Dr. Keith Essex · The Master's Seminary · 74 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Keith Essex, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
This session gives you the map for the whole book of Ezekiel. Dr. Essex traces the glory of Yahweh as it appears in Babylon, departs the temple eastward, and returns from the east to fill the future house, then works through the book's other governing themes, its purpose for the exiles, its unusually clear structure, and the strange dating of its opening verse. Listen for why the glory seen in Babylon matters so much to a people who thought God's presence lived in one building, and for the long silence between the start of the siege and the day Ezekiel's mouth was opened.
Ezekiel 1 piles up words of analogy, something like glowing metal, figures resembling four living beings, because the prophet is not seeing the unmediated glory itself: verse 28 names the vision the appearance of the likeness of the glory of Yahweh. Glory carries the idea of weightiness, the standing that belongs to Yahweh alone, the outward expression of the inward reality of his greatness. From the midst of the vision a voice speaks; in 3:12 the Spirit lifts Ezekiel with the sound, blessed be the glory of Yahweh in his place; he sits stunned among the exiles seven days; and at 3:23 he goes out to the plain and the glory stands there, like the glory by the river Chebar, and again he falls on his face. The first vision is dated to July 31, 593 BC on our calendar, with the plain vision a week later in early August, flowing into the sign-acts of chapters 4 and 5.
About a year later Ezekiel is carried in vision to Jerusalem, and in chapters 8 to 11 he watches the glory leave the temple. At 8:4 the glory of the God of Israel is there, like the appearance he saw in the plain, the same presence that filled Solomon's temple in 1 Kings 8 and rested over the mercy seat, the visible presence Israel had known since the tabernacle in the wilderness. The staggering claim is that this same glory has been seen in Babylon: Yahweh's presence is not restricted to one place, and he displays his glory under his sovereign initiative wherever he pleases. At 11:23 the glory rises from the midst of the city and stands over the mountain east of the city, and the vision leaves Ezekiel among the exiles in Chaldea. Judah will be exiled and the temple destroyed, yet the godly remnant can be assured that Yahweh is with them wherever they go.
After 11:23 the glory goes unmentioned until chapter 39, where, with Israel's restoration and the collapse of God's enemies, Yahweh sets his glory among the nations and the house of Israel knows that I am Yahweh their God from that day onward. Then in 43:1 to 5 Ezekiel is led to the east gate: the glory of the God of Israel comes from the way of the east, like the vision when he came to destroy the city, like the vision by the river Chebar, and the glory fills the house. Where did we leave the glory in chapter 11? Over the mountain east of the city. The glory that departed is the very glory that returns, so, Essex quips, you had better learn Ezekiel 1, because it describes the glory of the millennium too. The book's title could be from glory to glory: the glory that was in the first temple, and the glory that will fill the future house.
Scholars have called the apostle John the New Testament theologian of Ezekiel. Revelation draws heavily on the book: Essex, following Beale, still gives Daniel first place proportionally for Revelation's allusions, but in sheer volume Ezekiel supplies as much or more. And John 1:14, the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, shows the glory seen incarnate for a moment within history, with the transfiguration displaying the glory of the return. Some therefore read chapters 40 to 46 symbolically: Jesus is the new temple, the returning glory already came at the incarnation, and we live past what Ezekiel foresaw. Essex flags the debate for a later session and will argue instead for a literal fulfillment after Israel's restoration, a literal house in Jerusalem filled with the glory. But every orthodox commentator agrees on the envelope: the book opens with a vision of the glory and closes with the vision of its return.
All the prophets proclaim Yahweh's holiness, sovereignty, and glory, but exegetes have long noted the distribution: Isaiah bears a particular emphasis on Yahweh's holiness, Jeremiah on his sovereignty over the nations, and Ezekiel on his glory, the weightiness and standing that no one else in the universe possesses.
Seventy-three times in forty-eight chapters the clause falls like a hammer: they will know that I am Yahweh. Israel will know it through judgment, beginning in chapter 5, when my wrath is spent they will know that I Yahweh have spoken in my zeal; and through restoration, dominating chapters 34 to 39, where Yahweh is blunt: I am not restoring you because you are worthy but for the honor of my name, just as the Torah said he chose Israel not for might or number but because of the promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And the nations will know it through God's hand, above all in Gog of the land of Magog, whom God hooks by the jaws and drags onto the mountains of Israel: I shall be sanctified through you before their eyes, O Gog. Gog, says Essex, is the last Pharaoh: as God raised up Pharaoh so the nations would know who Yahweh was, so at the end the nations will see and know, and will understand that Israel went into exile for its iniquity, not because Yahweh failed.
