 can doubt the prophet’s faithfulness to proclaiming the judgment to come; he is free from any culpability in the death of the wicked.
But does this mean that there is now no hope for God’s rebellious people? Having failed to heed the prophetic word of warning, does that mean that since judgment has come, they are as good as dead? This seems to have been the thought among at least some of the exiles. They are saying to one another: “Our offenses and sins weigh us down, and we are wasting away because of them. How then can we live?” (33:10). Now that Jerusalem is on the brink of destruction and they are finally taking the possibility of judgment seriously, despair is a real danger.
Ezekiel’s answer to that was that the living God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked but rather seeks their repentance that they may live (33:11; cf. 18:31–32). God’s judgment is not a fixed, deterministic fate that operates regardless of human action, but rather is a response to actual human behavior. Even now, it is not too late to turn and be saved. The fundamental covenant choice of life or death is still open to the people (33:11). The prophet illustrates the reality of that choice by appealing to two case studies, familiar from chapter 18. In the first case, a righteous man “trusts in his [past] righteousness” and does evil; he will surely die and not live (33:13). In the second, a wicked man turns from his sins and does what is right; he will surely live and not die (33:14).
Although these are presented as two equal and opposite cases, it is evident from the context that the primary interest is the second case—the wicked person who may yet live. That is the situation in which the people find themselves in 33:10. The prophet’s point is that neither judgment nor salvation is an automatic process, but each works itself out through a life of “righteousness” or “wickedness”—that is, a life lived in accordance with the terms of the covenant (“the decrees that give life,” 33:15) or in violation of it.
The problem that the people face is not that of God’s justice, of which they complain in 33:17. His ways are indeed just, even more than just, since the path to life is continuously held open to rebels. The problem is with the people’s lack of righteousness; they have followed an unjust way (33:17). They have consistently chosen the path to death over the path to life. That is what makes it bad news that God will judge each according to his own way (33:20)! Nonetheless, the point of the case studies is that there is a remedy for the bad news. The possibility of repentance is Ezekiel’s answer to despair, though the need for perseverance is also there to counteract any tendency toward presumption.
This is the context in which Ezekiel places the news of Jerusalem’s destruction (33:21–22). A survivor brings an eyewitness testimony of the city’s fall. This is the radical turning point in the fortunes of God’s people and in Ezekiel’s own life. His dumbness, which has been with him since his commissioning as a prophet in 3:26–27, is now removed, just as the Lord promised in chapter 24. The prophet has finally been released from his divinely imposed bondage. The possibility of a new beginning for God’s people similarly exists. But which will they choose: life or death?
The prophet is not left long in suspense. The following two sections make it clear that the hearts of God’s people have not been fundamentally changed even by this radical act of judgment. Both back home in Judah (33:23–29) and among the exiles (33:30–33), it is business as usual. Those who remain behind in Judah, inhabiting the ruins of God’s judgment, see the situation as an opportunity for economic gain rather than personal and societal repentance. Claiming to be Abraham’s children, they interpret God’s covenant promise of the land to Abraham as an inalienable right, an unconditional covenant. If Abraham as one man was able to possess the land, how much more his many descendants still living in the land (33:24)?
Indeed, the example of Abraham was a pertinent one to those who experienced the devastation of the Promised Land. The prophet Isaiah had urged the people to
Look to Abraham, your father,
and to Sarah, who gave you birth.
When I called him he was but one,
and I blessed him and made him many.
The LORD will surely comfort Zion
and will look with compassion on all her ruins;
he will make her deserts like Eden,
her wastelands like the garden of the LORD. (Isa. 51:2–3)
The promise to Abraham should indeed act as an assurance that God would not completely abandon Israel but would comfort Zion and look with compassion on all her ruins (cf. Mic. 7:18–19). But this assurance of God’s covenant faithfulness is only relevant for those who are, like Abraham, covenant-keepers. Those who do not continue in Abraham’s faithful ways cannot expect to experience the blessings of the covenant.
