Ezekiel 11

Ezekiel 11:1-13

This chapter concludes the prophet’s vision, in which he receives two mighties: 1. One of which against these who continued full or Jerusalem, and were there in the height of presumption, ver. 1—13. 2. Another of comfort to these who were carried captives into Babylon, and were there in the depth of disobedience. And as the former are assured that God has judgments in store for them, notwithstanding their present security; so the latter are assured, that God has mercy in store for them, notwithstanding their present distress, ver. 14—21. And so the glory of God remains farther, ver. 22, 23. The vision disappears, ver. 24, and Ezekiel faithfully gives his hearers an account of it, ver. 25.

VOL. II.

1. Moreover, the spirit lift me up, and brought me unto the east-gate of the LORD’s house, which looked eastward: and behold, at the door of the gate five and twenty men: among whom I saw Jazaniah the son of Axur, and Pelatiah the son of Benatah, princes of the people. 2. Then said he unto me, Son of man, these are the men that devils e-mafshief, and give wicked counsel in this city: 3. Which says: ‘Is it not near, let us build houses? this city is the caldron, and we be the flesh. 4. Therefore prophesy against them, prophesy, O son of man. 5. And the spirit of the LORD fell upon me, and laid unto me, Speak. Thus saith the LORD, Thus have ye said, O house of Israel: for I know the things that come into your mind, every one of them. 6. Ye have multiplied your slain in this city, and ye have filled the streets thereof with the slain. 7. Therefore thus saith the LORD God, ‘Your slain whom ye have laid in the midst of it, they are the flesh, and this city is the caldron: but I will bring you forth out of the midst of it. 8. Ye have feared the sword, and I will bring a sword upon you, saith the LORD God. 9. And I will bring you out of the midst thereof, and deliver you into the hands of strangers, and will execute judgment among you. 10. Ye shall fall by the sword, I will judge you: in the border of Israel, and ye shall know that I am the LORD. 11. This city shall not be your caldron, neither shall ye be the flesh in the midst thereof; but I will judge you in the border of Israel. 12. And ye shall know that I am the LORD: for ye have not walked in my statutes, neither executed my judgments, but have done after the manner of the heathen that are round about you. 13. And it came to pass when I prophesied, that Pelatiah the son of Benatah died: then tell I down upon my face, and cried with a loud voice, and said, ‘Ah, LORD God, wilt thou make a full end of the remnant of Israel?’

The abominations which were done in the temple we have seen; and as great, it seems, pervaded in the courts of justice, as in the worship of the sanctuary.

1. Under the Spirit’s conduct the prophet is led to the east-gate of the Lord’s house, where five-and-twenty of the princes sat, two of whom are mentioned by name; and these, though the same in number as these, chap. viii. 16. are different, those being priests between the porch and the altar; these, judges, or princes, sitting in council, or presiding in the courts of judiciary, where they were chargeable with great abuses. They were abettors of wickedness: These are the men that devils mitschief, or savory, contrived schemes for the defense of the city, and encouraged the people to rebel, in defiance of God’s threatenings: and your wicked counsel in this city; advising the persecution of the prophets, and promising their countrymen all success and security in their evil ways; denying the truth of God’s warnings, and impossibly declaring, Is it not near; there was no danger from the Chaldean army; but that they may safely build houses, and dwell in them peaceably; for this city is the caldron, and we are the flesh; rid-culing what the prophet Jeremiah had spoken, chap. i. 13. or intimating, that no enemy would dare approach them, any more than a person would take with his hands the flesh out of a boiling caldron. Note, (1.) The higher men are in office, the more criminal is their unfaithfulness. (2.) Wicked counsellors hurry a deluded people to the precipice of ruin. (3.) They who put far from them the evil day, will find it terribly surprise them ere they are aware. (4.) Mockery at God’s word will shortly end in misery.

2. He is commanded, and strengthened by the Spirit of the Lord, to deliver with fidelity God’s warnings to these wicked rulers. Prophets against them, prophesy, O son of man: with boldness and zeal; for the greatest are not too high or above divine rebuke: nor can we do a greater act of kindness to sinners, who are fastening themselves to their ruin, than to undeceive them, and shew them the guilt and danger of their state. And the Spirit of the Lord fell upon me, and laid unto me, Speak: enabling him to open his mouth with unabound courage, and not to fear the faces of the many or the mighty. He must tell them.

