1. Of Ezekiel's life and circumstances before he was carried into captivity with King Jehoiachin in the year 597 we have no direct information, beyond the facts that he was a priest and that his father's name was Buzi. One or two inferences, however, may be regarded as reasonably certain. We know that that first deportation of Judæans to Babylon was confined to the nobility, the men of war, and the craftsmen; and since Ezekiel was neither a soldier nor an artisan, his place in the train of captives must have been due to his social position. He must have belonged to the upper ranks of the priesthood, who formed part of the aristocracy of Jerusalem. He was thus a member of the house of Zadok; and his familiarity with the details of the Temple ritual makes it probable that he had actually officiated as a priest in the national sanctuary.
Moreover, a careful study of the book gives the impression that he was no longer quite a young man when he received his call to the prophetic office. He appears as one whose views of life are already matured, who has outlived the buoyancy and enthusiasm of youth, and learned to estimate the moral possibilities of life with the sobriety that comes through experience. This impression is confirmed by the fact that he was married and had a house of his own from the beginning of his work, and probably at the time of his captivity. But the most important fact of all is that Ezekiel had lived through a period of unprecedented public calamity, and one fraught with the most momentous consequences for the future of religion. Moving in the highest circles of society, in the centre of the national life, he must have been fully cognisant of the grave events in which no thoughtful observer could fail to recognize the tokens of the approaching dissolution of the Hebrew State.
One strong and beneficial influence a vigorous and high-minded aristocracy is calculated to exert upon a robust and sound people. I have had occasion, in speaking of Homer, to say very often, and with much emphasis, that he is in the grand style. It is the chief virtue of a healthy and uncorrupted aristocracy, that it is, in general, in this grand style. That elevation of character, that noble way of thinking and behaving, which is an eminent gift of nature to some individuals, is also often generated in whole classes of men (at least when these come of a strong and good race) by the possession of power, by the importance and responsibility of high station, by habitual dealing with great things, by being placed above the necessity of constantly struggling for little things. And it is the source of great virtues. It may go along with a not very quick or open intelligence; but it cannot well go along with a conduct vulgar and ignoble. A governing class imbued with it may not be capable of intelligently leading the masses of a people to the highest pitch of welfare for them; but it sets them an invaluable example of qualities without which no really high welfare can exist.1 [Note: Matthew Arnold, Mixed Essays.]
2. Ezekiel's call to the prophetic office came in the fifth year of his captivity (592 b.c.). It took with him, as with the prophets generally, the form of a vision. This vision is described at length in chapters 1 to 3. In reading these chapters we are impressed with the contrast which they present to the account of Isaiah's call (Isa_6:1-13). Isaiah, with a few strokes, sets the whole scene before us. Ezekiel, on the other hand, goes into elaborate detail, describing the minutest features of the vision. This literary method meets us not only here but in various parts of the book.
We must think of Ezekiel as having left the town or village in which he dwelt, and going forth alone to the banks of the river Chebar. There came upon him that strange ineffable thrill through nerve and brain for which the prophets of Israel could find no other expression than that “the hand of the Lord was on them,” the ecstasy of one who “falls into a trance, having his eyes open”; and to him, in that ecstasy, as afterwards to Stephen and to Christ, the “heavens were opened,” and he saw “visions of God.” The theophany seemed to Ezekiel, as Jeremiah's vision had seemed to him, to come from the North, partly, perhaps, because the expectations of men turned to that region as pregnant with the new nations, Scythians, Medes, Persians, and the like, and the new events, which were to determine the coming history of his people; partly also, because it was associated, as in Job_37:22, with the idea of clearness and of brightness, and so with that of the “terrible majesty” of God. And there he beheld a vision of unutterable glory, the nearest approximation to which, as a help to our powers of imagining the unimaginable, may be found in the marvellous brightness, incandescent and irradiant, of a northern aurora.