The people are, in fact, corporately in a situation analogous to the first case study described by Ezekiel. They are relying on earlier righteousness—in this case, that of Abraham—to see them through in the face of present disobedience. The prophet describes their disobedience in the stereotypical terms of “eat[ing] meat with the blood still in it4 and look[ing] to . . . idols and shed[ding] blood” (Ezek. 33:25), or “you rely on your sword, you do detestable things, and each of you defiles his neighbor’s wife” (33:26). Should such covenant-breakers inherit the blessings of the covenant and possess the land? By no means! Rather, these covenant-breakers will continue to inherit the three classic curses of the covenant: the sword, wild animals, and plague (33:27; cf. Lev. 26:22, 25).5 The land will continue to suffer God’s judgment until it becomes a desolate wasteland (Ezek. 33:28–29; cf. Lev. 26:32–33). All their hopes will come to nothing.
Nor are matters any better among the exiles. The news of Jerusalem’s fall appears to have given Ezekiel’s message a certain popularity and topicality. He is now the subject of conversation in the cities and doorways (Ezek. 33:30). To use a contemporary analogy, he is the toast of the talk shows. But the interest is superficial: The people listen to his words but do not put them into practice, regarding them as an intriguing phenomenon rather than a life-changing reality. His fame is like that of a pop star, whose declarations on spiritual matters may arouse curiosity but are scarcely accorded authoritative status. People may have been humming along to his tune, but they are paying no attention to the true meaning of his lyrics.
Time, however, will prove the power of the word of the Lord through Ezekiel: “When all this comes true—and it surely will—then they will know that a prophet has been among them” (33:33). In that day, just as all will know experientially the power of the Lord, so they will also be forced to recognize the authenticity of the Lord’s prophet.
Bridging Contexts
THE HARSH REALITIES of life. The people of Ezekiel’s day were a people whose physical and psychological world had collapsed. The news of the destruction of Jerusalem was a paradigm-shaking reality. It was as if the sky had fallen on their heads. The central belief structures of their world crumbled, causing many of them to be faced with the temptations of overwhelming doubt and despair. These are not issues that are often addressed from the pulpits of our churches, where a relentlessly upbeat image of the Christian life is presented as the norm. “Smile, Jesus loves you!” is our slogan. Yet for many people, the outward smile conceals teeth gritted to endure the harsh realities of life. The temptations to doubt and despair are still there under the surface, but in our contemporary circles they are “the temptation that dare not speak its name.”
The reality that life is not uniformly wonderful has, of course, always been true. However, the willingness to face up to that fact is something that varies from culture to culture and generation to generation, depending on that generation’s experience. Thus the generation that grew up in Europe around the turn of the century possessed a strong corporate faith in the progress and perfectibility of humankind—only to have that faith decisively shattered in the trenches of the Somme and the mud of Passchendaele. The post-First World War generation knew firsthand what doubt and despair were. They knew how hard faith in the reality and love of God was in a brutal and bloody world.
On a smaller scale, a similar shift in the cultural landscape is taking place in our time. The Baby Boomers (those born between the end of the Second World War and 1960) have grown up in an age of unprecedented economic growth and social improvement. As a generation, they came to expect endless opportunities and affluence; in general, they believe that through hard work and education, anything is possible. Theirs is an essentially optimistic outlook on life, which is mirrored by the upbeat, “self-help” approach of many sermons.
The generation that followed them, however, commonly dubbed the “Baby Busters” or “Generation X,” has grown up in a world of recession and divorce, of global warming and downsizing.6 As a result, in spite of their relative affluence, they are not an optimistic generation, but rather cynical and bored, bereft of meaning and purpose.7 Such a generation is not likely to be reached by pop psychology and pat answers, for they know all too well the meaning of doubt and despair. Douglas Coupland expresses his own experience of doubt and despair in these terms:
Is feeling nothing the inevitable result of believing in nothing? And then I got to feeling frightened—thinking that there might not actually be anything to believe in, in particular. I thought it would be such a sick joke to have to remain alive for decades and not believe in or feel anything.8
Not everyone of his generation shares these same feelings, of course. Personal experiences significantly shape each person in different ways. However, the church must recognize the general shift in cultural outlook to address the unchanging gospel in ways that still communicate. Part of that shift in our day will be learning to preach to the despairing in ways that speak to their particular needs and temptations.
