Ezekiel 10

8-10. The impulses of the prophet’s humanity and love for his country and people stand out here with beautiful simplicity. Seeming to himself to stand almost alone, one living man among the heaps of dead, his natural thought and utterance are, “Ah, my God! Wilt Thou destroy the whole nation? In this scene of retribution on the guilty Jews, are there none at all to be spared?” The Lord answers that their iniquity is exceeding great; that the land is full of the blood of personal violence, outrages, and murder; and the city full of perverseness—the wrestling of judgment, the violation of every personal and sacred right—these sinners practically saying, “There is no God here; He does not see us; He has gone up from the earth” (see 8:12). Because of these outrages and horrible immoralities the Lord cannot pardon.

11. The man with the ink-horn reports the fulfilment of his commission. It is not intimated that the men with slaughter weapons made any report. The difference in the two cases indicates the special interest felt by the Lord in the men who are to be saved and in the faithful execution of His commission in their behalf. Judgment, here as ever, is His strange work; mercy, His delight. The spirit of vengeance does not for one moment eclipse His love for His people or abate from His wakeful and never-waning interest in their welfare. The moral force of this entire scene is of the very highest order, and is scarcely surpassed by anything found in the sacred Scriptures. The Jerusalem of that age represents the corrupt Church of God—the case of His chosen people when fearfully apostate from God, so utterly corrupt indeed that the Lord can spare no longer, but turns to terrible judgment. One of the points of most vital significance (as already shown) is the principle on which the discrimination is made between God’s friends and His enemies. This cannot be studied too carefully or with too much close and thorough self-application. H. C.

Chap. 10. The prophet’s eye has been directed in the two preceding chapters to the sinning people and to the ministers of Divine wrath. It is now bent, as in chap. 1, on the vision of the glory of the Lord, the particulars given identifying the two visions. B. C.

This chapter is a continuation of the same vision. The scene presented here is substantially a reappearance of that recorded in chap. 1. The glorious Shekinah, the cherubim, their wings, bodies, the wheels attending them, the common inspiration that moved them all, are the leading features. The scenes of chap. 1 were specially adapted to the inauguration of the prophet into his work. Those of chap. 10 were adapted to the purposes of this vision (chaps. 8-11), particularly to show that the consuming fire cast upon the guilty city came forth from underneath the throne of God, wielded by the omnipotent agencies which underlie that moving throne.

2. This fire taken from between the wheels underneath the cherubim, to be cast upon the guilty city, indicated that terrific judgments from the agencies of God’s providence were about to consume it. It is a significant fact that the executive agent here should be the man in linen who, in chap. 9, has no other function save to mark in their foreheads the men who bewailed the abominations of the guilty people. But God has no class of servants too holy or sacred to act as His agents, if need be, in the execution of His righteous judgments. It certainly corresponds with His arrangements in this world to use them in representing, symbolizing, and setting before the minds of the people these most fearful judgments. The Gospel minister who wears holy linen in God’s temple must not shrink from proclaiming to the wicked both their guilt and their fiery doom.

3-5. That the Shekinah removed from the mercy-seat and stood over the threshold indicates that He was preparing to depart from that polluted Temple. It may also have been a more appropriate position from which to direct and observe the movements then at hand. The sublime and impressive sound of the wings of the cherubim when they moved was prominent in the vision of chap. 1. (See chap. 1: 24, 25.)

9-15. The points made here were mostly presented in chap. 1. The cry, “O wheel!” seems intended to recognize them as inspired with intelligence and consciousness—the Spirit of God dwelling within them and energizing all their activities. This view is given also in chap. 1. H. C.

16,17. The attributes here assigned to them show that they were pervaded by one will—the spirit of the living creature was in them.

20. I knew that they were cherubim. The glory of the Lord had now manifestly departed from the Temple, and in this departure the seer recognizes for the first time the full meaning of the vision which he had seen on the banks of Chebar. When he saw it there, he doubtless understood that the symbolical forms and the glory which rested on them resembled the glory of the Lord seated between the cherubim in the Temple. He knew it to be the manifestation of the same God. But this did not yet imply that Jehovah had forsaken His house. Now this is made clear; the glory has left the Holy of Holies, has appeared in the court, has been enthroned on the living four, and with them has departed from the Temple. It is now clear that these four (in form similar to, yet differing from the cherubim of the Temple) are indeed the cherubim, in the midst of whom the Lord dwelleth. B. C.

