Ezekiel 5

Ezekiel 5:1-17

VOICING THE OF GOD Ezekiel 5:1-17. IN studying this dramatic volume, we have given a chapter to the “Visions of God” and a chapter to the “Voice of God”. I purposely pass over the 4th chapter of the volume. I do that on dual grounds: First, the symbolism is so strictly Oriental as to make it difficult for a Western audience to comprehend the same; and Secondly, if it were fully understood and properly applied it would be found to refer very largely to the same judgment from God against Israel to which this 5th chapter is devoted. In fact, God, with whom wisdom is, puts into the Divine revelation those principles that men test out from time to time and discover to be true, and among them stands prominently this, namely, that there is power in repetition.Israel might not comprehend a single symbol, or be brought to see herself as God saw her, by one, or even two, pictures of His purpose of judgment; but when the same thought has been presented from angle after angle, it will finally burn its way in, and this people will see, as the people of Jesus’ day saw, that God is angry with them, condemns their ways, and is preparing for a judgment that will surely come if they continue in impenitence.The 5th chapter is more easy of comprehension, and yet covers a kindred ground with that involved in the 4th chapter. We propose to discuss it under—The Portrayal,The Prophecy,The Performance.THE The shaven head is the symbol of smitten Israel.“And, thou, son of man, take thee a sharp knife, take thee a barber’s razor, and came it to pass upon thine head and upon thy beard”. Here the Lord is pleased to interpret Himself. That which is spoken in the first verse He interprets in the fifth:“Thus saith the Lord God; This is Jerusalem”. Dr. John Skinner, Professor of Old Testament Exegesis in the Presbyterian College of London, was selected by Robertson Nicoll to write the interpretation of Ezekiel 5 : for the “Expositor’s Bible”. In speaking of this Scripture he says, “The shaving of the Prophet’s head and beard is a figure-for the depopulation of the city and country.”Jerusalem, as the capital, stood for the country as well. It was, as the same writer had previously remarked, “the heart and brain of the nation,” “the center of its life and its religion.” Whatever, then, threatened Jerusalem, threatened Israel also, and this figure, if it had any significance at all, looks to the practical wiping out of Jerusalem. As the razor took the hairs from the head and face of the Prophet, leaving nothing but the pale skin behind, so the armies of aliens should sweep Jerusalem clean; her demolition should be complete.The fate of his hair was the figure of her fiery experience.“Take the balances to weigh, and divide the hair. “Thou shalt burn with fire a third part in the midst of the city, when the days of the siege are fulfilled: and thou shalt take a third part, and smite about it with a knife: and a third part thou shalt scatter in the wind; and I will draw out a sword after them” (Ezekiel 5:2). “Thou shalt also take thereof a few in number, and bind them in thy skirts” (Ezekiel 5:3). It was, indeed, a significant type of Israel yet to take place. The third part should be burned with the fire; the third part should perish with the sword; and the third part should be scattered to the uttermost ends of the earth.When Christ was on earth He looked on this same city, conquered again and again, its inhabitants again and again carried away into captivity, its houses burned, its people smitten with the sword, and though it had recovered something of its original greatness He also, as another true Prophet of God, was compelled to foresee its coming captivities, and to foretell its coming sorrows.There were two or three times in the life of Christ when He wept. Once was when He looked upon Jerusalem, and one never forgets His pathetic cry, as a cry of despair,“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the Prophets, and stohest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! “Behold, your house is left unto you desolate”. In that last sentence He was doing exactly what Ezekiel is here doing. He was anticipating history. He was not so much forth-telling it as fore-telling it. He knew what the future held for Jerusalem;He knew that the Roman soldiers would come and its walls would crumble, and its Temple would be destroyed, and its people would be enslaved, and that the sufferings of the past would be once again enacted because the sins of by-gone days had come back upon the same people and necessitated a repeated judgment.There are a good many people in the world who do not seem to understand God’s judgments. They revolt against them as if they were unjustifiable. Even when they are pronounced against others they resent them, apparently entertaining the opinion that God, who is love, should never exact justice on anybody; and yet, when one studies the parables of Jesus as they relate to Divine judgment one’s highest reason is compelled to approve.John Watson in “The Mind of the Master” says, “If Heaven and hell—be they places or states— are made to hinge on the arbitrary will of the Almighty, or on the imperfect processes of human reason, then judgment will not be a fiasco, it will be an outrage.

