April 18, Ezekiel 4
And you, son of man, take a brick and lay it before you, and engrave on it a city, even Jerusalem. And put siegeworks against it, and build a siege wall against it, and cast up a mound against it. Set camps also against it, and plant battering rams against it all around." - Ezekiel 4:1-2
When I was a little boy, I enjoyed building models. My friends and I built cars, airplanes and even monsters. They were scale models, tiny replicas of much larger objects. We bought the kits, glued the pieces together, painted them and affixed the decals for the finishing touches.
My grandchildren like to play with Legos. My oldest grandson Graham has built and collected a huge assortment of carefully constructed models, all built with tiny Lego pieces.
I thought about those models when I read about
Ezekiel's model in Chapter 4. His model was not made from a kit, but he carefully followed instructions to build it. If it lacked realistic details (a brick does not look much like a city), it more than compensated for that lack in rich prophetic significance. Ezekiel engraved the brick with the word Jerusalem. He built little replicas of siegeworks, walls and mounds. He made little enemy camps around his brick city and even fashioned tiny replica battering rams that would be used to break through the city's gates or walls. His work was a model of what was going to happen to Jerusalem.
Next God told him to set up an iron griddle between himself and the little model city. The griddle would represent all the sins of the people and illustrate how an iron wall of sins had separated them from their God. It was a visible representation of what the prophets had been saying and the people had not been hearing. Doom was coming to their beloved Jerusalem because of the sins of idolatry and rebellion against God. Ezekiel and the other captives in Babylon were a long way from Jerusalem in terms of miles. But the city was still very near to their hearts.
Next God told Ezekiel to lie on his left side, bearing the sins of Israel for a long time. Then he was to turn over and bear the sins of Judah on his right side. I believe Ezekiel was modeling something God would do about the hopeless lostness and ruin of the people of Israel. God himself in the person of Christ would bear their sins to make a way for them to be forgiven and return to God. It was a dramatic display, foreshadowing what Jesus would do about the ruin and separation sin had caused.
The drama continued as Ezekiel followed God's script to take a mixture of grains to make his daily bread. His only cooking fuel would be dung, which would under normal conditions render the food cooked over it unclean. It was a picture of the poverty and impossibility of keeping the Law that the captives would know while they lived in Babylon.
All the curses God had promised to bring on his people if they forsook him and disobeyed him had begun and would continue to come true. Their misery was the direct result of their sin against God.
Why did God use the lives of his prophets to illustrate truth? Why did he employ devices like Ezekiel's besieged brick and Jeremiah's wooden yoke to give a visual model of the prophecies? Perhaps those dramatic devices were evidence of God's great desire for his wayward people to hear and understand the message he wanted them to get. Perhaps such demonstrations would speak to visual learners when they had already rejected the words of the prophecies. Maybe the model and the drama was intended to work like Jesus' dramatic demonstration of washing the disciples' feet the night before the cross. He had told them more than once that the greatest among them would be their servant. He was the greatest, and he did serve them. The powerful demonstration finally taught these men to stop vying to be the greatest and be humble servants. But most of Ezekiel's captive audience didn't seem to get the message, even after the demonstration.
Thank God for his mercy and patience that goes to great lengths to save his people from self-destruction. Let's be smart enough to learn early and well what the Lord is teaching us.
Copyright © 2024 by Michael B. McElroy. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Today in God's Word—April 2024
East Tallassee Church of Christ
Comments