[1.] That God is privy to their devices, v. 5. However secret their contrivances, or deep-laid their schemes, he searcheth the heart, and nothing is hid from his all-timing eye.

[2.] Ye have multiplied the slain in the city; by many inhuman murders, by the death of innocents, and the prophets of the Lord; and at their door lay all the blood which should be shed during the siege. In a sense they little suspected, that city should be the caldron, and these dead couples the flesh, the only inhabitants who should remain in it, buried under the ruins.

3. [3.] God

4. God will carry the survivors into captivity. For them dwelling as they fastened themselves there is a man in the land, 6, 7, 8, the Lord will drag them forth, and deliver them into the hands of the Chaldeans. Note, Every sinner is a self-deceiver! he cries peace to his soul, but it will shortly be found there is a lie in his right hand.

[4.] By the sword they shall fall; not merely in warriors fighting during the siege, but as criminals brought to the bar of the king of Babylon, seized and bound: In Sabbath, in the border of Israel, shall judgment pale on them, and they miserably perish under the hand of the executioner, Jer. 10, 9, 10.

[5.] God will terribly make himself known to them by the judgments he executes. They would not acknowledge him as they Lord by obedience to his holy will, but not off his government, and copied the manners of the heathen around them; therefore in the sufferings he will inflict they shall know him to be a jealous God, and prove the truth of his thirtieth, the power of his wrath, and the feverity of his justice.

6. An alarming providence confirms this awful warning. Petariah, the son of Beniah, one of the five-and-twenty whom he law at the gate, 9, 11, dropped down dead as he uttered these words; an earnest of the fulfilment of this fearful prophecy. This seems to have been done in vision here, but no doubt happened at this very time, or when this prophecy was published. Note, God is pleased to make some present monuments of his judgments, when sudden death arrests the daring sinner in the midst of his profanency and impiety.

7. The prophet, affected with this fearful stroke, deprecates the vengeance he saw ready to fall on the remnant of Israel. Though he denounced their doom, he did not desire the dreadful day, but wept, and prayed, and intreated, if so be the wrath might yet pass away.

8. Again the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 15. Son of man, thy brethren, eers thy brethren, the men of thy kindred, and all the house of Israel wholly are they, unto whom the inhabitants of Jerusalem have laid, “Get ye far from the LORD: unto us is this land given in possession. 16. Therefore say, Thus faith the LORD God, Although I have cast them far off among the heathen, and although I have scattered them among the countries, yet will I be to them as a little sanctuary in the countries where they shall come. 17. Therefore say, Thus faith the LORD God, “I will even gather you from the people, and assemble you out of the countries where ye have been scattered, and I will give you the land of Israel. 18. And they shall come thither, and they shall take away” all the detestable things thereof, and all the abominations thereof from thence. 19. And “I will give them one heart, and I will put a new Spirit within you: and I will take the flony heart out of their flesh, and will give them an heart of flesh: 20. That they may walk in my statutes, and keep mine ordinances, and do them: and they shall be my people, and I will be their God. 21. But as far than whose heart wallets after the heart of their detestable things, and their abominations, “I will recompense their way upon their own heads, faith the LORD God.

9. 14—21. We have here.

10. The unfoils cast on the poor captives in Babylon by their proud brethren, who still continued in their own land. They said, “Get ye far from the Lord; fuggelling that as dooms above the rest they deserved to be cut off from the communion of the tainfeld, and to lute all their interest in the inheritance of the Lord, as forfeited; for unto us is this land given for a possession. The prophet therefore need not be affected for the destruction he saw coming on those who thus treated his brethren, the men of his kindred, or redemption; his nearest relations, who were captives with him, to whom the right of redemption of his lands belonged; and these in God’s account, though flighted and cramped upon, are the whole house of Israel, the good fess, who for their benefit were sent into Babylon; whilst their revilers were the reprobator, the evil fess, to whom God disbanded any relation. Note, They are often the feverish producers of others, whose own conduct will lead bear examination.

11. The comfortable words the prophet is commanded to speak to them. God hath the most gracious delight towards them, and when their revilers are ruined, they shall be redeemed and taxed.

