Jeremiah

Jeremiah mainly figures in God’s eternal Covenant section in the Messianic prophecy essay

Baruch, Lamentations

The horrors in these books are well night unimaginable. I always find these to be a powerful meditation and a contemplation of what the horrors of Hell might truly be like, lived in separation from God. It’s almost too horrible to write here, so I’ll leave it there for now. Monday we’ll start with Ezekiel. I’m working over the weekend, so you might not hear a lot more from me.

Not only is Lamentations a reflection on Hell, it is also a powerful reflection of the depths of human despair in the earthly life, and how a man can cause suffering to his fellow man. But some persons have difficulty believing that they can find happiness in Heaven when their loved ones who chose disbelief went to Hell. Their answer is in Lamentations 4:10. “Love” that is God-less does not endure on Earth, leave alone in Hell.

Ezekiel

Ezekiel 1 is his amazing “Chariot” vision of God. You will know that this and Isaiah’s “Holy Holy Holy” Temple visions are the two greatest in the Bible, along with probably Daniel 7 “Ancient of Days and Son of Man”

This is a “chariot”, because each of the angels (“Living creatures”) controls a wheel, and their “spirit is in the wheel”. with their outstretched wings they hold up the dome atop which God is. This is the incredibly poetic construction of the chariot. But the best part is this. Ezekiel saw “above the throne…something that seemed like a human form” (v.26), and goes on to affirm: “this was the likeness of the glory of God”.

You might like to look at this section (7) in my article which presents all the instances where there is an indication of a human form for God in the Old Testament. This is not only a powerful reflection of the manner in which God can say that we are “in his own image and likeness”, but a powerful pre-figurement of the Incarnation of Christ. It does not mean that God in his eternal substance has literally a human shaped outline, which would be absurd, because it is a boundary (what’s between his fingers?!). Rather it shows that even in these most glorious visions, God does not recoil from presenting himself to us, in the form of us. The divine condescension here is incredibly awesome, where God could merely have presented himself to these persons as something dazzlingly awesome and left it there. However God chooses, in his great love, to present himself to us in a manner that we can identify with, which is a human form. These visions are the great divine condescension that will pre-figure the biggest of them all that is to come, the Incarnation of the Son.

This is a complex text, so I try to trace the main characters, and I contend that there is also here the Holy Spirit of God, in addition to God who is on the Throne. I hope this synopsis helps:

Again these passages are beautiful. God (whom the prophet has seen in the “form of a man”) now speaks to him (2:1) and “when he spoke to me” (2:2), “a spirit entered into me and set me on my feet” (2:2). They the narrative continues “he said to me…I am sending you…” (2:3); “you shall speak my words to them…” (2:7); “go…speak my very words to them” (3:1), “they are not willing to listen to me…” (3:7) all of which sounds like God himself speaking, then we see again “Then the spirit lifted me up, and as the glory of the Lord rose from its place…” (3:12a) “the spirit lifted me up and bore me away… the hand of the Lord being strong upon me” (3:14),

and finally we have another vision of God in human form “Then the hand of the Lord was upon me there, and he said to me, “Rise up, go out into the valley, and there I will speak with you.” So I rose up and went out into the valley, and the glory of the Lord stood there, like the glory that I had seen by the River Chebar, and I fell on my face” (3:22,23) accompanied once again with the indwelling spirit “The spirit entered into me and set me on my feet, and he spoke with me and said to me…” (3:24a). I should add here that the creatures are cherubim, as fully affirmed multiple times in chapter 10.

In chapter 8 begins the second divine vision “the glory of the God of Israel was there, like the vision that I had seen in the valley” (8:4) “God said to me…” (8:5), “and he brought me…” (8:7,14,16), so here we have God “bringing” Ezekiel to a certain place in visions and simultaneously speaking to him (8:8,15,17).

Through this there is a certain “man clothed in linen” who is obeying the commands of the Lord, as though his chief agent or commander (first appearing at 9:2 “with a writing case by his side” accompanied six other men “each with his weapon for slaughter in his hand”, then 9:3,11;10:2,6etc.).

When the mention of the “spirit” is made again (11:1) “the spirit lifted me up and brought me…”, here the spirit is performing another action that has elsewhere we have seen attributed to God, which is bringing Ezekiel to a certain place in a vision (the other act was to speak the words of God).  

This time round it is called the “spirit of the Lord”: “then the spirit of the Lord fell upon me and he said to me, “say, Thus says the Lord…” (11:5) and  a second time, this time following the previous pattern we have seen of accompanying the vision of the Glory “And the glory of the Lord ascended from the middle of the city and stopped on the mountain east of the city. ²⁴ The spirit lifted me up and brought me in a vision by the spirit of God into Chaldea, to the exiles….” (11:23,24).

Thus we can conclude, as Christians, from three premises that this is the Holy Spirit, first the two actions of God we have already mentioned and second, the two mentions of “spirit of the Lord/ spirit of God”.