It will be a climax of irresponsible despotism, whose monstrous injustice would leave Heaven without blessing and hell without curse.”As we see it there is one fatal defect in such reasoning, namely, that “the arbitrary will of the Almighty” should for a moment be brought to the low level of the imperfect processes of “human reason,” or even identified with “irresponsible despotism.”We believe that the arbitrary will of the Almighty is always and everywhere just, and right, and true and good; and when Watson continues further in the same discussion, “Reason cannot disagree with the reading of Jesus,” he comes on to safe ground, for, as he said, “Jesus rested judgment on the firm foundation of what each man is in the sight of the Eternal. He anticipated no protest in His parables against the justice of this evidence: none has ever been made from any quarter.

The wheat is gathered into the garner. What else could one do with wheat? The tares are burned in the fire. What else could one do with tares? When the net comes to the shore, the good fish are gathered into vessels; no one would throw them away. The bad are cast aside; no one would leave them to contaminate the good. The supercilious guests who did not value the great supper were left severely alone. If men do not care for Heaven, they will not be forced into it.

The outcasts, who had never dared to dream of such a supper, were compelled to come. If men hunger for the best, the best shall be theirs. The virgins who had taken the trouble of bringing oil went in to the marriage; they were evidently friends of the bridegroom: the virgins who had made no preparation were shut out from the marriage; they were mere strangers. Had the foolish virgins been rejected because they were a few minutes late, they would have had just cause of complaint. When the bridegroom declined their company for the simple reason that he did not know them, they had no answer. It would be equally out of place either for friends to be refused, or strangers to force admission to a marriage.

It is all fair and fitting—exactly as things ought to be: Jesus’ judgment is the very apotheosis of reason.”Nothing could be more unkind on the part of God than to let a nation sink to lower and lower levels of iniquity and never correct them by judgment.The most unwise parent, the parent who is absolutely unfit for his parenthood, is that parent who fondles his children, pours out upon them a wealth of sentimentality, permits them to do exactly as they please, never corrects and never chastises; but stands helplessly by and not only watches them increase in mischief, grow insolent in iniquity, but actually, by his silence, consents to their degradation. God is not of that sort!His fires are sent for cleansing; His whips are for correction; and neither of them voice so much of venom as of affection.

The blows He administers are administered in love, and Israel today, scattered, harried and peeled as she is, without a nation, without a king, without a country, is a better people than she would have been had God continued to pour His favor upon her festering immorality.THE The prophecy of His judgment and, at the same time, the justification of it, is written into Ezekiel 5:6-17.When we began to study these prophecies we found, first,The judgment against Israel will exceed that against the Gentiles.“Because ye multiplied more than the nations that are round about you, and have not walked in My statutes, neither have kept My judgments, neither have done according to the judgments of the nations that are round about you; “Therefore thus saith the Lord God; Behold, I, even I, am against thee, and will execute judgments in the midst of thee in the sight of the nations. “And I will do in thee that which I have not done, and whereunto I will not do any more the like, because of all thine abominations” (Ezekiel 5:7-9). Here again people have difficulty to understand. If Israel is better than the nations, why should her judgment be greater than is theirs? But that is not difficult to the paternal or material mind. On the contrary it is perfectly understood.I have brought up my family of children in neighborhoods where I felt there were many children who far exceeded them in mischief. It is not strange, is it, that if I corrected or chastised my own occasionally, I never chastised the others? That was not because I was indifferent to them; not because I had no kinship with them; not because I was not concerned for their future, but it was because their relationship was not as close, and consequently my responsibility for their conduct not so great.S.

E. Herrick in his volume “Some Heretics of Yesterday”, writing on Latimer, tells of how when Henry VIII. was on the throne, and after two or three clashes between his views and Latimer’s, Latimer was finally prompted to write him a letter.

These were his closing words,“Wherefore, gracious king, remember yourself: have pity upon your soul: and think that the day is even at hand when you shall give an account of your office, and of the blood that hath been shed by your sword. In the which day that your grace may stand steadfastly, and not be ashamed, but be clear and ready in your reckoning, and to have (as they say) your quietus est sealed with the blood of our Saviour Christ, which only serveth at that day, is my daily prayer to Him that suffered death for our sins, which also prayeth to His Father for grace to us continually, to whom be all honor and praise forever! Amen! The Spirit of God preserve your grace!”It is doubtful if Latimer would have written so frankly to any other king on earth. Why? Because he was his king.