Ninety-three times Yahweh addresses the prophet as son of man, in Semitic idiom one characterized by humanity; Block translates it simply human being. The contrast is the point: Ezekiel has just seen the appearance of the glory and fallen on his face, and the voice says, human being, stand on your feet, the grandeur of God over against the mere man he will use, sustained to the last vision, son of man, have you seen this? A fourth theme: though Ezekiel speaks to Judean exiles, he calls them the house of Israel, using house of Judah only five times, chiefly in the enigmatic sign of lying 390 days for Israel and 40 for Judah in chapter 4, whose exact meaning, Essex admits, no one finally knows. The point of the usage is that in exile the old distinction between the two nations has dissolved: all of the seed of Abraham is one house of Israel in captivity and in the promised future.
Two further themes: the temple that was and the temple that will be, the house that held the glory in the past and the house that will be the specific location of the same glory in the future, with Leviticus essential background, especially for chapters 40 to 46. And the Spirit of Yahweh: the Spirit enters Ezekiel and sets him on his feet (2:2, 3:24), lifts him up and takes him away (3:12, 3:14), moving the prophet throughout his ministry.
Ezekiel concentrates first on the coming destruction of Jerusalem: the first half of the book leads up to it, and the fall of the city and temple were necessary measures for the God of glory to employ in correcting his disobedient people. But that is not Yahweh's final word: in the future he will restore a repentant remnant to the land and establish with them a new temple that includes his personal presence, so that the first temple was only a prelude to a greater experience of Yahweh. Past failure, present judgment, future restoration: after Isaiah and Jeremiah the pattern is familiar, told now with a different vantage, a prophet in Babylon speaking to exiles just before the temple fell, then loosed to speak of what God will do.
Whatever is hard in Ezekiel, the structure is not. After the prologue, virtually all commentators see a threefold division: oracles of judgment against Israel (1 to 24), oracles against the nations (25 to 32), and oracles of restoration (33 to 48). A minority takes a twofold division beginning the restoration at chapter 25, reasoning that judging the nations is the first step of restoring Israel. Ezekiel's own dating formulas, it came about in such a year, such a month, mark the seams, though interestingly the formula of 24:1 is not repeated until chapter 26, even though every exegete places the major break between 24 and 25.
The prologue is unique: verse 1 is first person, the thirtieth year, while verses 2 and 3, best read in parentheses as the NASB prints them, shift to third person and translate the date: the fifth year of King Jehoiachin's exile, the baseline Ezekiel uses for the rest of the book. Ezekiel is the priest, son of Buzi, otherwise unknown. Priests entered their ministry, per Numbers 4, in their thirtieth year, and Essex takes the number literally as Ezekiel's age: in the very year he would have begun coming into Yahweh's presence in Jerusalem, Yahweh sovereignly came to him in Babylon, a thousand miles from the temple, where he could never offer a sacrifice. God made him instead a priest-prophet whose ministry would display the glory of God to the exiles.
Chapter 8, about fourteen months after the call, raises the question whether Ezekiel physically left Babylon; the answer is no. His body lies on his side through the 430 days of the sign-act of chapter 4, which runs from 593 into September 592 BC, and 8:1 shows him sitting in his house with the elders of Judah before him when the hand of the Lord falls on him: he is carried in vision to Jerusalem while the exiles still see him in Babylon, and when the vision leaves him at the end of chapter 11 he tells them all he has seen. The report brought little comfort: the exiles were hearing from their prophets that they would soon go home, and Ezekiel tells them the glory has already left the temple that was supposedly their guarantee.