There are times when God reasons with us, gently and at length; and though He has from the first the best of the argument, He permits the discussion to continue, so that we may help to work our own conviction. He allowed Moses, He allowed Jeremiah, He allowed Luther, to discuss the new call of life; but with Ezekiel He seems almost peremptory. We may confidently assume that there was that in Ezekiel's character which demanded such urgency on God's part. Did not Christ also, while He would almost dissuade the eagerness of one too forward disciple, quicken another's halting step as by a strong pull of the hand?-“Leave the dead to bury their own dead; but go thou and publish abroad the kingdom of God.” Ezekiel, too, might have been tempted to wait for the funeral of a dying nation's glory, mute and pensive and unfruitful, but that, even while he sat in his house, “the hand of the Lord God fell there” upon him. He yielded himself entirely to its rule; it led him through gloomy shades and close to many a shuddering precipice; but its very absoluteness was his peace.1 [Note: H. E. Lewis, By the River Chebar, 8.]
What a blessed repose and rest doth that soul enjoy that hath resigned itself and gives a constant, unintermittent consent to the Divine government; when it is an agreed, undisputed thing that God shall always lead and prescribe, and it follow and obey.2 [Note: John Howe.]
3. Some years later the prophet passed from the mount of visions to the bleak and narrow passes of experience. One morning, as he was going forth to his task, the word of the Lord came to him: “Son of man, behold, I take away from thee the desire of thine eyes with a stroke: yet neither shalt thou mourn nor weep, neither shall thy tears run down.” He went on his way, dazed, but faithful to his duty: “So I spake unto the people in the morning; and at even my wife died; and I did in the morning as I was commanded.” The story is told in briefest words, and not for its own sake, we might say, but because of its symbolic value to the nation: “Thus Ezekiel is unto you a sign.” But we are surely not to understand that the wife died because of the exigencies of a symbol. Man and man's life have a value of their own to God; they are more precious to Him than symbols can ever be. They may become symbolic by a secondary purpose, but man is more than the allegory. Perhaps we may fairly infer that the prophet had his temptation in the very sweetness of the home. Certainly men meant to be prophets have sometimes been spoilt by a too sunny, a too easeful, hearth. May this account for God's peremptoriness at first in impressing Ezekiel into the prophetic office? The desire of his eyes had, it may be, unconsciously made him dull at times to follow the gleam.
She is mine,
My fair white lamb, mine only one; whilst Thou
Hast many in Thy calm fold on the hill
Of frankincense and myrrh. Lord, be content
To lead Thy flock where shining waters sleep,
And leave the poor man in the wilderness
His one ewe lamb!
So he might have pleaded, but he had to yield her up. The morning light was clouded with the foreshadow of bereavement; still he spoke God's word:
For no weak tears
May fall upon the sacred fire; no sound
Of breaking human heart may mar the full
Majestic music of a Prophet's voice,
Speaking to all the ages from the mount
Of cloud and vision.
The very bareness of the story makes the tragedy more real. It is as if a thin, helpless mist fluttered above an earthquake's chasm, making it more dreadful in half hiding it. Had he written more, we might have felt less. He simply went forth, with bowed head, through death's “nest of nights,”
To speak for God-with such strange calm as God
Can give to dying men, or men with hearts
More dark than death could make them.
“At even my wife died”-their last day was spent apart-“and I did in the morning as I was commanded.” He took up life's burden in death's very sanctuary, and went on bravely till the end.
By my ruined home
I stand to speak for God, and stretch my hands,
Emptied of their sweet treasure, in God's name
To all the people.
John Semple was of Ezekiel's school, as the following passage from Patrick Walker's story of his life shows: “That night after his wife died, he spent the whole ensuing night in prayer and meditation in his garden. The next morning, one of his elders coming to see him, and lamenting his great loss and want of rest, he replied, ‘I declare I have not, all night, had one thought of the death of my wife, I have been so taken up in meditating on heavenly things. I have been this night on the banks of Ulai, plucking an apple here and there!' ”
So the ancient struggle is continued-God against the home; and God has still His victories. But His victories finally mean the re-establishment of the home, in a “home not made with hands.”
And when at length
The evening-time of my long day shall come,
And God shall give me leave to lay aside
The prophet's mournful mantle for the robe
Of joy and light-when at His gate I find
An everlasting entrance, there my love
Shall meet me smiling.
“And I did in the morning as I was commanded.”1 [Note: H. E. Lewis, By the River Chebar, 16.]
