What's EZEKIEL about?

Impending disaster and reliance on magnificence

Ezekiel wrote soon after Jerusalem had been conquered by the Babylonians, about 600 years before Christ. Ezekiel has a vision in the temple of God's magnificence, and this indescribable power of God gives Ezekiel absolute trust that God will eventually rescue the people. His famous description of wheels turning within wheels may be an image of the advanced technology the Babylonians used in their chariots, but Ezekiel applied that image to God whose power, Ezekiel is saying, is much greater than the enormous military might of Babylon.

God sends Ezekiel to warn the people that their continued refusal to obey God's commands for justice will lead to terrible destruction. (For the military and political background, click here). Ezekiel knows the people will reject his warnings, but God assures him of support, and directs him to perform a series of dramatic warnings of impending disaster. Toward the end of the book, Ezekiel encourages the people not to give up hope, and uses the images of a valley full of dry bones coming to life—that is the Israelites whose hope has dried up will still receive God's spirit and will become powerful again.

The final nine chapters, from Chapter 40 onwards, contain intricate descriptions of the details of the temple, its rituals and customs. The people had been enslaved in distant Babylon for seventy years during which time the memories were fading of how to do worship in the temple. If they had forgotten completely, then Judaism would have disappeared permanently, and with it the unique insights they had about the depth of God’s commitment to humanity. While the wealth of immense detail means little to us, Ezekiel is trying to demonstrate to the despairing people of his time that he has complete blueprints and ritual instructions so that when God returns them to Jerusalem they will be able to construct an exact replica of the ancient temple and will be able to perform worship with total accuracy in every detail. The idea is that God is making it possible for them to experience God again, and God wouldn’t do that unless God was already planning to return them. These technical details assured the people that God hadn’t permanently abandoned them, and would have given them hope and confidence that they would survive and thrive.

These details are of immense interest to historians because they give us a description of how the Israelites worshipped in the 600’s B.C., or at least how they thought they had worshipped before they were captured and exiled to Babylon. Herod the Great expanded the temple to an enormous size around the time Jesus was born, but sadly no equivalent records of the details of the building or its ceremonies have survived. So we assume the ceremonies at the time of Jesus were somewhat like what Ezekiel describes, and other passages in the Hebrew Bible, but we don’t know for certain.

How Ezekiel is helpful for us

In our world, we can have experiences of being overwhelmed by forces beyond our control just as the ancient Israelites did. Ezekiel encourages us to renew our awareness of the God who is far beyond all temporary powers in this world and who can fill us with confidence and energy in our time.