Chapter 24 is dated to the very day the king of Babylon laid siege to Jerusalem, January 588 BC: the boiling pot set on the fire pictures the city under siege, and Ezekiel's wife dies with the command that he show no grief, picturing God's own response to Jerusalem receiving the judgment due her. The siege was a waiting game of roughly two and a half years, the Babylonians starving a walled city with its own water supply until, food gone, they rammed the walls in August 586; the famine grew so severe that, as Jeremiah records and Lamentations will echo, the besieged resorted to cannibalism, fathers consuming sons. From 24:1 to 33:20 Ezekiel speaks no more about Jerusalem's present until 33:21 to 22: in the twelfth year, January 585, five months after the fall, refugees arrive saying, the city has been taken, and the evening before they came the Lord had opened his mouth. No message travels faster than a refugee; the prophet in Babylon waited five months for news. From that opened mouth flow the restoration oracles, including the glory's return in 43:4.
The work on Ezekiel is Daniel Block's two-volume NICOT exegetical commentary, some 1,500 pages representing fifteen years of labor, with, Block told the seminary, another 1,500 pages edited out; read the text as English readers and mine the footnotes, and prefer it far above Allen's two-volume Word Biblical Commentary. Second, and the best starting place: Ralph Alexander's premillennial work in the Expositor's Bible Commentary, one of the finest available. For English interpretation, Feinberg's classic Moody volume gives the flow of the book chapter by chapter, and Cooper's NAC volume, though somewhat thin like Feinberg, serves as a compendium of previous commentators with salient preaching applications. Expositionally, Iain Duguid's new NIVAC volume, from his doctoral work in Ezekiel, is the strongest in that series on the prophets, in Essex's judgment surpassing Oswalt on Isaiah: amillennial in its contemporary application, church as new Israel, which Essex cannot follow, but excellent in historical-grammatical interpretation and spiritual principle.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Tap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all twenty-two are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. What does Ezekiel 1:28 say the prophet actually saw?
2. What does glory fundamentally convey in Ezekiel?
3. What is the theological significance of the glory appearing in Babylon?
4. Where does the glory of Yahweh come to rest at the end of chapter 11?
5. From which direction does the glory return to the temple in Ezekiel 43?
6. Why does Essex say you had better learn Ezekiel 1?
7. Which apostle has been called the New Testament theologian of Ezekiel?
8. What distribution of emphases do exegetes note among the three major prophets?
9. How often does the clause they will know that I am Yahweh occur in Ezekiel?
10. What reason does Yahweh give for restoring Israel?
11. Why does Essex call Gog the last Pharaoh?
12. How does Block translate son of man, and what is the address meant to convey?
13. Why does Ezekiel call the Judean exiles the house of Israel?
14. What is the purpose of the book as Essex states it?
15. What is the majority threefold division of Ezekiel?
16. What dating baseline does Ezekiel use throughout the book?
17. How does Essex understand the thirtieth year of Ezekiel 1:1?
18. Did Ezekiel physically travel to Jerusalem in chapters 8 to 11?
19. What sign was given the very day the siege of Jerusalem began?
20. What was Ezekiel forbidden to do when his wife died?
21. How long after Jerusalem's destruction did Ezekiel receive the news, and how?
22. Which commentary does Essex call the work on Ezekiel, and which is his recommended starting place?
All twenty-two correct. Lecture 11 is complete.
The exiles assumed Yahweh's presence lived in the temple, and Ezekiel saw the same glory in Babylon. Where are you tempted to tie God's presence to a place, a routine, or a circumstance, and what does the vision by the Chebar say to that?
Seventy-three times the book repeats that they will know that I am Yahweh, and God restores Israel for the honor of his name, not their worthiness. How does grace grounded in God's name rather than your merit change the way you receive it?
God addressed his prophet ninety-three times as son of man, a plain human being, right after showing him the likeness of the glory. Why might both halves of that pairing, the greatness of God and the smallness of the servant, be necessary for ministry?
Ezekiel began his thirtieth year, the year he should have entered temple service, as an exile who would never stand at the altar, and God gave him a different priesthood. Where has a closed door in your life become the very place God appointed you to serve?
Ezekiel waited five months for news of Jerusalem's fall, silent about the city all the while. What does his patience under God's timetable suggest about ministering faithfully when you cannot see, or hasten, what God is doing?
Ezekiel 43:4
Read Ezekiel 1 through 3 slowly, marking every phrase of likeness and appearance, then read chapters 8 to 11 and 43:1 to 5 together to follow the glory out of the temple and back. Then read 24:15 to 27 beside 33:21 and 22 to feel the silence between the siege and the opened mouth. Next session: Ezekiel's call and commission, and the strange sign-acts by which the prophet became the message.