4. The picture which the prophet gives of the life of the exiles and their circumstances is singularly colourless. His interests were exclusively religious, and any insight which he affords us is into the religious condition of his fellow-captives, from whose mouth he occasionally quotes an expression very suggestive as to their state of mind. His own mind was occupied with the largest conceptions, and the exiles were to his eye representatives of a larger subject. When bidden go to “them of the captivity” he felt sent to the “house of Israel,” and while addressing his fellow-exiles he fancied before him the people in Canaan or the nation scattered abroad throughout the world. This identification of the exiles with the people as a whole, and this occupation of the prophet's mind with great national interests, make it difficult to know how far in his apparent addresses to the exiles he is touching upon their actual practices. Nothing is more likely than that the captives continued the evil courses in which they had grown up at home, so far as this was possible in a foreign land. They certainly shared in the fanaticism or optimism of those left in the country, and heard with incredulity the prophet's predictions of the speedy downfall of the city. It is known from Jeremiah that there were false prophets among the exiles, who confirmed them in their delusive hopes, and Ezekiel might refer to these prophets in such passages as chapters 13 and 14.
The false prophet in Jerusalem and in Babylon was often a man endowed for higher things, but robbed of his reward through fear of his times. He suffered the smile of an age to disinherit his soul of God's perfect praise. And we who live here and now are similarly tried and tempted. Europe to-day with mailed fist bids its prophets prophesy smooth things. Unpatriotic has almost become synonymous with speaking the unpleasant truth too plainly. But there is still that stands true. Archbishop Abbot stood alone in that unholy Court. “Shall I, to please King James, and to shelter and satisfy his vile favourites-shall I send my soul to hell?” shouted Archbishop Abbot to one of the King's emissaries. “No, I will not do it.” So Jeremiah stood in Jerusalem “alone,” because of God's “hand”: “As for me, I have not hastened from being a pastor to follow thee: neither have I desired the woeful day; thou knowest: that which came out of my lips was right before thee.” And so Ezekiel stood in Babylon: “Behold, I have made thy face strong against their faces, and thy forehead strong against their foreheads. As an adamant harder than flint have I made thy forehead: fear them not, neither be dismayed at their looks, though they be a rebellious house.” It is easier to be honest in a foreign tongue under such circumstances; it would have been so much more comfortable for Ezekiel if he had been allowed to pronounce his awful words of doom in any other than his mother's tongue. But it was not to be so. “For thou art not sent to a people of a strange speech and of an hard language, but to the house of Israel.”1 [Note: H. E. Lewis, By the River Chebar, 25.]
5. Once his ministry was terribly vindicated by what seemed to be a direct act of Providence. He stood face to face with the princes of the people, denouncing in scathing terms their social iniquities, and pronouncing immediate judgments upon them. “And it came to pass, when I prophesied, that Pelatiah, the son of Benaiah, died.” Who can hate the dead? Charlotte Brontë, watching the dead face of the brother who had wronged them all so much, felt, as she never felt before, the supremacy of forgiveness. “All his errors-to speak plainly, all his vices-seemed nothing to me in that moment; every wrong he had done, every pain he had caused, vanished; his sufferings only were remembered; the wrench to the natural affections only was left. If man can thus experience total oblivion of his fellow's imperfections, how much more can the Eternal Being, who made man, forgive His creature?” Something of the same reconciling emotion swept over Ezekiel, seeing his dead prince. “Then fell I down upon my face, and cried with a loud voice, and said, Ah Lord God! wilt thou make a full end of the remnant of Israel?” And it is interesting to observe that the rest of the chapter contains a most gracious hope of restoration, and an evangelical promise of the new heart. It is well that he who brings down the lightning should himself be humbled by its coming.
Have you ever, in your theological quests, studied the face of the dead? Is there not also a revelation there? We have looked upon many-faces of poor, insignificant people, faces of indifferent livers; also upon great faces. And what do we find there? For one thing, the deep religiousness of death. All religion is there; its mystery, its sublimity. No one can pass irreverently into a death-chamber. The face there, in its grand, calm immobility, with everything of littleness wiped out, speaks of the essential greatness of man, of the soul. And is there not here something more? Is there not here nature's seal of uttermost forgiveness, her seal of the goodness, the love that is above all? That rugged, worn face, furrowed in life with so many lines of care and struggle-she has wiped out all that as though it were nothing, and brought to it the sweetness, the freshness of a little child. A child we come into this world, with loving faces all around us. And this dead, beautiful face-is it not that also of a child, born into another world, and again with loving faces all around it?1 [Note: J. Brierley, Faith's Certainties (1914), 120.]
