If you have your Bible, please turn to Ezekiel, chapter 8. We will be looking at a protracted vision that this priest in exile south of Babylon experienced six years into King Jehoiakim’s exile, in 592 BC. Ezekiel described this vision in chapters 8 through 11.

When God intends to get our attention after a prolonged bout of stubbornness and disobedience, He allows painful things to occur. Proverbs 3:10-11 says, “My son, do not reject the discipline of the Lord or loathe His reproof, ¹² for whom the Lord loves He reproves, even as a father corrects the son in whom he delights.” Hebrews 12:6 quotes that verse more intensely, “He scourges every son whom He receives.” Prison has been a large part of God’s reproof for your waywardness, in order to protect you from final and irremediable punishment in hell forever. Aren’t you glad that God appointed you for prison on earth rather than being jailed in Hades in the clutches of demons? Aren’t you glad you were sentenced by an earthly magistrate to prison, rather than by the Supreme Judge to the lake of fire for a lifetime of unbelief?

You are those who have taken refuge in the Lord for salvation; and your attendance here this morning bears witness that you realize how costly is your soul to God and how precious is your salvation. For God so loved each and every one of you that He sent His only begotten Son so that when you believed you would not perish in hell but receive everlasting life! You also realize how great a peril in eternity you have escaped!

Sadly, most of the men in this prison do NOT acknowledge Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. So they are only one gunshot wound, one tragic accident, or one massive aneurism or heart attack away from death, and eternal separation from God in torment.

There are no human words that can express the depths of unrelenting terror, torment and trauma for those now residing in Hades, who await the Day of Judgment. They live every moment with the certainty that they are condemned to hell forever. Hades for them will last untold thousands of years experientially. They will never experience even a moment’s pleasure or happiness again. Then comes the Day of Judgment in Heaven, where the lost will behold the face of God. Their whole life will be reviewed before them. They will see how time and again they could have repented and turned to Christ. But every time, they turned Him down. They’ll see everything their soul could possibly have wanted, but know they rejected Him, and are rejected by Him, forever. Their souls’ agonies will be beyond comprehension.

The failure of Israel’s kingdoms is a tragic allegory of the human story of turning away from God in the pursuit of temporal pleasure or selfish gain. Israel was a chosen nation for God, who knew God’s favor above every other nation on earth. But just like us, they threw away their spiritual heritage to pursue self-indulgence grounded in idolatry. The Bible tells us to “put away immorality, impurity, evil desire and greed, which amount to idolatry.” Whatever hinders us from living for Christ is a form of idolatry.

Jesus Christ opened the gates of heaven for everyone who trusts Him for salvation. We become God’s elect, His chosen race, when we turn to Christ for salvation. But when we allow ourselves to be enticed by our own lusts, James says, we give birth to sin, and sin leads to death. Death comes to us, even while we live, in lost years, relationships and opportunities that can never be retrieved. We then become like the Second Temple in Jerusalem, built after the Babylonian exile, that was wholly inferior to Solomon’s temple.

After roughly eight centuries since the Exodus from Egypt, the devastating prophetic duo of Jeremiah and Ezekiel pronounced God’s present judgment upon the last remnant of the Davidic kingdom and Israel’s self-governance as a nation. Jeremiah remained in the land of Judah to speak directly to kings like Jehoiakim and Zedekiah that their conquest by Babylon was inevitable and ordained by God. Ezekiel came later as a young priest in his twenties living as an exile south of Babylon near the great canal Chebar. One day, around 593 BC, he saw fantastic visions of flying cherubim responding instantaneously to the moving of the Spirit.

Last month we looked at how the Spirit worked in Ezekiel’s extraordinary vision of the four cherubim connected to wheels covered in eyes. The cherubim represented the living agents who serve and hold up the glory of God. The wheels with eyes symbolized the dynamic movement of God’s purposes that can never be resisted. These cherubim introduced the glory of God who was seated above them on a throne. His body glowed like heated metal with fire all around it from His loins up, and like a fire below. His voice sounded like a rushing river. This is how God introduced the most portentous judgment ever to fall upon the remnant of Israel. This was the final collapse of David’s kingdom and the conquest and destruction of Jerusalem and God’s holy temple.