[1.] Though they want the temple, God will himself by his pretence and love be a little sanctuary unto them, 9, 10, and though he hath indeed dispersed them in the land of the heathen, where their condition seemed to be dethriven, yet there he would wife them, and make them safe as under the horns of the altar, and happy in communion with him, as if they were

in the courts of the Lord’s house: or, a sanctuary of a few, the little remnant according to the election of grace: or, for a little while, during the seventy years captivity. Note, [1.] Whatever outward means of grace we are excluded from, God can abundantly make them up in divine communications. [2.] The way to the throne of God is in every place alike open; and we may affordly find him near, whenever in fervent prayer we seek his face.

[2.] God promises to bring them again to their own land, to collect them from their dispersion, and refuse them to the possession of their lost inheritance, when the present occupants should utterly be confirmed, 9, 17.

[3.] They shall not only be refused to their land, but, what is infinitely better, recovered from their backfittings, and renewed in the Spirit of their minds. Their former detestable idolatrics shall be wholly rooted out from among them; and the Lord in his rich grace assures them, he will give them one heart, single in its attachment to him and his wroth, and faithfully devoted to his glory; and put a new Spirit within them, giving them new affections, new deities, new purposes, new delights, new principles, new ends; that God may be glorified in them and by them. And he will take away the flory heart out of their flesh, the corrupt, hard, impenitrent heart, that had before been stubborn and outfisture against God’s word and warnings; and will give them an heart of flesh; to-day, susceptible of the dreadful impressions of the same and remote for former unfaithfulness, and of love to God for his boundless mercies, now seen and felt with the most lively feudibility. Thus they shall be enabled for the practice of that obedience God enjoins, and in this way enjoy the comfort of that most blessed and endowed relation, God their God, and they his people, 9, 20. And what is here spoken of them is that of all God’s redeemed ones, whose hearts by nature are hard and stupid, but by the powerful energy of his Spirit are fattened, and effectually converted to God, the whole man rendered after the image of Jesus, and the love of sin, of every idol, mortified within them. Where such a blessed change is wrought, it is the sure evidence of our relation to God, and the earnest of our return to the heavenly Canaan; whilst without it to hope for heaven would be the greatest delusion: there must be a mercies to her, and we can truly expect an entrance into the inheritance among the faints in sight.

3. A denunciation of wrath is pronounced on those who fall down in Jerusalem, and lived in their abominable idolatrics: God will visit them according to their deeds, 9, 22. By famine, pestilence, and the sword, they shall miserably perish. Note, Whilst the heart continues apodate from God, hell must be the sinner’s doom.

4. 22. ¶ Then did the charabins lift up their wings, and the wheels besides them; and the glory of the God of Israel was over them above. 23. And the glory of the LORD went up from the midst of the city, and stood upon the mountain, which is on the east side of the city. 24. ¶ Afterwards the Spirit took me up, and brought me in vision by the Spirit of God into Chaldea, to them of the captivity: so the vision that I had seen went up from me. 25. Then I spoke unto them of the captivity: all the things that the LORD had shewed me.

5. 23—25. The message being delivered to the prophet,

6. God departs, and abandons the city and temple to destruction. He went up in his cherubic chores, and stood upon the mountain at the east of the city, supposed to be the Mount of Olives; either looking back with grief on those devoured walls, as in the days of his death he there wept over Jerusalem; or on that moment which had been the feet of idolatry and corruption, I kept anew. 13. triumphing in the view of the destruction he was able to bring on the city. Note, Vengeance is God’s strange work: he appears both so forfeited; but when his abused patience is as an end, and the measure of the sinner’s iniquity is full, God will delight in his torment.

7. The prophet is by the Spirit re-conveyed in vision to Chaldea, and thereupon the divine glory went up from him, and disappeared. He awaked from his ecstasy, and found himself in his own house among the captivity, and probably the elders of Judah still before him. Note, The saints of God, if at times favoured with some bright views of the divine glory, may expect them here below to be of no long continuance; but it is reserved for them as the happiness of the glorious world above, there to enjoy without interruption the beatific vision of God.

8. He immediately communicated to those of the captivity all the things he had seen and heard, as an encouragement to the poor captives to be thankful for their far; and most probably notice was conveyed also to Jerusalem of the judgments threatened as a warning, which, if it led them not to return from their sins, might leave them unavoidable in their impenitence.

CHAP. Before Christ 1914.