Ezekiel 3

17. Warning from Me. No preaching can be complete that does not, now and again, remind the people of the terrors of the law. It is no light thing to sin; and, come to what conclusion you may about the future of the wicked soul, there can be no doubt that that future is one of tremendous agony. Who will dare it? Who will willingly go forward to it? I know of no theory of the future of the soul which by some point or other does not bring in the righteous punishment of offending man. You can only affect some persons through fear. Without imagination of the better kind, without high sentiment, without noble education, without generous impulses—they can only be touched along the line of fear. Upon such persons high discourse about the nobler spaces, the infinite liberties, the glorious sanctuaries yet to be revealed and enjoyed, would be lost. J. P.

18-21. This passage anticipates the great moral principle of Divine government, enlarged upon and enforced in chap. 18, that each man is individually responsible for his own actions, and will be judged according to these and these alone. They who are appointed to watch the souls of others must render their account of their performance or neglect of this their duty, but the man who sins shall die for his own sin.

Thou shalt surely die. The primal sentence (Gen. 2:17) is reinforced (cf. Rom. 6:23). But the penalty of sin is not simply natural death; so a righteous man, though involved in the general calamity and even perishing with the rest, may live and not die. B. C.

The condemnation that God pronounces on sin is the condemnation of the law against every violation of it. It is the sentence due to a disregard of the end for which man was made; due to treason against God’s authority; due to the abuse of His goodness; due to the contempt of His mercy; due to the debasement and degradation and ruin of a soul entrusted as an infinite treasure to our keeping. And let the sinner himself say what that ought to be. Say what is due to your own guilt for defeating the end of your being; for having transformed God’s temple into an idol’s shrine; for having stifled in the dust of worldliness, aspirations that should have stopped at nothing short of a heavenly birthright as a child of God? What do you deserve for restraining prayer and withholding praise, for giving to the creature what is due only to the Creator; for spurning the duties and the privileges of an heir of heaven; for disqualifying your soul utterly for the service and worship of the sanctuary above! Gillett.

No man will be condemned by the All-righteous Judge for the want of that which he could not have had. One condemnation will be, and is, that we have not that which we might have had, and that we have a clinging, crushing weight of sin, which we have gathered and heaped upon ourselves, which benumbs all our efforts and palsies all our faculties, and from which, if we had given ear to the exhortations of our better monitors, inward and outward, we might have been free. Hare.

Put it down as a fact that there is a law of penalty in the universe, and you can neither suspend it nor evade it. This is a law and not a caprice, a necessity of goodness and not a burst of passion. It is the very security of the universe; without it we could not pray, without it we could not live. A man cannot touch fire and not be burned. The stars in their courses utter God’s testimony; the winds as they fly are vocal with His name; the lightning as it comes will be harmless as a blessing if you make a highway for it, but oppose, and you oppose it only once. J. P.

The God of heaven has said and does say to every wicked man, that if he go on still in his trespasses he shall surely die; his iniquity shall undoubtedly be his ruin—it tends to ruin and will end in ruin. Dying thou shalt die; thou shalt die so great a death, shalt die eternally, be ever dying but never dead. The wicked man shall die in his iniquity, shall die under the guilt of it, die under the dominion of it. That if a wicked man turn from his wickedness and from his wicked way he shall live, and the ruin he is threatened with shall be prevented; and that he may do so he is warned of the danger he is in. The wicked man shall die if he go on, but shall live if he repent. Observe: He is to turn from his wickedness and from his wicked way. It is not enough for a man to turn from his wicked way by an outward reformation, which may be the effect of his sins leaving of him rather than of his leaving his sins, but he must turn from his wickedness, from the love of it and the inclination to it by an inward regeneration; if he do not so much as turn from his wicked way there is little hope that he will turn from his wickedness. The ministry of the word is concerning matters of life and death, for those are the things it sets before us, the blessing and the curse, that we may escape the curse and inherit the blessing. H.

The law of God denounces eternal death as the punishment for all sins, not because they are all alike in moral guilt, but because they are all alike indications of the same condition of the sinner—one of enmity to God. The very lightest transgression proves, as clearly as the very greatest, the innate lawlessness of the perverted and therefore sinful will. Bp. Magee.

When God throws upon man the fearful responsibility of the issue of his course, and he examines the testimony of his own consciousness upon the subject, it tells him that in a moral point of view he is precisely what he chooses to be; that the path upon which he is travelling, leading him, as he sees it does, away from the forgiveness, and peace, and hope of the Gospel, is the one which, upon the whole, is preferable to his mind; and thus, out of deference to the desires of his own heart, which cling to the vanities and pleasures and honors of this perishable world—in the face of motives infinite as God can make them, forceful as the retributions of a coming scene, bright as the fascinations and dark as the forbidding gloom of an eternal world, he turns away from an offered salvation, and with his own hand closes against himself the gate of heaven and puts the seal upon his everlasting destiny. For this controversy between God and man God has the human spirit on His own side, and no one can wring from it a testimony in contracontra-diction of the statement of the Saviour, “Ye will not come unto Me, that ye might have life.” E. M.

