Listen To What I Do

Ezekiel is currently my favorite prophet (until I forget that I picked him and another one surfaces as most favorite. 😉 )

I’m realizing he could be characterized as the Peter of the prophet core. In fact, God said He was sending him to a stony people because he was equally stony.

Then He said to me, “Son of man, I am sending you to the sons of Israel, to a rebellious people who have rebelled against Me; they and their fathers have transgressed against Me to this very day (Ezekiel 2:3).

Behold, I have made your face as hard as their faces and your forehead as hard as their foreheads. Like emery harder than flint I have made your forehead. Do not be afraid of them or be dismayed before them, though they are a rebellious house (Ezekiel 3:8-9).

So Ezekiel was hard-headed and probably on the rebellious side himself. He makes me think he was a bit like Moses, wanting to rush ahead of God and take things into his own hands. And that’s were I see the similarities with Peter, who stuck his foot in his mouth as often as he espoused the truth — until the Holy Spirit changed him inside out.

God changed Ezekiel, too, but from the outside in, it would seem because he needed God to rein in “the sharp stone.”

I will make your tongue stick to the roof of your mouth so that you will be mute and cannot be a man who rebukes them, for they are a rebellious house. But when I speak to you, I will open your mouth and you will say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord GOD.’ He who hears, let him hear; and he who refuses, let him refuse; for they are a rebellious house (Ezekiel 3:26-27).

Ezekiel did prophesy plenty, but as it turns out, he also acted out a lot of God’s message.

There was the “siege” of Jerusalem, for example. He set up a brick to represent the city, then built a siege wall, ramps, pitched camps, and set up battering rams against it. Lastly he put an iron plate between himself and the city and then he lay down on his side. For thirteen months — three hundred and ninety days — he laid siege to Jerusalem, a day for each year of Israel’s waywardness. Afterward, he flipped to his left side for forty more days, a day for each year of Judah’s rebellion.

Another time he enacted the people under siege trying to sneak out of the city. Under God’s direction, he packed his things, dug a hole under the wall, at night shouldered his baggage, and made as if he was trying to escape.

Then there was the hair object lesson. God told Ezekiel to shave off all his hair and beard. He was to weigh it and divide it into thirds. One third he burned in the fire; another third, he was to strike with a sword; and the final third he was to scatter to the winds. In the same way, God said, He would deal with His people.

The hardest object lesson, though, was when God told Ezekiel his wife would die and he was not to mourn for her. He was to “groan silently,” but not to make a public display of his grief, as a picture of how those in Jerusalem would deal with the dead as the time of the exile closed in.

What a cost it was to be a prophet. Hosea had to marry a prostitute. Jeremiah almost lost his life and ended up at the bottom of a pit for a time. But Ezekiel … now there was a prophet who lived out what he preached. Literally!