God is justified in correcting His own.Dean Farrar was supposed to be liberal in theology, and yet Dean Farrar once said, “This growing indifference to the thought of future punishment, this philosophy which is so treacherous and so timid, seems to me, and I say it deliberately, at once an aberration of the intellect and an infatuation of the will. Oh, better surely that a sinner should tremble with agony, as the last leaves of the aspen shudder in the late autumnal wind, than that he should thus falsely presume that he knows more of God than God Himself hath taught him and, seeing, as has been said, That wrath is written in Scripture against his way of life, should hope that it is not wrath, but mercy, and so rush upon the bosses of the Almighty’s buckler as the wild horse rusheth into the battle.’”It is our judgment that no age preceding this has had greater need to face the final reckonings with fear than this age in which we live.

We may imagine that we are the favorites of the most High, but it is clear that we have forgotten that “whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom He receiveth”.Here nature’s forces were to execute furious judgment.“A third part of thee shall die with the pestilence, and with famine shall they be consumed in the midst of thee: and a third part shall fall by the sword round about thee; and I will scatter a third part into all the winds, and I will draw out a sword after them. “Thus shall Mine anger be accomplished, and I will cause My fury to rest upon them” (Ezekiel 5:12-13). Pestilence, famine, sword;—How many times that trinity of furies have been called to the correction of the nations.Did you ever stop to think of the world’s condition in the Spring of 1914? In Germany, militarism had triumphed; unwarranted ambition had taken possession of the people; beer guzzling and conceit were alike uniform, and the Darwin-Nietsche desire to conquer the earth was uppermost.In Belgium, the Roman apostasy was rampant with bigotry; the oppression of blacks in Belgian Africa, in behalf of rubber and ivory, had reached the point where it enraged the civilized world.In France, liquor and lust met nightly in high carnival, and a godless gaiety was the esprit de corps of the State.In Russia the Czarist oppression had enslaved the people, burdened them with taxation, kept them in the night of ignorance, eventuating in corruption, private and public.In England, the injustices in South Africa, and the opium trade in India, and the drink house at home constituted a trinity of infamy for which the nation should have, but did not, feel ashamed.In America, an increasing luxury was fuel to lust; a legalized liquor traffic was cursing not only the home land, but every nation on earth with which we had commercial relations; and a growing indifference to God was inimical to the cause of Christianity.While in the far Orient, in Turkey, Palestine, and the neighboring countries, and in all Southern Europe, God, when at all in their thoughts, was only there in corrupt definition and misty understanding.Then the war broke, and famine, and pestilence, and the sword rode on the swift wings of death and chastised each nation in turn until, in penitence, it promised reform. But, that which we planned in the hour of our sorrow, we have failed to perform when the agony was over, and once more the nations of the earth are standing with their backs to God.We have had Hague Councils, World Courts, and Leagues of Nations; they have spent hours upon hours in conference on world-improvement and world-peace, but up to the present we have no prospect whatever of either.Why? God has been ignored; God has been excluded from the councils; the Word of God has been forgotten; the warnings of God have been despised; and once more it looks possible for pestilence, famine, and the sword to fly their ways throughout the world, executing further judgment. Is it strange? Yes, but the strangeness, existing in the circumstances, is impenitence, our utter failure to learn from past experiences, our utter indifference to the Divinely proffered guidance.Oh, I know there are great men, philosophers and so-called statesmen, who will tell you these things must needs come, that they belong to nature’s ways, and the only explanation of them is in the circumstance that pestilence may break out at any moment; famine may strike any country at any season, and the sword be taken from its scabbard at any hour of the day or night; but the text does not indicate that these powers of death are free to execute their pleasure on the one hand, or are mere accidents of nature on the other hand.

The truth is, as the last sentence of this study indicates—“The Lord is over all.”Mark the phrases,“So will I send upon you famine and evil beasts, and they shall bereave thee; and pestilence and blood shall pass through thee; and I will bring the sword upon thee. I the Lord have spoken it”.He assumes the responsibility; He announces that He Himself, and not the forces of nature, is back of judgment.Men may as well make up their minds to that fact.

God is not inclined to set criminals free with a smile. God is not a Ma Ferguson who, for the sake of political office, would distribute these pardons to the most undeserving.God is the moral governor of the universe, and as such He seeks morality for men, and even threatens the insubordinate with the furies. If it were not so, the world would be in a pandemonium. If it were not so, man would have long since destroyed himself from the face of it, and left behind him a history as black and charred as was Jerusalem herself when the siege of A. D. 70 was ended.