A deep awareness of sin. The despair felt among the exiles was not simply the result of the hand fate had dealt them, however. It was the result of the evidence of God’s judgment on his people. They despaired not simply because of their situation but because of their sin (33:10). Such a depth of awareness of sin is not common in our day. Few today ever reach the point of crying out in recognition of God’s holiness, “How then can we live?” (33:10). Few come to the deep conviction that there is a God and there is judgment for sin and there may even be salvation, but that it may not be for them!
Such, however, was the experience of some past ages. For example, in the classic eighteenth-century work Human Nature in Its Fourfold State, Thomas Boston described the eleventh (!) stage in the conversion process in the following terms:
The man being thus far humbled . . . looks on himself as unworthy of Christ, and unworthy of the favour of God. . . . If you now tell him he is welcome to Christ, if he will come to him, he is apt to say, “Can such a vile and unworthy wretch as I be welcome to the holy Jesus?9
Here, doubtless drawing on his own extensive pastoral experience in a rural congregation in Scotland, Boston depicts a man who has been so crushed by the preaching of the law that he feels a sense of total despair. He feels his sin to be so great that even Jesus will not welcome him. Of course, at the root of such despair is pride rather than true humility, as Boston goes on to show. It is precisely such vile wretches that the Son of Man came to seek and save (Matt. 9:12–13). However, it is a mark of the prominent preaching by Boston and his contemporaries of the claims of the law of God on all people and the certainty of God’s wrath against unbelievers that such feelings of despair were produced.
Boston was far from being a legalist, but he was not afraid to say from his pulpit, “O wicked man, you will surely die” (Ezek. 33:8). Sometimes the pendulum may indeed have swung too far in that direction, so that genuine believers lacked assurance of salvation, but that is scarcely a danger in most contemporary pulpits. We need to learn from the past how to preach for deep heart conviction of sin, until people cry out in our churches also, “What must I do to be saved?”
Are we getting through? Of course, not everyone will respond in such positive terms to the plain preaching of the law. There will be those who, like the remnant left in Judah, feel that all this preaching has nothing to do with them. Instead of appealing to Abraham, as Ezekiel’s contemporaries did (Ezek. 33:24), in our churches they may appeal to the fact that they have grown up in the church, as have their parents before them. Such an appeal to tradition is not enough. Even though God promises to deal faithfully with the children of his people (Gen. 17:8; Acts 2:39), that promise does not work apart from their faith but through their faith. It is as the next generation is brought by the Holy Spirit to their own expression of faith in the God of their fathers that they inherit the promises of their fathers’ God.
Others may respond in a superficially favorable way, praising the clarity with which the Word is being preached. They listen and listen, but never learn or do. For them, as for some of Ezekiel’s hearers, the preacher is merely an entertainer, not a conveyer of life-changing truth. Like the seed that fell on rocky ground in the parable of the sower (Matt. 13:5–6), there is no substance to their claim to faith. Time will demonstrate that fact, as they wilt under the pressures of life.
Contemporary Significance
SUPERFICIAL OR GENUINE? What do we say to those whose world has caved in? What specific temptations and problems do such people face? Those living through the aftermath of personal or societal disaster face the danger of false hope of shallow and easy answers. Many people seem to think that suffering inevitably prepares one for sainthood. Suffering is not automatically redemptive, however, nor are all the promises of God’s Word available equally to all without distinction. The blessings of a covenant relationship with God come only to those within the covenant community who are living a life of obedience to the covenant.
This means that there is no automatic salvation to be found in having prayed a particular prayer, or in having been received into the membership of a particular church, or in having been baptized (whether as a child or an adult). The promises made to Abraham are real and substantial, but they are only effective for those who are genuinely Abraham’s spiritual children. Such people are justified by faith, just as he was, but specifically they are justified by a faith that works itself out in action, just as his did (James 2:20–24). A claim of faith without the works that go along with it is a false claim, and the hope that is based on it is a false hope. True saints are those who persevere in faith and action to the end. In an age of “easy-believism,” this is a note that needs to be sounded more clearly in our churches. The law needs to be clearly preached to those who consider themselves comfortably within the covenant community, even though their lives demonstrate no evidence to back up their claim, to press in on them their need of Christ.
