Ezekiel 9

16-18. Here are twenty-five men, their backs to the Temple of the Lord, and their faces eastward, worshipping the sun. As the other special forms of idolatry were Egyptian and Syrian in their origin, this is nationally Persian, yet was in most ancient times widespread, and very probably was the earliest form of idolatry. Nor was their sin limited to idol worship. Under the influence of idolatry the people had become grossly immoral. They had “filled the land with violence”—the usual phrase to indicate assaults and murders. Idolatry is the legitimate mother of extreme immorality. It discards the fear of God, and breaks down all the restraints that come upon the minds of men from just views of the great, the pure, and the ever-glorious Jehovah. Thus it opens the floodgates of human depravity. For all these grievous sins the Lord will surely scourge and punish His apostate people; He will not spare; and however imploring their cry, He will not hear! There is a time for prayer; but that time once past, there comes another hour which is not the time for prayer. H. C.

16. Five-and-twenty men. It was not an indefinite number taken at random, but the number of the heads of the twenty-four courses, with the high-priest presiding over them. These then were the representatives of the priests as the seventy were of the people. In the Temple the seat of the Divine Majesty was at the west, perhaps appointed for this very purpose, to guard against the idolatrous adoration of the rising sun. Therefore the idolatrous priests must, in worshipping the false sun god, turn their backs upon the true. It was a further aggravation of their daring impiety that they took a position scarcely permitted in the worship of Jehovah. The ordinary place of the priests was in the forecourt to the east or north of the brazen altar where they sacrificed. It was only in times of extraordinary calamity that they drew near to weep between the porch and the altar (Joel 2:17), turning of course to the west of the Temple.

Chap. 9. The sin has been described. This chapter portrays the punishment of the dwellers in Jerusalem. B. C.—This chapter continues the subject of the chapter preceding. The prophet is shown in vision how the Lord discriminates between His friends and His enemies, to spare the one and to slay the other without mercy. H. C.

1-6. In the preceding chapter the prophet had got a full view of the abominations that were done in the midst of Jerusalem; and here he gets a visionary representation of their punishment. He beholds six men approaching the city, each of them armed with a destroying weapon, who are expressly commanded to slay the inhabitants, both old and young, beginning at the sanctuary. But before they proceed to execution, one, distinguished by his garb, being clothed with linen, and having a writer’s ink-horn by his side, receives the gracious commission recorded in my text, to separate the precious from the vile, by setting a mark upon their foreheads, that they might not be involved in the ruin of their fellow-citizens. R. W.

1,2. These men represent the executive agents or ministers of the Lord’s providential government over the city. The object of this vision is to set before the eye of the prophet the fact of God’s retributive judgments upon the city, and the manner in which His agents perform their mission. The “man clothed with linen” is not attired for slaughter. Linen, so commonly worn by the priests, would have been out of place on the men who bore the “slaughter weapons.” It was the custom of official scribes to attach their ink-horn to their girdles. The executioners take their stand first beside the brazen altar, to begin their work at the point which best indicated the great sin of the people—the desecration of God’s holy altar. H. C.

God has ministers of wrath always within call, always at command; invisible powers by whom He accomplishes His purposes. The prophet is made to see this in vision, that he might with the greater assurance in his preaching denounce these judgments. God told it him with a loud voice that it might make the deeper impression upon him, and that he might thus proclaim it in the people’s ears. H.

It is still customary in the East to wear the ink-horn in the girdle. Scribes wear them constantly in their girdles, and ministers of state wear them in the same manner as symbols of their office. B. C.

3,4. This “glory of the God of Israel” I take to be the Shekinah of the Mosaic economy. (See Ex. 29: 43; 40: 34, 35 and 1 K. 8: 11.) Its resting-place was over and upon the cherubim, whose outspread wings covered the mercy-seat or lid of the ark of testimony. This removal to the threshold seems to have the twofold object of indicating that He was soon to withdraw from this desecrated and doomed Temple and of placing Himself in nearer proximity to the executioners of His vengeance, as if to supervise and direct their movements. Chap. 10: 18 notes the return of this Shekinah to His usual position. The godly men of the city must first be discriminated and marked before the wicked are slain. So in the end of the world (Matt. 28: 32). The man with the ink-horn asks for no one’s professions or claims or hopes. He asks only for these most reliable tests of the heart—the tears and outcries of bitter grief by which those whose hearts were really with God must indicate the anguish they feel in view of such awful abominations. Man may look on the outward appearance; God looks on the heart. H. C.—Those who keep themselves pure in times of common iniquity God will keep safe in times of common calamity. They that distinguish themselves shall be distinguished; they that cry for other men’s sins shall not need to cry for their own afflictions, for they shall be either delivered from them or comforted under them. God will set a mark upon His mourners, will book their sighs, and bottle their tears. H.

5-7. The destroyers followed—did not precede—the man with the ink-horn. But they followed close behind him. They spared every man who bore the mark, but none other. Whoever was not for God decidedly, strongly, with his real heart, was adjudged to be against Him, and was cut down accordingly. There was no recognition of any neutral class. The commissions given respectively to the man who marked and to the men who slew utterly precluded the possibility of any neutrality in the case. The men who did not care for the honor of God, and who had no tears to shed over these abominations, were at once cut down as God’s enemies. H. C.

6. Begin at My sanctuary.** Let those who have sinned against most mercy and most privileges be the first victims of justice. Those who know their Lord’s will and do it not shall be beaten with many stripes. The unfaithful members of Christ’s Church will be first visited and most punished. But let not those who belong to the synagogue of Satan exult in this; for if judgment begin at the house of God, what will the end be of them who obey not the Gospel? However, the truly penitent of all descriptions shall be safe. The command of God is, Set a mark on all them that sigh and cry; and His command to the destroyers is, Come not near any man on whom is the mark. A. C.

The first to be punished were those who had brought idolatry nearest to the holy place. The twenty-five men who had stood with their backs to the altar were the first to be slain. B. C.

The wickedness of the sanctuary was of all

other most offensive to God, and therefore there the slaughter must begin: “Begin there, to try if the people will take warning by the judgments of God upon their priests, and will repent and reform; begin there that all the world may see and know that the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God, and hates sin most in those that are nearest to Him.” II.