Rescued from Exile: A Homily on Ezekiel

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you are trying to accomplish something but the information you have to sort through to do so is so overwhelming that you are tempted to give up?

One example of this is the costs I incurred after my car engine stopped working one afternoon. It turns out that Kia engines of a certain date had a design flaw that caused them to seize. Kia replaced the engine for no charge and said I was eligible for reimbursement of rental car expenses. But now, after more than six months of effort, I still have not been reimbursed. And everyone at Kia I discuss this provides different, and apparently incorrect, information about how to resolve the problem. If it weren’t for the encouragement of my wife, I would have already given up.

In many ways the book of Ezekiel is much like this. It is filled with visions of whirling wheels and creatures with four faces; it’s setting moves from place to place, country to country, and time to time; and it speaks of people and events in strange lands and foreign times. The information overload can be overwhelming, and figuring out what the Lord wants us to learn from Ezekiel is no easy task.

Yet, if we work our way through Ezekiel, we will find that we indeed have a great need for the wisdom contained in it. Ezekiel teaches us that God is not far off but nearby, that as Christians we live in the presence of God each day. This makes digging into it very much worth the effort. So let’s spend a little time doing that today, focusing on Ezekiel 3:1-11; 5:5-17; and 36:22-32.

The book of Ezekiel opens with Ezekiel sitting “among the exiles by the Chebar canal.” So the first thing we learn is that Ezekiel is not where he should have been. Ezekiel was a Jew, one of God’s chosen people. His place was with God at the temple in Jerusalem, not at the Chebar canal in Babylonia.

This may sound strange to modern ears. Today, we can be with God wherever we are. He is always with us for He has poured out his Spirit upon us. But things were different in those days.

In those days, God lived in the temple at Jerusalem. His glory filled the temple in its holy of holies. God came to live with His people, the Israelites, and they went to see Him in the temple. They knew that he was their God and they were His people because he lived with them.

Yet Ezekiel was in Babylonia, far removed from God’s dwelling place. And he wasn’t alone. He was one of many exiles who had been forcibly removed from Jerusalem by the Babylonians. He and his fellow exiles must have been devastated to find themselves apart from God. They must have been asking themselves, “How could God have allowed such a thing to happen?”

Well, God came to Ezekiel in a vision while he was at the Chebar canal and gave him the answer to that question. God came to Ezekiel in his glory, “a stormy wind … out of the north, and a great cloud, with brightness around it, and fire flashing forth continually, and in the midst of the fire, as it were gleaming metal.”

Talk about overwhelming! When Ezekiel saw what he called “the likeness of the glory of the Lord,” he said “I fell on my face, and I heard the voice of one speaking.” And when he was finished with this meeting with God, Ezekiel “sat there overwhelmed among them seven days.”

We shouldn’t be surprised. Encounters with the One True Living God have such an effect on people. Moses, Isaiah, Peter, John, and others all had similar experiences of being overwhelmed by the presence of God.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case for the people of God in those days. Rather than being overwhelmed and awed by God and thus turning to Him in worship, they had become a “rebellious house or nation” with “hard foreheads and hard hearts” that “won’t listen to” God. They were in such bad shape that when God came to Ezekiel to send him to speak to the people of Israel, there was no hope that they would listen to him. As God told Ezekiel, “the house of Israel will not be willing to listen to you, for they are not willing to listen to me.”

As we are soon to find out, their deafness means much worse things are in store for this “rebellious house.” But before we learn about the tidings of woe, let’s note some things of comfort in this passage.

One is that God didn’t allow this to happen, he caused it to happen. The exile of the Jews from Jerusalem isn’t merely some random happenstance; it was the result of the work of the Sovereign Lord. It is in His hands, and under His control. So surely if He has done such a thing as to separate His people from Himself, he can do something else to unite them together with Him.

And in fact, God has already started this work of unification. In Ezekiel’s vision, God’s glory came to His people in exile. Though they were no longer where God dwelt, God came to them where they dwelt and spoke to them. Though it may have been difficult even for the faithful among the exiles to find comfort in many of the words of foreboding that God spoke to them during this time, just the fact that He was speaking to them should have been a great comfort.