It only remains to suggest that these symbols are repeated in this vision of judgments on Jerusalem to show that the agencies for its destruction were precisely those which were symbolized by the wonderful phenomena of the moving throne of God. In His government over the nations of men, God wields the agencies of judgment and retribution at His pleasure, with resources ineffably vast and glorious. If we might only see them with unveiled eye, it might befall us as it befell the servant of Elisha when his master prayed, “Lord, open his eyes that he may see.” “And the Lord opened the eyes of the young man and he saw, and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha” (2 K. 6:17). H. C.

Chap. 11. This chapter continues the same vision, and brings it to its close. While the prophet is in vision at Jerusalem, he sees some of the princes of leading influence in wickedness, and is directed to prophesy to them. While doing so, one of them, Pelatiah, falls dead. From this point the strain of the vision changes. In answer to the prophet’s expostulation, the Lord shows him that although the Jews in Jerusalem are proud, exclusive and hopelessly hardened, yet it is His purpose to save a precious remnant from among the exiles and give them wholly a new spirit and a tender heart. With this the vision closes.

1-3. A new scene opens. The Divine Spirit puts the prophet into a new position at the east gate of the Temple, where he sees twenty-five men of leading influence, among whom he recognizes and names two who were princes among the people. These are the men who had seduced the people into deeper sin, perpetually counteracting the labors of the Lord’s faithful prophets. Verse 3 quotes some of their language. H. C.

1. Five-and-twenty men. The number carries us back to 8:16, but they are not the same men. The five-and-twenty there were representatives of the priests, these of the princes. The number is, no doubt, symbolical—made up, probably, of twenty-four men and the king (Kliefoth). The number twenty-four points to the tribes of undivided Israel.

3. Let us build houses. To build houses implies a sense of security. Jeremiah bade the exiles build houses in a foreign land because they would not soon quit it (Jer 29:5; cf. Jer. 35:7). These false counsellors promised to their countrymen a sure and permanent abode in the city which God had doomed to destruction. No need, they said, to go far for safety; you are perfectly safe at home. B. C.—The twenty-five are represented as teaching the people a false security; as instructing them to build houses in perfect confidence that their generation would at least be safe; that Jerusalem was indeed the caldron and they the flesh; but that the fire would not consume them, who were only to be prepared and perfected by the process, and would remain in safety to a mature old age. Abp. Newcome.

5-11. Thus have ye said, etc. Ye have advanced the assertion maintained (verse 3). You have rightly said what you say: “The city is the caldron, and we are the flesh,” shall be fulfilled, but not as you understand it; many of you will perish in the city. For those it will be the caldron, and they will be the flesh boiled in it. But yourselves shall not be the flesh in the caldron; but you shall be taken out and elsewhere cut in pieces. Michaelis.

It is supposable that this slaughter was then yet future, but near and thought of as certain, and as the legitimate fruit of their pernicious influence. Hence they might well be charged with the responsible guilt of it. The prophet turns their figure (verse 3) to a terrible significance. The heaps of slaughtered men soon to fill this city are to be the flesh, held by this city as a caldron holds animal flesh. The living God will bring them forth out of this city into a bitter exile. “The hands of strangers” will bear them far away. When the lord said (verse 11), “This city shall not be your caldron,” etc., He meant, it shall not be so in your sense of that figure. For they would surely be driven out of their city and land.

13. In order to confirm this prophecy to the

people, and not least, to give the prophet himself an impressive sense of the terrible significance of the things now shown to him and announced by him, all suddenly, while he is speaking, Pelatiah falls dead! The prophet falls on his face and cries out, “Ah, Lord God, wilt Thou make a full end of the remnant of Israel?” Shall none be left? Are the people of God to be exterminated and no seed be left to replant the land and rebuild the Zion of the Lord? The shock of such an appalling death impresses him with this painful fear, to which the Lord kindly responds in the verses following.