Ezekiel's ideas of God cannot be said to be specially distinctive when compared with those of his immediate predecessors. The more thoughtful minds in Israel since the days of the prophet Amos, in the middle of the eighth century b.c., had been gradually emancipated from the old conceptions of Jehovah as a local deity. Isaiah and Jeremiah had in their day striven to deliver Judaism from the fetters imposed by the national limitations of God's purpose or His sphere of work. God had other ends in view than to uphold the Jewish kingdom and national polity. Jehovah's purpose was the establishment of a righteous moral order in, and by means of, Israel as an instrument. But that instrument must be conformed to its moral end. His sphere of work was not Israel only, but the world. This universal sovereignty, taught successively by Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah, is presupposed in the oracles of Ezekiel. The destinies of foreign nations are subject to His supreme control, and oracles are devoted to the fate of individual races or kingdoms by all these prophets. Jehovah brought the Syrians from Kir and the Philistines from Caphtor, as well as the Israelites from Egypt (Amos). Assyria was the rod of His Divine wrath for the chastisement of guilty Israel (Isaiah), and similarly Nebuchadnezzar, according to Ezekiel, had accomplished God's judgment against Tyre, and, as a faithful servant, deserved a reward for so doing.
Every prophet, like every religious teacher, must finally be judged by what he has to tell us about the mind and will and character of God.1 [Note: W. F. Lofthouse.]
1. Under the expression “the name of God,” the prophet sums up his ideas of what God essentially is. That name must not be profaned; what God wrought was “for his name's sake,” to prevent its profanation; the pity which He would show to Israel was to be exercised for the same reason, and not for their sakes; in the coming time that name was to be known and had in honour by Israel; here we may say that “name” is almost equivalent to “glory”; and in the future God will be jealous (i.e., zealous) for the honour of His holy name. All His dealings with Israel have been and are and will be “for his name's sake.” They are designed to manifest His one unchangeable nature. Israel had merited nothing but destruction in the wilderness, but He spared them for His name's sake, “that it should not be profaned in the sight of the nations.” So now it is not for any merit on Israel's part that they will be recalled from exile, but for Jehovah's name's sake. “I do not this for your sake, O house of Israel, but for mine holy name.” The judgment of the nations and the redemption of Israel are both a sovereign exercise of Divine grace in accordance with the immutable character of the Divine nature.
The name by which the prophet calls the God of Israel is “Jehovah,” or “the Lord Jehovah.” Whether the name “Lord” expresses something judicial or not may be uncertain; it expresses at least something sovereign; but the other name “Jehovah” in Ezekiel's age expressed the idea of God absolutely. Jehovah has all power; the nations as well as Israel are in His hand. He brought Israel out of Egypt, and gave them the good land of Canaan, and He will disperse them among the nations, delivering them over to the king of Babylon; but yet again He will recover them out of the hand of those who have served themselves of them, and will save them with an everlasting salvation. With the same omnipotence He rules among the nations. His judgments fall upon the peoples around Israel-Ammon, Moab, and Edom-whose name He causes to perish among the nations; but they light also on Tyre and even upon Egypt, which He gives into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar. He breaks the arm of Pharaoh and strikes the sword out of his hand, putting His own sword into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar. He brandishes His sword in the eyes of all the nations, while creation shudders and the waters of the great deep stand motionless. He puts His hook in the jaws of Gog, and brings him up from the ends of the earth, revealing Himself to the most distant lands and the far-off islands of the sea. He reverses the past, bringing again the captivity of Sodom and her daughters. He sends forth His life-giving Spirit, and the nation that was dead, and whose bones were scattered, feels the breath of life and rises to its feet a great army. His rule of the nations is the judgment of the nations; and His verdict upon a nation is seen in the last act which it plays upon the stage of history and is eternal.
Doctrine that is aglow with holy emotion is kindly and uplifting, but if it settles into cold and frosty forms it is apt to become cruel. The opposition in this case [to evangelistic work] chiefly arose from a too sharp Calvinism which went far beyond Calvin himself and became deadly cold. Martin writes: “Calvinism is imperialism. Many of my countrymen seem to confound God's Sovereignty with arbitrariness or the worst form of absolutism, and to exclude from the matter of salvation all will of the creature whatsoever, just as others exclude the Divine will and make it depend wholly on the human. God's sovereignty is a sovereignty of love. How grand a thought it is that we have the Divine will on our side. But His will works through our wills, not doing them violence, but acting constitutionally. That God's will is for our salvation is the chief incentive to our wills-their greatest inspiration. The truth is that we are upborne and upheld by the Divine will, which is as a stream that bears all who cast themselves upon it onward into the Kingdom of God.”1 [Note: N. C. Macfarlane, Rev. Donald John Martin (1914), 91.]
