The spirit told Ezekiel that the princes were the men that devised mischief and gave wicked counsels to the city. How often have we seen this prostitution of great mental power and great official authority through the service of evil! Imagine the picture of five-and-twenty men, the princes of Israel, all given over to the conception of evil policies and the execution of selfish designs! We shall miss the whole purpose of Divine revelation if we suppose that evil is local, or that it is confined to the ignorant and the poor. Evil is universal: it is in the thrones of the nations, as well as in the hovels and huts of poverty; the king has wandered as far from the standard of righteousness as has the meanest subject of his crown. Education when not sanctified is simply an instrument of evil. Great social station, when it is divorced from the action of a healthy conscience, only gives a man leverage, by the working of which he can do infinite social mischief. Moral security, therefore, is not in circumstances, but in character. When princes are right and just, wise and patriotic, it does not follow that the people will follow their example, or reproduce their excellences; but when the princes are of a contrary mind it is easy to imagine how their great influence may contribute vastly to the spread of wrong thinking and mischievous action. Religious apostasy means social anarchy. When the princes ceased to pray they ceased to regard human nature as of any value: slaughter became a pastime; heaps of slain men were passed by as mere commonplaces, and the whole city became as but a cauldron in which the flesh of men might be boiled. But God Himself says He will make this use of the city; He will make it a cauldron, and they who supposed it was a place of security shall find what uses providence can make of human arrangements. The Lord says that He is proceeding on account of the sins of the people, saying, “I know the things that come into your mind, every one of them.” The empire of the mind is supposed to be the exclusive property of the individual: what brother can take out of his brother’s heart all the thoughts that live there? What man can read the mind of his dearest friend, and be as familiar with that friend’s motives as he is with that friend’s conduct? The mind can shut out the closest observer, yet the one observer that it cannot exclude is the living God. The things that come into the mind determine the real character of the mind of man, Conduct is but a short measure by which to estimate a man’s character. (J. Parker, D. D.)
A vision of priesthoods
I. The destruction of a corrupt priesthood. The evil of the priesthood of that city and day is seen in this vision to consist in--
1. Their unhallowed designs and influence. The inventions of the genius of evil are, as they were then, often manifold and deep.
2. Their contempt of sacred things. They actually play about “the cauldron” that Jeremiah had seen in a vision of retribution. Familiarity with sacred things is perilous to men who lose true sacredness of living, for they are tempted to use their wit to cover their shallowness, with regard to themes wherein they should “stand in awe and sin not.”
3. Their false security. Their assertion about the Chaldean invasion, “It is not near,” illustrates the presumptuousness that ever marks mere professors of piety.
4. Their conformity to evil associations. Whereas the one consecrating cry of all true priesthoods is, “Be ye separate,” the histories of all corrupt priesthoods reveal a conformity to the world with which they have to do, that may well be charged against them in the words heard in the vision, “Ye have done after the manner of the heathen.”
5. Their liability to terrible retribution. The death of Pelatiah, at the very time when Ezekiel was pronouncing the doom of this priesthood, is an emblem of retribution history records, and prophecy predicts on all the false.
II. The indications of a man belonging to the true priesthood.
1. Open to Divine illumination. As Ezekiel was “lifted up” by the Spirit, and afterwards had that Spirit “fall upon him”--indicating, surely, special contact with the Divine; so there is the promise to every regenerate man “that he shall see heavens opened.”
2. Sensitive to impressions from human life. To be Divinely enlightened does not indicate that there will be any functionalism, any stoicism in the man.
3. A wide conscious brotherliness. The cry to the exile, “thy brethren, thy brethren,” indicated that not alone in the twenty-five who had fallen, but in the scattered throngs that would be gathered again, he recognised a brotherhood. So our Master has taught us, “all ye are brethren.”
4. Commissioned to proclaim inspiring promises. The priestly prophet was to utter as surely as was Isaiah, and every God-sent messenger, a “comfort ye.”
III. The formation of a true priesthood.
I. Divinely collected. God knew where the scattered were, and would gather them again. The eye of God resting alike on all classes and castes, churches and countries, discovers the genuine men. He has been a “sanctuary for a little time” to them in the midst of uncongenial pursuits, hostile circumstances, adverse experiences; but from every such Babylon of evil He will gather them for His sacred work.
2. Divinely regenerated. No words could more forcibly express a complete moral and spiritual reformation than “the words in which the eternal Spirit of Goodness declares, “I will put a new spirit within you, and I will take the stony heart out of their flesh, and will give them a heart of flesh.”
3. Divinely adopted. “They shall be My people,” etc. (Urijah R. Thomas.)