Not all, though, sought comfort in the word of God. To them, God speaks to the exiles words of coming judgment and destruction in Ezekiel 5. And great the destruction it will be. Not only where there be plagues of wild animals, swords and pestilence, famine, the eating of one’s children, and being scattered among the nations, but God will be against them.

We find out in this passage exactly why God is doing such a thing to His people: they had broken their covenant with Him. God explained they had “rebelled against my rules by doing wickedness more than the nations, and against my statutes more than the countries all around her.” Israel had become a nation of idolaters. They had abandoned their God in pursuits of other gods and become unfaithful to Him.

Of course, the possibility of this rebellion was not unanticipated. As Iain Duguid notes in his commentary on Ezekiel, “the language that Ezekiel adopts in these verses is not his own creation, but largely borrowed from Leviticus 26, a chapter that lays out the blessings and curses attached to the covenant” God had made with Israel.

As covenant breakers and idolaters the people had called down the curses from Leviticus 26 upon themselves. So now, comments Duguid, “the Lord’s immediate presence, the crowning blessing of the covenant relationship, is not blessing to a rebellious people but a curse. For the Lord who is there is no longer with them but against them.”

Yet even in the midst of covenantal curses there is hope. God says that Israel “shall know that I am the Lord … when I spend my fury upon them.” This, of course, is a terrible way to know God. Yet those of us who know God know that He has steadfast love and is full of mercy. And we see that here. When His anger is spent, that means that not only will it be poured out, but it will run out. Ezekiel knows this to be the case, but coming from the Old Testament perspective he is hard pressed to clearly explain how a just God could possibly run out of wrath against evil.

Today, however, we can see this much more clearly. God’s anger against evil will never come to an end, but through Jesus Christ His wrath against His people has come to an end because Christ kept the covenant for us.  In Christ, we can now experience the blessings of covenant fulfillment instead of the curses of covenant failure. God kept a remnant even in those days of His wrath. Today, as that remnant is filling the world, there is no condemnation on us as we are in Christ Jesus; it was upon Him that God spent his wrath.

We see in Ezekiel 36 how this was to play out. God said that He would “take [them] from the nations and gather [them] from all the countries and bring [them] into [their] own land.” But it wasn’t enough for God to restore them to the land and give them a new earthly king. They had had these things before and they didn’t work out. A total transformation was necessary.

God explains what this looks like in Ezekiel 36:25-28: “I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. You shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers, and you shall be my people, and I will be your God.”

This brings us back to where we started. As God’s people, being exiles is not an option. We are required to be in God’s presence and come before Him in praise and worship. The exiles at the Cheba canal could not do this. But we can.

Even though sometimes it may seem that Christians are still in exile today, we can be assured that is not the case. We are at home with God for two reasons. First, God’s Spirit is within us—He goes wherever we go. Second, we are no longer confined to one small slice of the world God created. Rather, our dwelling place with God is the land that he gave to our fathers—the entire earth. And however disfigured that land may be at the moment, it is our land. The exiles today are the unbelievers; they are the ones who are wondering in the desert, who live in a land not their own. We are God’s people, He is our God, and He has brought us to our home in the Promised Land.

We can also be assured because Christ is “making all things new,” we will reside with God forever in this land flowing with milk and honey. And because we will know that He is the Lord as, through us, he vindicates His holiness before the nations. Even though at times we still profane His name among the nations, thanks be to God our future is tied to God’s unchangeable, eternal holiness rather than our persistent but perishing sinfulness.

All of us should remember this when we sin against God. Satan will attempt to take advantage of our failure to confuse us and condemn us by twisting God’s Word. He would have us believe that we are exiles no longer living in God’s presence. That because God is far away from us, we have no hope. But the clear message of Ezekiel is that while we should acknowledge and grieve our sin, we are justified in the sight of God by the work of Jesus Christ. We are already at home with Him, living in His presence every day with our new heart and new spirit. And we will one day be one perfected in our holiness, just like our Savior who is now and will be forever on our side.