Fearful is even one instance of the rejection of the offer of life eternal. How long can it be persisted in without an interminably fatal result? If men will go on, over and over again, putting from them the cup of immortality, in every way ministering to the disease of sin, and retaining its leprosy in the soul, refusing the aid of the Great Physician, the elements of an everlasting character are all the while forming. If men will exclude the gracious influences of the Divine Spirit, and prefer their alienation from the life of God, no wonder if God at length retires from them, and leaves the completion of the sinful creature for eternity to the hands of the master workman, Death! G. B. C.

The dormant sense of liability for the consequences of our conduct ought surely to be awakened by considering how we hold other men responsible in common life. Society is pervaded by the law of personal responsibility; the weight rests on every head, on every heart. It is the burden of life which every man must bear. Every man’s sphere of action is much wider than he imagines. The punishment of sin always seems to a habitual transgressor disproportionate to the offence. There is not a sinner who will not be astounded when God “sets in order before him” the facts of his case. These considerations should impress the mind with a new sense of the infinite bearings of our thoughts, words, and actions, and should make us “swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath.” Let to-day be the day of salvation by becoming the day of judgment, for “if we would judge ourselves, we should not be condemned with the world.” E. White.

Our voices should ever be heard on earth. A solemn message is committed to us, by the very fact of our belief in Jesus Christ and His work. With that faith come responsibilities of which no Christian can denude himself. To warn the wicked man to turn from His wickedness; to blow the trumpet when we see the sword coming; to catch ever gleaming on the horizon, like the spears of an army through the dust of the march, the outriders and advance guard of the coming of Him whose coming is life or death to all, and to lift up our voices with strength and say, “Behold your God;” to peal into the ears of men, sunken in earthliness and dreaming of safety, the cry which may startle and save; to ring out in glad tones to all who wearily ask, “Watchman, what of the night? Will the night soon pass?” the answer which the slow dawning east has breathed into our else stony lips, “The morning cometh;” to proclaim Christ, who came once to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself, who comes ever, through the ages, to bless and uphold the righteousness which He loves, and to destroy the iniquity which he hates, who will come at the last to judge the world—this is the never-ending task of the watchmen on the walls of Jerusalem. The New Testament calls it “preaching;” proclaiming as a herald does. A. M.

Every person is in one sense or another an appointed watchman in behalf of others. Every man is in one sense or another his brother’s counsellor, even if not his brother’s keeper. In just so far as he knows the better or the more perilous way which opens before his brother—especially his younger brother—is a man in duty bound to give a word of counsel or of warning to that brother. When we have faithfully and in loving tenderness given good counsel to those whom God has privileged us to teach or to reach, then, and not until then, are we to leave the responsibility with them as to their action in the direction of our counsel. If they go wrong without our good advice, we are sharers with them in the blame of their wrong-going; but if they go wrong in spite of our good advice, they alone must bear the blame of their wrong-going. S. S. T.

20. I lay a stumbling-block before him. I bring him to trial by placing difficulties and temptations in his way. Thus in 7:19 the silver and gold which the people possessed are said to be the stumbling-block of their iniquity. See 44:12, they caused the house of Israel to fall into iniquity, lit. as in margin, they were for a stumbling-block of iniquity to the house of Israel. In 14:3, 4 the people are said themselves to put the stumbling-block of their iniquity before their eyes. It is true that God tempts no man in order to his destruction, but in the course of His providence He permits men to be tried in order that their faith may be approved, and in this trial some who seem to be righteous fall. (See on chap. 18.)

Because. This is not the sole cause—the individual was tried and found wanting; but so far as the prophet was concerned, the neglect of his duty is reckoned as the cause of the seemingly righteous man’s fall. B. C.

The best men in the world have need to be warned against apostasy, and to be told of the danger they are in of it and the danger they are in by it. God’s servants must be warned (Ps. 19:11), that they do not neglect His work and quit His service. One good means to keep us from falling is to keep up a holy fear of falling (Heb. 4:1), Let us therefore fear; and (Rom. 11:20), even those that stand by faith must not be high-minded, but fear, and must therefore be warned. H.

Righteous turn. (Also Ezek. 18:24, 26; 33:12, 13, 18.) All these passages are hypothetic: “If a righteous man should turn,” or when the righteous doth turn—which means, If he should. None of them directly affirm that a truly righteous man does in fact turn back to utter sinning. They do squarely affirm that, if he should, he would die in his sins. So in Heb. 6:4-6: “If they shall fall away,” all is over with them; it is impossible to renew them again. Yet this falls short of affirming that any one does apostatize utterly from the true Christian state. H. C.

