Ezekiel 1–6: Prophet & Watchman

Read the Bible in 2023 ◊ Week 24: Friday

Now it happened in the thirtieth year, on the fifth day of the fourth month, while I was by the river Chebar among the exiles, that the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God.

Ezekiel 1:1 LSB

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Friday’s Bible reading is Ezekiel 1–6. Ezekiel was both priest and prophet, and he prophesied while living among the exiled Jews in Babylon, who had been taken there by Nebuchadnezzar in 597 B.C., before the destruction and burning of Jerusalem.¹ He began prophesying after Jeremiah was called by God as a prophet in Judah, but before the final events recorded in the book of Jeremiah, and he continues his prophetic ministry until well after Jerusalem falls (cf. 40:1). Gleason Archer has this introduction to the book:

“The Hebrew name Y^eḥez^eqē’l means God strengthens. The theme of Ezekiel’s prophecy is that the fall of Jerusalem and the Babylonian captivity are necessary measures for the God of grace to employ if He is to correct His disobedient people and draw them back from complete and permanent apostasy. But the day is coming when Jehovah will restore a repentant remnant of His chastened people and establish them in a glorious latter-day theocracy with a new temple.”²

As is Jeremiah, there are precise references as to when Ezekiel began to prophesy, and God also directs Ezekiel to do various symbolic object lessons for the Jews. Ezekiel, however, is also a prophet of visions, and there are numerous ones throughout the book. John Taylor writes:

“For most Bible readers Ezekiel is almost a closed book. Their knowledge of him extends little further than his mysterious vision of God’s chariot-throne, with its wheels within wheels, and the vision of the valley of dry bones. Otherwise his book is as forbidding in its size as the prophet himself is in the complexity of his make-up.

“In its structure, however, if not in its thought and language, the book of Ezekiel has a basic simplicity, and its orderly framework makes it easy to analyse. After the opening vision, in which Ezekiel sees the majesty of God on the plains of Babylon and receives his call to be a prophet to the house of Israel (1–3), there follows a long series of messages, some enacted symbolically but most expressed in spoken form, foretelling and justifying God’s intention to punish the holy city of Jerusalem and its inhabitants with destruction and death (4–24). Then, at the half-way mark in the book, when the fall of Jerusalem is represented as having actually taken place (though the news has still not percolated through to the exiles), the reader’s attention is diverted to the nations that surround Israel and God’s judgment on them is pronounced in a series of oracles (25–32). By this time the reader is prepared for the bombshell of the news of Jerusalem’s destruction, and 32:21 tells of the fugitive’s statement, ‘The city has fallen!’ But already a new age is dawning and a new message is on Ezekiel’s lips. With a renewed commission and a promise that God is about to restore His people to their own land under godly leadership by a kind of national resurrection (33–37), Ezekiel leads on to desribe in apocalyptic terms the final triumph of the people of God over the invading hordes from the north (38, 39). The book concludes, as it began, with an intricate vision, not this time of the Lord’s chariot-throne moving over the empty wastes of Babylon, but of the new Jerusalem with its temple court and inner sanctuary where God would dwell among His people for ever (40–48).”³

Gleason Archer has these four major divisions of Ezekiel:⁴

I.	The prophet’s call and commission, 1:1–3:27
II.	Prophecies against Judah prior to the fall of Jerusalem, 4:1–24:27
III.	Prophecies against the heathen nations, 25:1–32:32
IV.	Prophecies of reconstruction and restoration after the fall, 33:1–48:35

God tells Ezekiel He is sending him to the stubborn and rebellious people of Israel, but whether or not they listen to him, Ezekiel is to speak God’s words to them (cf. 2:7). Taylor comments that in 3:4–9, God gives to Ezekiel the “promise of the power to persevere in the face of opposition.”⁵

“Behold, I have made your face as strong as their faces and your forehead as strong as their foreheads. Like diamond stronger than flint I have made your forehead. Do not be afraid of them or be dismayed before them, though they are a rebellious house.”

Ezekiel 3:8–9 LSB

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Taylor writes:

“To judge from his subsequent ministry, Ezekiel does not give the impression of being anything but fearless. It is almost as if he is immune to the many human reactions of fear and inadequacy and sorrow that dog most of God’s servants. It is therefore all the more illuminating to see the repeated way in which God has to tell him to be free of his natural fears and not to be dismayed by their looks [2:6, 3:9]. The verb here is a very strong word, meaning ‘to be shattered’…

“…The repetition of the word hard [LSB: strong] in verses 8 and 9 (Heb. ḥāzāq) may be a deliberate play on the prophet’s name, for Ezekiel means ‘God strengthens’ or God hardens’…It was certainly a characteristic mark of his ministry that he was able to outlast his opponents and not to be worn down by the apparent intransigence. To that extent, at any rate, he was well named.”⁶

In Ezekiel 3:16ff. God tells Ezekiel he is a watchman to Israel.

Now it happened at the end of seven days, that the word of Yahweh came to me, saying,

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“Son of man, I have given you as a watchman to the house of Israel; so you will hear a word from My mouth, and you shall warn them from Me. When I say to the wicked, ‘You will surely die,’ and you do not warn him or speak out to warn the wicked from his wicked way that he may live, that wicked man shall die in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at your hand.

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“Yet if you have warned the wicked and he does not turn from his wickedness or from his wicked way, he shall die in his iniquity; but you have delivered yourself.

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“Again, when a righteous man turns away from his righteousness and does evil, and I put a stumbling block before him, he will die; since you have not warned him, he shall die in his sin, and his righteous deeds which he has done shall not be remembered; but his blood I will require at your hand.

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“However, if you have warned the righteous man that the righteous should not sin and he does not sin, he shall surely live because he took warning; and you have delivered yourself.”

Ezekiel 3:16–21 LSB

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Taylor comments:

“Just as Habakkuk took his stand upon the watchtower (Hab. 2:1), so Ezekiel is appointed as a watchman to the people of Israel (17). The expression used is literally ‘I have given you to be a watchman’, signifying that the appointment of Ezekiel as a prophet to warn the exiles of their impending doom was in fact an act of grace on God’s part. The term watchman was a common one for the true prophets of Yahweh (cf. Is. 56:10; Je. 6:7; Ho. 9:8). Their function was to be alert to the situation around them, to hear the word of God whenever it came to them, and to speak it accurately to the people. Inevitably this meant that the prophets as often as not acted as messengers of judgment to an erring people, and Ezekiel was no exception. His message was about the serious consequences of sin.”

God’s prophets were valiant men. They did not change God’s truth or muffle it according to people’s reaction to it. They knew the consequences of sin are eternal. Ezekiel spoke God’s message faithfully.⁷

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Silvesterzug Laterne: Bk muc. (CC BY-SA 4.0).
The Prophet Ezekiel: James Tissot, via Art and the Bible. Public Domain.
^1,2,4Gleason L. Archer, Jr., “Ezekiel,” A Survey of Old Testament Introduction (Moody Press, Chicago IL: 1974) 369, 368.
^3,5,6,7John B. Taylor, Ezekiel: An Introduction and Commentary (The Tyndale Press, London: 1969) 13–14; 62; 62, 66; 69.

I’m using Michael Coley’s Bible reading plan (one page PDF to print) to read through the Bible in 2023. Each day my posts are on different books because he divides Bible readings into seven categories, one for each day of the week: Epistles, The Law, History, Psalms, Poetry, Prophecy and Gospels. There’s more information on his plan and other ones at Read the Bible in 2023.