The passage from Ch.16 has always been very striking to me. God says that those who prostitute themselves to worldly desires are worse than literal prostitutes, since prostitutes are at least doing what they do to fill their bellies. Why do the former do it? On the contrary they pay people to fulfill their desires. Indeed who is worse, the prostitute or the client?:

“30 How sick is your heart, says the Lord God, that you did all these things, the deeds of a brazen prostitute, 31 building your platform at the head of every street and making your lofty place in every square! Yet you were not like a prostitute because you scorned payment. 32 Adulterous wife who receives strangers instead of her husband! 33 Gifts are given to all prostitutes, but you gave your gifts to all your lovers, bribing them to come to you from all around for your prostitutions. 34 So you were different from other women in your prostitutions: no one solicited you to prostitute yourself, and you gave payment, while no payment was given to you; you were different.”

and the incredibly tender passage from Ch.18: “23 Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked, says the Lord God, and not rather that they should turn from their ways and live? “

Chapters 23, the parable of the two sisters Oholah and Oholibah on the theme of sexual wantonness and it’s fruit. Again this is a reflection on Hell. Those who seemingly “loved” here will hate and abuse there. Don’t be fooled by earthly “loves”.

Towards the end of the book, we see no less than five passages end with these promises of reunion, kingdom and the outpouring of the Spirit upon Israel. We’ve covered the material above, but the passages are from Ch.34:23-30, 36:22-33, 37:22-28, 39:21-29, 43:1-12.

The book ends with the Temple visions which go from Ch. 40 through to 48. They are given to the prophet by a “man…whose appearance shone like bronze” (40:3). The two chapters go into several details and measurements, but Ch.43 Ezekiel is given to see the Glory of the God of Israel, which he records was like the vision which which the book begins (v.3). Once again the promise of an eschatological eternal Kingdom is given (vv.6-12). The East gate remaining shut “no one shall enter by it, for the Lord, the God of Israel has entered by it” (v.2) has been been taken by Catholic apologists as a sort of prefiguring of the perpetual virginity of Mary. The “linen undergarments on their loins” (44:18) of the Levitical priests reminds us of Christ’s own linen undergarment alluded to in the Passion narratives in the Gospels.

Chapter 47 describes the water, which one can only surmise represents the promised outpouring of the Holy Spirit, that flows from the entrance of the Temple “from below the south end of the threshold of the temple, south of the altar” and that it “flowed toward the East”, adding parenthethetically. “for the Temple faced East” (v.1). This water then progressively deepens from being only ankle deep to then being an immense “river that could not be crossed” (v.5). That river, continuing to flow on eastward (v.3), becomes life-giving (vv.8-12), and also purifying (v.8) and healing (v.12)

Finally, the book ends wonderfully with (48:35) “and the name of the city from that time on shall be, The Lord is There (Yahweh Shammah יְהוָ֥ה שָֽׁמָּה׃”).

Here is a pdf that Michael Heiser provides on his Naked Bible podcast which is by Othmar Keel, a leading specialist in ancient Babylonian iconography, a German (who writes in German), and is a terrific insight into the vision of Ezekiel described in Ezekiel 1. In it, Heiser makes the point that the people of the ANE would have known exactly what was being described in that vision and it would not have taken them my surprise at all- what is being spoken of is a “cherubim throne”. To us it sounds completely unexpected, even to the point that some have commented that it might have been space aliens in a UFO! But not to the ancients (I have to say though that I would have liked to see the creatures and their wings and wheels all covered in eyes, I have real trouble visualizing that!).

Heiser asserts that this vision is none other than that of the Throne room of Yahweh, whether upon Earth or in Heaven. The Earthly visions are already alluded to in no less than two places, the first would be 1King’s7:23-26 which has much of the imagery that Ezekiel uses with the bulls under the molten sea facing in the four cardinal directions and the ten movable bronze stands complete with carvings of lion, bulls and cherubim and being fitted with “chariot wheels with axles rims spokes and hubs made of cast metal” (v.33). The second is in 1 Chronicles 28:18 in which it is King David who is giving his son Solomon the plans for the Temple (vv.11-19) that “the Spirit put in his mind” (v.12) ” He also gave him (Solomon) the plan for the chariot, that is, the cherubim of gold that spread their wings and overshadow the ark of the covenant of the Lord.” (v.18), King David continues “All this,” David said, “I have in writing as a result of the Lord’s hand on me, and he enabled me to understand all the details of the plan.” (v.19)

Heiser wants us to appreciate how powerful this image of the Throne room of God must have been to the Israelites in their devastation as they stood by the banks of the river Chybar in their exile, this would have been a sign of hope that although they were defeated, it was still their God sovereign over the Universe, they had been warned of their punishment, which was their own fault for not obeying the word of God, and they should never abandon hope that he would redeem them if they turned once again to him.

Daniel

In addition there’s an entire section (5.7?) in The Messianic Prophecy of the Bible

Daniel is called “greatly beloved” (10:11,19). Let us also labour in our lives that we may, in Christ be made worthy of this great love showered upon us from Heaven that we are one day called the same.

Chapter 12 is the last of Daniel in the Protestant Bible, although the Catholic Bible has two more chapters which are about Susanna and Bel and the Dragon. This begins with the beautiful description of the resurrection of the dead, one of a kind passage in the OT