21. There seems to be an intimation that sin is alien to the character of a righteous man. The words might be rendered if thou warn the righteous man that he sin not as becometh a righteous man. (Cf. 1 John 3:7-9.) B. C.

22,23. This “plain” or valley stands contrasted with the hill (Tell Abib) where the people resided. The spirit of the call is, Go down to a retired place; I have another personal charge to give thee in private. The prophet obeyed; and there he saw again the same manifestation of the glory of the Lord which he had seen by the river Chebar. Here also, as there, he falls prostrate on his face. This going to the valley seems to have been done in the external world. What followed there was said and shown to him in prophetic vision. H. C.

23. A fresh revelation of the glory of the Lord, to impress upon Ezekiel another characteristic of his mission. By eating the roll (verse 2) he was taught that his words should be those of the Spirit of God—by being a watchman, that he must speak boldly and without fear of consequences; now he is to learn that there is a time to be silent as well as a time to speak, and that both are appointed by God. This represents forcibly the authoritative character and Divine origin of the utterances of the Hebrew prophets. B. C.

27. The likelihood of men obeying the Gospel is usually diminishing in proportion to the frequency with which that Gospel is preached to them and its appeals ministered upon them. The blessing may be undervalued because it is within the reach of all; and while an outward regard to it may be the marked characteristic of a whole community, they may be no less distinguished by a practical indifference to it; and thus a people who have enjoyed the clearest light of the Gospel may, as they become hardened under its influences, convert their very privileges into the grounds of their more certain and severer condemnation. And so the clearness of Gospel light, and the multiplicity of Gospel advantages, may be not only the precursors, but the instruments of a general blindness of mind, and deadness of heart. And a people subjected to the well-arranged and well-plied machinery of religion may, by reason of this fact, be fast falling into that state into which we may suppose the hearers of Ezekiel to have been, which rendered his ministry to them more ineffectual and hopeless than it would have been among a people as ignorant and superstitious as the men of Nineveh, to whom Jonah preached with such effectiveness and success. E. Mason.

It is not strange that God should act upon the souls of His converted children in these two lines of influence—viz., upon their hopes, through rich promise; upon their fears, through warnings against apostasy. Upon their hopes, for they often sadly need this assurance of His love and of His gracious help; upon their fears, for their own utmost vigilance must be secured and kept in exercise, their own constant endeavors, their own watchfulness, prayer, and faith in God. Doubtless the interworking of these two lines of influence—appeals to hope and appeals to fear—are delicate and critical, and require a careful adjustment of promise and warning; but this should not militate against the fact that both these influences are provided for in the plan of God, and are both brought in the Scriptures to bear on the Christian heart. Both are involved in the ministration of one and the same Divine Spirit. He uses each and both as means for securing the perseverance of the saints.

It may be well to consider that warnings against danger are one of the necessary and natural means of protecting moral agents against that danger, and so are among the necessary means of fulfilling the promise of their ultimate salvation. To omit warnings against danger because Divine promise has pledged final victory would be extremest folly. For us to ask it would be equivalent to proposing to the Almighty—not to say, demanding of Him—that He save His people without any activities or agencies of their own—without their own prayer or faith or watchfulness.

Let us remember that God’s plan contemplates dealing with free moral agents, and proposes to save them only as such agents—i.e., by keeping alive their faith and prayer and watchful endeavor. So that the gist of our problem is simply this: Is it in the power of the Infinite God to keep alive this faith, prayer, and watchfulness of His people to such a degree as will insure their ultimate salvation? Can He apply this power of His Spirit behind and back of the appropriate Christian effort, so as to keep alive those holy impulses, and thus preserve truly converted souls from falling fatally? On this point we must say: His promises plainly indicate that, in His view, He can. He would not have promised if He had foreseen that He could not perform.

The outcome of this interworking of Divine with human agencies is that God is able to determine, and therefore can fitly promise, a given result—this result involving the free moral agencies of man, yet without infringing upon man’s moral responsibility, without overriding it or in any wise dishonoring it. Else it were in vain for God to foretell future events in prophecy and at the same time depend upon the free moral action of men to bring those events to pass. “The Son of man goeth as it was determined; but woe to that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! It had been good for that man if he had never been born.” For the fact that his deed was foreknown and foreindicated of God could neither abate from his freedom nor lessen his guilt.

This subject ought not to be dismissed without the remark that the doctrine of saints’ perseverance is capable of being abused. It may be used wisely and well; but doubtless also it has sometimes been abused, and may be again. When a professed Christian says to himself, “Once a Christian, always a Christian;” I made my salvation forever sure when I was converted, and I can go in the strength of that assurance the rest of my days—without watchfulness, without fear of falling, without much if any prayer; with little if any real endeavor to live and labor for Christ—he is manifestly on the high road to perdition. Who has guaranteed the soundness of his conversion? How does he know that he is one of Christ’s sheep? The test given by the Good Shepherd Himself is, “My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me;” but this man does neither. H. C.