For some, a major life crisis may cause them to attend church, but only as superficial hearers. Like Ezekiel’s audience, they may find the form of the message interesting and stimulating, but they never feel its power in their hearts as a life-changing reality. Those of us who are preachers need to be careful that we do not foster such shallow attention. In our day, there is a focus on “seeker-sensitive” services that will present the gospel in a way that will be attractive to such people. The task of the church, however, is not to assemble seekers but to make disciples.
The task of the preacher. We should certainly have services that are open and understandable to all who come, but we should never forget that our goal is to see these people move beyond being seekers to being those who are found in Christ. The seriousness of the message must never be obscured by the desire to make the medium more attractive. The preacher’s task is not to entertain or inform but to plead passionately with men and women to flee the wrath that is to come on account of sin. The preacher is commissioned to call clearly for repentance and turning to Christ, to be a watchman rather than an entertainer.
But preachers must not only preach the law to confront the hypocrite, they must also preach the gospel to woo the lost sheep. They must answer the pressing question of the justice of God (Ezek. 33:17). In times of personal or societal meltdown, the question for many is, “Why are these things happening to me? What did I ever do to deserve it?” In Judah’s case, the answer to that question was apparently simple: It is not the Lord’s way that is unjust, but rather their own ways are unjust (33:20). The disaster that had befallen Jerusalem was the consequence of Jerusalem’s sin, as Ezekiel had gone to considerable lengths to demonstrate before the city fell. But God’s purpose even in this painful judgment was not death for the errant sheep but life; after all, the Lord has no pleasure in the death of the wicked. He does not commission his prophet to say: “Turn or burn; take it or leave it; the choice is entirely yours.” Instead, he instructs his watchman to cry out: “Turn! Turn from your evil ways! Why will you die, O house of Israel?” (33:11).
Responding to life’s struggles. Sometimes, as with Jerusalem, the catastrophic things that happen to you are the results of your own sin. In other cases, they are not directly the result of your own sin. In either event, however, your responsibility is the same: to heed the call to respond to the glory of God. Painful experiences may be the occasion for our eyes being opened to God for the first time, or they may be the call to demonstrate perseverance in the midst of the depths of our suffering. As Christians they are never, however, simply designed to crush us. In our deepest and most desperate struggles, the problem lies not in God’s unfairness in placing these burdens on us, but rather in our unrighteousness that makes us resent our particular providence.
The profound news of the gospel is that whatever bad things happen to us in this life, God does not judge us as Christians on the basis of our own ways but rather on the basis of Christ’s righteousness. The gospel is therefore good news to the despairing. Since God has loved us so profoundly as to send Jesus to die on the cross for us, what will he not give to us? The bruised reed he will not break; the smoldering wick he will not extinguish.
This was the painful truth to which Horatio Spafford testified in his famous hymn, “It Is Well With My Soul.” After the death of his only son, he suffered the loss of his business holdings in the Great Fire of Chicago in 1871. Just two years later, his wife and four daughters were on board a passenger ship that sank in mid-Atlantic; only his wife survived. In a short period, virtually his entire world had been destroyed. Yet as he sailed to be with his wife, at the very spot where his daughters had drowned, he wrote these immortal words of faith in God’s goodness to his people, no matter what happens:
When peace like a river attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll,
Whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say,
“It is well, it is well with my soul.”
Chorus:
It is well with my soul,
It is well, it is well with my soul.
Though Satan should buffet, though trials should come,
Let this blest assurance control:
That Christ has regarded my helpless estate,
And has shed his own blood for my soul.
My sin—O, the bliss of this glorious thought,
My sin—not in part but the whole,
Is nailed to the cross and I bear it no more:
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!
And, Lord, haste the day when my faith shall be sight,
The clouds be rolled back as a scroll,
The trump shall resound and the Lord shall descend:
Even so—it is well with my soul.