3/14/21
EZEKIEL
Ezekiel was likely born in Jerusalem and grew up to to the priesthood. He is exiled to Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar among hundreds of others. Ezekiel would have seen this conquest as an instrument of God’s justice against the unfaithfulness of Israel and Judah.
One of his favorite words is abominations. Ezekiel saw human unrighteousness as an injustice toward the goodness of God.
Ezekiel the priest makes his transition to prophet by God’s call through amazing, mystical visions—wheels within wheels, flaming chariots, and the like—which draw him out of the crowds into that personal Twilight Zone of prophetic revelation.
Ezekiel was known for some strange antics. He liked to get his whole body into his prophesying, lying on one side of his body for so many days, switching to the other side for so many more days, and initiating many symbolic actions as embodied signs of God’s messages to the people.
He eats bread cooked on a cow pie fire, and that was after bargaining with God.
Ezekiel, like other prophets, sees the God-to-people relationship as analogous to that of husband to unfaithful wife, and therefore understands the collapse of the life of Judah as God’s judgment against Israel’s infidelity.
Our text today is an oracle against the Prince of Tyre.
Some scholars have used this text to explain the origins of Lucifer or Satan—but others—myself included—consider that a misreading.
Hear now the text.
EZEKIEL 28: 1-10 NRSV
1 The word of the Lord came to me: 2 Mortal, say to the prince of Tyre, Thus says the Lord God:
Because your heart is proud
and you have said, “I am a god;
I sit in the seat of the gods,
in the heart of the seas,”
yet you are but a mortal, and no god,
though you compare your mind
with the mind of a god.
3 You are indeed wiser than Daniel;[a]
no secret is hidden from you;
4 by your wisdom and your understanding
you have amassed wealth for yourself,
and have gathered gold and silver
into your treasuries.
5 By your great wisdom in trade
you have increased your wealth,
and your heart has become proud in your wealth.
6 Therefore thus says the Lord God:
Because you compare your mind
with the mind of a god,
7 therefore, I will bring strangers against you,
the most terrible of the nations;
they shall draw their swords against the beauty of your wisdom
and defile your splendor.
8 They shall thrust you down to the Pit,
and you shall die a violent death
in the heart of the seas.
9 Will you still say, “I am a god,”
in the presence of those who kill you,
though you are but a mortal, and no god,
in the hands of those who wound you?
10 You shall die the death of the uncircumcised
by the hand of foreigners;
for I have spoken, says the Lord God. †
ITHBAAL, PRINCE OF TYRE
Ezekiel’s target, in our text, is Ithbaal, who was the prince of Tyre. Tyre was a leading city in Phoenicia, just above Galilee on the Mediterranean coast. Its people were semitic—in the time of Solomon they prayed to the Lord, the God of Israel—and the Phoenicians were good friends of Israel. Solomon built his beautiful temple and palaces with the famed cedars of Lebanon, which shipped straight out of Tyre. So Tyre had great wealth and peace, but when Solomon fell and the kingdom divided, it is likely then that the Phoenicians went back to worshipping Canaanite deities—Baal and Asherah—just as Israel and Judah had done.
So Ithbaal and his armies manage to repel Nebuchadnezzar’s army from doing much damage to Tyre (this after they had overthrown Jerusalem), so the prince thought himself invincible—even godlike—and praised himself without hindrance. Ezekiel calls him out and condemns his pride.
The first words state the theme of the oracle: Because your heart is proud
Again, some have used Ezekiel 28 as the origin of Lucifer story. This is not the best reading, in my opinion. Even good people can make myths out of prophetic utterances, and this chapter—especially the latter half—is a case in point. But rather than run down the list verse by verse about why this is not about Satan nor Lucifer, I’ll just remind you that in both verse 2 and verse 9, Ezekiel makes it crystal clear:
“But you are a man, and no god.”
Recently, on Ash Wednesday, we marked ourselves as dust. We do the very thing that the Prince of Tyre could not do; namely, acknowledge that under the one, true God, we are all dust—we all answer to God’s judgment.
prophets of the dust.
Prophets speak from the dust. They all carry their message from God with something like brokenness, something like poverty, and unpopularity written large. It is the brokenness of being merely human and therefore sinful. It is the poverty of the people of God who think their own way is better than God’s way. And it is the unpopularity of speaking truth—the real truths—that no one wants to hear, chiefly because it calls out the sins they love most.
One prophetic sign of repentance and grief was sackcloth and ashes. It was self-humiliation. They would wear cheap sackcloth that even naked beggars would reject, and sit in the town square pouring handfuls of dust on their heads.
People would do this out of grief. Soldiers who had lost in battle but survived would do this. Prophets did it to show the lowliness of humanity in comparison to the greatness, goodness, and holiness of God.
But Ithbaal, the prince of Tyre, is at the opposite end of the spectrum. He’s so impressed with himself for his successes and wealth that he thinks himself divine—a god or a son of the gods. This was not unusual—most of the city/state rulers of Mesopotamia did the same—as did most of the Roman Caesars. Greek leaders, like Antiochus Epiphanes—you hear that name, “Epiphany”?—means “God made manifest.”
There is no limit to how highly a successful man will think of himself. Wealth can certainly breed megalomania—and an atheism to all gods but oneself—but no amount of money or success can keep a mere mortal from finishing life as dust, dust, dust.
Lest you think the prophets like Ezekiel are being negative—far from it—they are truth-telling the good news that God is greater than all of humankind and greater than the world we see. Ezekiel will proclaim by the image of a valley of dry bones that God is greater than death. God will have the last word with humanity, not death.
God is the perfect judge, and He is absolutely unavoidable. So we all are dust. Rich, poor, just, unjust, oppressor, oppressed, devout and sinners alike—we all are equalized beneath the pall of death and the judgment of a good and holy God.
“SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER”
This series, The Prophets and the Powers, is about how the Word of God and its truth speaks to the powers of this world.
This has become a very hip phrase in our time: speaking the truth to power. Whenever I hear it, I think, “Beware—false prophets ahead!”
Among its most popular—and pompous—practitioners are the news media. They speak of the role of the press as that of “speaking the truth to power,” which may rightly characterize journalism at its best, but usually they use that phrase merely to establish their credibility—their moral credibility.
Be clear, journalists are not the noble, dispassionate arbiters of objective truth they’d like us to think they are, nor are they the world’s high priests of honest information. They do love to think of their profession as nobly speaking the truth to power, but they are not prophets—not good ones, anyway.
Yes, they think of themselves like prophets flouting popularity in order to speak the hard truths to those in positions of power—it’s a grand image, isn’t it? The noble, lowly reporter who refuses to kiss the king’s ring, or who nobly declares that the emperor, in fact, has no clothes on. But today, in the era of fake news, this moral credibility is equally fake.
The anchor-persons who work as very attractive, professional, readers of teleprompters are the masks of their parent companies. CNN, NBC, CBS, Fox, msnbc—these are powers unto themselves. Considerable powers with enormous automatic influence on public opinion. They shape the facts that you and I discuss day to day.
William Randolph Hearst’s massive empire spoke only in morning and evening editions of his newspapers, so what are we to think of 24/7 live-streaming news—Twitter, Facebook, Google, and the rest—refreshing their news feeds every 20 seconds? Speaking the truth to power? They are the power, and any who dare to speak the truth to them runs the risk of getting cancelled or shut down. Influence negated.
No, journalists are pawns of their princes, lackeys of their network lords, serving their extremely for-profit corporations and their shareholders.
Journalists don’t speak the truth to power, they are the very voices of power, and the news readers are valued for their loyalty to the company line. Otherwise, networks would reward truth-tellers even when their ratings go south (which would certainly be the case with real prophets of God).
If you want real journalists, you have a better chance with independent writers. You might even look towards those who have been fired for unpopular opinions—say, those critical of their parent companies—but these trend toward obscurity rather than air-time.
“We’re being prophetic”
Another popular trend to beware is the use of the word “prophetic” to legitimize one’s activism. This is particularly popular with seminaries and Christian activists seeking to lend moral weight to their otherwise-questionable agitations. “We’re being prophetic,” or “We need to use the prophetic voice,” are their attempts to sacralize their agenda, which is usually politically-driven.
Calling oneself “prophetic” is a patent invitation to self-righteousness and sanctimony—a rather pitiful attempt at moral legitimization. We should not be fooled by it.
Beware any who publicly pat themselves on the back proclaiming that they are “being prophetic” or “speaking the truth to power,” because these are now the trademarks of false prophets.
Real prophets don’t talk that way. They bear the Word of God in humility, and often in the midst of their own, personal brokenness. The truth they speak is God’s truth—it is nothing any individual can be proud about, because it is not their own. God’s truth judges the prophets every bit much as anyone else.
Yes, the prophets speak truth to power, but it is equally true to say that the prophets spoke for the true power of God to the false powers of this world. And this is what we’ve seen with every prophet in this series.
Today, we hear Ezekiel speaking God’s truth to the false power of egotistical pride. That word speaks to each of us as well.
PROPHETS SPEAKING TO US
As prophets bear the Word of God to the people, we can hear God’s Word to us as well. This season of Lent is our time to put ourselves under their scrutiny—setting every aspect of our lives under the history of God’s judgment of His people.
Do we see ourselves in Israel and Judah? Are you and I ever so pride-filled by comforts or success that we disregard the calling of God? If so, you and I play at being Ithbaal.
The judgment of God does not come to us to wreck or destroy us, but rather to save us and grow us into wholeness. Where God’s Word does not get a foothold inside our hearts, sin certainly will.
Sin is like a nasty salesman at your door. He gets his foot inside and plants it in place. If we do nothing to remove that foothold, we’re stuck, for soon that foothold will grow metal scales or a stone wall around it.
Sin is insidious and persistent. Once it builds a little fortress around its foothold, it immediately seeks to build another wall further out—further inside our souls—and another wall soon after that. Sin would to take us over entirely—that is what it does. The Word of God, through the prophets, seeks to stop that occupation, that spread.
Unless we do, that sin becomes the source of one abomination after another until our entire life, heart, and soul becomes an abomination.
The good news is that God is with us. In Christ He has paid the price for our catharsis.
It is in freedom and hope that we do the hard work of searching our hearts for whatever abominations may be trying to take root. We have the Holy Spirit in us working—searching our hearts at depths deeper than sighs—and revealing to us the things that would block us from knowing God’s love, grace, and mercy.
We should all be taking time with this kind of self-inventory each Lent. Think of it as spring-cleaning for the soul. We pray that God would help us access the deeper rooms of our soul and there reveal any “planted feet.” From there, we have the mechanism of confession by which we turn those things over to God’s judgment and mercy, and God will cleanse every room.
We were not made for abominations; we were made to be the wholesome, joyous people of God who know His love like the love of a good Father, a good shepherd, an ineffably-loving Lord. †
QUESTIONS
- How is unrighteousness a kind of injustice?
- How do wealth, success, and comfort lead to pridefulness? Can one have these things without becoming prideful?
- How does pridefulness distort one’s perception of God?
- Why was it no picnic to be a prophet?
- What is the problem with seeking to be one who “speaks the truth to power”?
- Why should we beware one who claims to be using the “prophetic” voice?
- What is the key difference between well-meaning, political activists and true prophets?
- How is the Word of God rightly born to us today? Are there several ways?
- What obstacles do we face when it comes to checking our own hearts for sin?