2. Closely connected with the conceptions of the glory and the name of Jehovah is the conception of His holiness. The term “holy” applied to Jehovah is very elastic, and may embrace much or little, one thing or another. To call Jehovah “holy” tells nothing in regard to Him further than that He is God, with the attributes of God. The idea has to be distinguished from the details brought at different times under it. There might be included under the idea the sole Godhead of Jehovah; such natural attributes of Deity as power, manifested in the rule of nature, or in judgments on the enemies of His people; moral attributes, as punitive righteousness, or ethical purity; and finally physical, or what might be called æsthetic, purity. When Jehovah reveals Himself as that which He is, or in any of His attributes and aspects of that which He is, He “sanctifies” Himself. Hence to “magnify” or “glorify” Himself or set His glory among the nations are particulars coming under the more general “sanctify.” In like manner men “sanctify” Jehovah when they recognize that which He is or ascribe to Him His true nature. On the other hand, when the iniquities of His people constrain Him to act in such a way as to disguise any of His great attributes, such as His power, in the eyes of the nations, so that they misinterpret His Being, his holy name is “profaned,” as on the contrary He is “sanctified” in the eyes of the nations by the restoration of His people and their defence when restored and righteous.
Rightly to understand what Yahweh's holiness meant to Ezekiel, we must have undergone Ezekiel's experiences; we must have seen the women weeping for Tammuz, and bringing to the crowds who thronged the temple courts at Jerusalem all the lewd ideas of the baser Oriental mythology; we must have watched the twenty-five men deliberately defying Yahweh in Yahweh's own house, or Nebuchadnezzar plying his divinations to decide whether Judah or Ammon should be his first victim. We must have marked with scorn and fear like Ezekiel's the degraded yet alluring idolatries of heathenism, so dangerous because so similar to the rites to which Israel had already been accustoming herself for years in Palestine; we must have grown indignant over the torrent of commercial dishonesty and greed which had swept away the remnants of the old Israelite simplicity and goodness, and wept in anguish at the thought that the city which had been created to be the joy of the whole earth, had been humbled by the wicked folly of her own children before the derision and contempt of the heathen world. To Ezekiel, unable to distinguish between the ritual and moral elements in religion, the practices which he saw around him were abominations as horrible as sacrilege and incest are to us.1 [Note: W. F. Lofthouse.]
If now in Christ, God's nature fully discloses itself as love, and it is in regard to His love that He claims to be the One beside whom there is no other, and the Incomparable, what the word holy describes is the majesty and sovereignty of His love in general, but in particular the fact that it is true to itself, as shown by its reaction against sin. Of course this is not to say that holiness takes its place alongside of love, and that an adjustment must be brought about between these two fundamental attributes of the Divine nature, as they are supposed to be. On the contrary, it is because it is perfect love that the love of God is Holy Love. Its reaction against sin is itself love, because it is the means for overcoming the opposition to love; and should it punish any persistent opposition to the supreme revelation of love, by departing from its importunate appeals, this also has its ground in the nature of love which cannot force itself. In this way we understand the circumstance that, in the New Testament as a matter of fact, the word holy is seldom found; but where it occurs, its main purpose is to give expression to the serious side of love, which is necessarily implied in its nature.2 [Note: T. Haering, The Christian Faith, i. 2 4.]
3. Lastly, Jehovah is God over all, and the self-exaltation of peoples or their rulers in any place of the world, as when the prince of Tyre says, “I am God,” or when the Pharaoh says, “My river is mine, I have made it,” is an offence against the majesty of Him who alone is exalted. What might be called moral forces are no less subservient to His will and ruled by Him than those that are physical. The prophet, indeed, represents Jehovah as the Author of all that occurs, whether on the stage of history or in the minds of men. Even the evil that men do is in many instances ascribed to Him, without men, however, being thereby relieved of responsibility for it. In one aspect men's deeds are their own, in another they are occasioned by God. Jerusalem sets her bloodshed on a bare rock, without covering it; but from another point of view it is the Lord Himself who sets it on a bare rock, “that it might cause fury to come up to take vengeance.” A prophet allows himself to be enticed, and entering into the purposes of the people-whitewashing the wall which they build-speaks such a prophetic word as fosters their delusive hopes. It is the Lord that deceives this prophet, that both he and those whom he deludes may perish together. The laws given to the people were “good”-statutes of life. But the people neglected and disobeyed them; they perverted their meaning, extending the law of the offering of the firstborn even to children, whom they burnt in the fire. This perversion was caused by God Himself: He gave them laws that were not good, that He might destroy them. Evil things come into the mind of God, He devises an evil device, saying, “I will go to them that are at quiet, … to take the spoil, and to take the prey.” It is Jehovah that puts hooks in his jaws and brings him forth: “I will bring thee against my land, that the nations may know me, when I shall be sanctified in thee.” These representations in Ezekiel are similar to others in Scripture, and, no doubt, raise difficult questions. Perhaps two things may be said in general: first, Jehovah is nowhere represented as causing nations or men to do evil acts, which they are not also represented as doing of their own accord and with evil intent; and secondly, Jehovah is nowhere represented as the Author of sin in such a sense that He causes an innocent mind to sin.
