Ezekiel 8:1 - Meaning and Application

Ezekiel was in Babylon, but the warnings he had given in the earlier chapters were about Jerusalem. The exiles saw their own peace or trouble as tied to the peace or trouble of that city, so God gave Ezekiel a vision of what was happening there. That vision continues through the end of chapter 11.

This vision is dated carefully. Ezekiel’s first vision came in the fifth year of the captivity, in the fourth month, on the fifth day of the month (Ezekiel 1:1-2). This new vision came about fourteen months later. It may have been after he had lain on his left side for 390 days to bear Israel’s guilt, and before he began the forty days on his right side to bear Judah’s guilt, since he is now sitting in his house, not lying down. God keeps a careful record of the messages he sends, because he will soon call us to account for them.

The setting also matters. Ezekiel was sitting in his house, likely calm and thoughtful, perhaps deep in prayer and reflection. The more we pull away from the world and turn inward before God, the better fitted we are for communion with him. Those who stop to consider what they have learned will be taught more.

He may also have been sitting in his house ready to speak to the people who gathered around him, waiting for God to show him what to say. God gives more light to those who share what light they already have. The elders of Judah, who were in exile with him, were sitting before him. It was likely the Sabbath, and they may have met with him each Sabbath to hear God’s word and join in prayer and praise. How else could they better spend the Sabbath, now that they had neither temple nor synagogue, neither priest nor altar?

This was also a mercy, like the good people who gathered around Elisha (2 Kings 4:23). Some think they came on this occasion because they wanted to ask the Lord for guidance and sat at the prophet’s feet to hear him. When the law had perished from the priests in Jerusalem, whose lips should have preserved knowledge (Ezekiel 7:26), those in Babylon still had a prophet to consult. God is not limited to one place or one person.

These elders in captivity seem to have valued God’s prophets more than they did back in their own land. When God brings people into suffering, he often opens their ears to instruction (Job 36:8, 36:10; Psalm 141:6). Those who once despised God’s word in the valley of vision now prized it, because the word of the Lord was precious and open vision was rare. When our teachers are driven into private homes, we should still attend carefully. A minister’s house ought to be a church to all his neighbors. Paul preached in his rented house in Rome, and God used him there, and no one was able to stop him.

Then the prophet felt the power of God upon him: “the hand of the Lord fell there upon me.” God’s hand seized him, as it were, to use him in this vision, and at the same time strengthened him to bear it. Ezekiel then saw a likeness of a man, most likely the same glorious figure he had seen before, bright above the waist and full of fire below, like the appearance in Ezekiel 1:27. It is likely that this was the man Christ Jesus.

The elders who were with him may have seen a light and been afraid, as the men who were with Paul saw a light (Acts 22:9). They gained this privilege by attending the prophet in a private gathering, though they did not get a clear view of the one who spoke to him. Then the vision moved Ezekiel to Jerusalem. The figure he saw stretched out the form of a hand and took him by a lock of his hair, which was the Spirit’s power lifting him up. The Spirit of God is called the finger of God, and here the Spirit within Ezekiel raised him, so that he was carried along by an inward power, not forced by anything outside him.

A faithful servant of God will move at even the smallest sign of God’s will, because his heart is already inclined to obey (Psalm 27:8). Ezekiel was lifted up between heaven and earth, as if he might fly away on eagles’ wings. The elders may have seen this too, according to Grotius, first the hand taking him by the hair, then lifting him up, and later perhaps setting him down again in a trance while the visions followed. Whether he was in the body or out of the body, he could not tell, much like Paul in a similar experience. We cannot know more than he did.

People are best prepared for communion with God when grace lifts them above the earth and its attractions. Then, while he was being lifted toward heaven, he was carried in vision to Jerusalem and to God’s sanctuary there. Those who would go to heaven must take that route in their hearts. The Spirit made the city and temple as clear to his mind as if he had been there in person. Oh, that by faith we could enter the Jerusalem above, the holy city, and see what cannot be seen with the eye!

There he saw the glory of God (Ezekiel 8:4), the same glory he had seen before, with the living creatures, the wheels, and the throne from chapter 1. God’s servants, wherever they go, should always keep his glory before them. Those who have seen God’s power and glory in the sanctuary should long to see them again, as they had before (Psalm 63:2). Ezekiel’s repeated vision of God’s glory was meant to give weight to what followed and to honor it.

It also made Israel’s sin look far worse. They had exchanged their own God, the God of Israel, who appeared in such glory, for useless idols, shameful idols, false gods, really no gods at all. The clearer we see God’s glory, the more ugly sin becomes, especially idolatry, which turns truth into a lie and glory into shame. This vision also made their coming misery more serious, because this glory of the Lord would soon leave them and leave the house and city empty (Ezekiel 11:23).

Then Ezekiel saw the disgrace of Israel, the image that made God jealous, set on the north side at the gate of the altar (Ezekiel 8:3, 5).

It is not certain what image this was, but it was probably an image of Baal, or of the sacred pole that Manasseh, king of Judah, had made and set in the temple (2 Kings 21:7; 2 Chronicles 33:3). Josiah later removed it, but his successors likely put it back, along with the sun chariots that Josiah found at the entrance of the house of the Lord (2 Kings 23:11). The text says it stood in the entry, but Ezekiel does not stop to name it.

That is the point. Instead of satisfying curiosity, he calls it the image of jealousy, because whatever it was, it deeply offended God and stirred his holy jealousy. God treated it as a husband would treat a wife’s unfaithfulness, and he would surely punish it, for God is jealous, and the Lord takes revenge (Nahum 1:2).

The very presence of this image in the Lord’s house was enough to provoke him. In matters of worship, God had already said, “I the Lord your God am a jealous God.” The people had set it at the door of the inner gate, where the people gathered, near the gate of the altar (Ezekiel 8:5). They meant to insult God by raising an idol as a rival for his people’s worship, and they also meant to lead people astray as they came to bring offerings to him.

Ezekiel must have been shocked and grieved to see this in God’s house. He had hoped the judgments already falling on them might have brought some change, but there is often more wickedness in the world, and even in the church, than good people expect. God asks him, in effect, whether this is not enough to show why he should abandon them to ruin.

Could anyone expect God to stay near a sanctuary filled with such sins? They were doing these things deliberately, as if they wanted him to leave, and so he would. In that sense, they were like the Gadarenes, who asked Jesus to leave their region, and God would no longer honor and protect his sanctuary as he had before, but would give it up to shame and destruction.

Even so, this is only the beginning. God tells Ezekiel to turn again, and he will be amazed to see greater sins than these. Where one sin is found, more usually follow. Sins do not come alone.