In Ezekiel 8, God set the stage prophetically for final judgment by taking Ezekiel in the Spirit to Jerusalem to see an ascending order of wickedness and betrayal toward God. This vision occurred in 592 BC, 13 months after his first vision of the cherubim in Ezekiel 1. Let’s read v. 1 of chapter 8:

“It came about in the sixth year, on the fifth day of the sixth month, as I was sitting in my house with the elders of Judah sitting before me, that the hand of the Lord God fell on me there.” Ezekiel’s first vision took place by the Chebar Canal, symbolic of flowing water or power. But this vision took place while Ezekiel was sitting in his house. It pertained to the Temple in Jerusalem, the House of God So quite appropriately, Ezekiel experienced this second vision in his house. Reading on in v. 2:

Then I looked, and behold, a likeness as the appearance of a man; from His loins and downward there was the appearance of fire, and from His loins and upward the appearance of brightness, like the appearance of glowing metal. This was Messiah in divine glory and power that we also saw at the end of Ezekiel 1. You also see Him described similarly in Revelation 1, an even more momentous vision given to the Apostle John. Reading on in vv. 3-4:

“He stretched out the form of a hand and caught me by a lock of my head; and the Spirit lifted me up between earth and heaven and brought me in the visions of God to Jerusalem, to the entrance of the north gate of the inner court, where the seat of the idol of jealousy, which provokes to jealousy, was located. ⁴ And behold, the glory of the God of Israel was there, like the appearance which I saw in the plain.” Here Messiah and the Holy Spirit were working in tandem. The rest of chapter eight showed three increasingly evil displays of idol worship that defiled the Temple in Jerusalem:

Then He said to me, “Son of man, raise your eyes now toward the north.” So I raised my eyes toward the north, and behold, to the north of the altar gate was this idol of jealousy at the entrance. ⁶ And He said to me, “Son of man, do you see what they are doing, the great abominations which the house of Israel are committing here, so that I would be far from My sanctuary? But yet you will see still greater abominations.”

⁷ Then He brought me to the entrance of the court, and when I looked, behold, a hole in the wall. ⁸ He said to me, “Son of man, now dig through the wall.” So I dug through the wall, and behold, an entrance. ⁹ And He said to me, “Go in and see the wicked abominations that they are committing here.” ¹⁰ So I entered and looked, and behold, every form of creeping things and beasts and detestable things, with all the idols of the house of Israel, were carved on the wall all around. ¹¹ Standing in front of them were seventy elders of the house of Israel, with Jaazaniah the son of Shaphan standing among them, each man with his censer in his hand and the fragrance of the cloud of incense rising. ¹² Then He said to me, “Son of man, do you see what the elders of the house of Israel are committing in the dark, each man in the room of his carved images? For they say, ‘The Lord does not see us; the Lord has forsaken the land.’” ¹³ And He said to me, “Yet you will see still greater abominations which they are committing.”

¹⁴ Then He brought me to the entrance of the gate of the Lord’s house which was toward the north; and behold, women were sitting there weeping for Tammuz. ¹⁵ He said to me, “Do you see this, son of man? Yet you will see still greater abominations than these.”

¹⁶ Then He brought me into the inner court of the Lord’s house. And behold, at the entrance to the temple of the Lord, between the porch and the altar, were about twenty-five men with their backs to the temple of the Lord and their faces toward the east; and they were prostrating themselves eastward toward the sun. ¹⁷ He said to me, “Do you see this, son of man? Is it too light a thing for the house of Judah to commit the abominations which they have committed here, that they have filled the land with violence and provoked Me repeatedly? For behold, they are putting the twig to their nose. ¹⁸ Therefore, I indeed will deal in wrath. My eye will have no pity nor will I spare; and though they cry in My ears with a loud voice, yet I will not listen to them.”

Did you see the ascending order of evil? First, there was the idol that provoked God’s jealousy standing at the north end of the altar. It stood directly before the altar where sacrifices were offered to the God of Israel. The idol of jealousy stood between God and the people. Then inside the temple rooms, Ezekiel saw two priests offering incense before images of creeping beasts, insects and idols.

Then, God showed him women weeping over the fertility God, Tammuz, whose periodic death caused the seasons in Mesopotamian religion. Sadly, foolish and idolatrous women are always there, like wicked Queen Jezebel or Queen Athaliah, to encourage their rebellious husbands to continue in their iniquity. I see the same phenomenon here at MCC, when wicked wives and girl friends smuggle drugs into prison for their men, getting them into deeper trouble and sustaining their addictions and bondage to sin.

Then as a final insult to God, Ezekiel saw twenty-five men with their backs to the altar prostrating themselves before the sun. They elevated a created thing as a deity above God. These men were the religious leaders of Judah at that time, the men most responsible for maintaining Judah’s moral compass. Taking these four blasphemies together, is it any wonder that the God of Israel was provoked to wrath against Jerusalem?

In response, God sent six angels to Jerusalem. God instructed an angel dressed in linen, “Go through the midst of the city, even through the midst of Jerusalem, and put a mark on the foreheads of the men who sigh and groan over all the abominations which are being committed in its midst.” ⁵ But to the others He said in my hearing, “Go through the city after him and strike; do not let your eye have pity and do not spare. ⁶ Utterly slay old men, young men, maidens, little children, and women, but do not touch any man on whom is the mark; and you shall start from My sanctuary.” God’s command to slaughter the idolaters started from the sanctuary, a fierce rebuke to the hypocrisy and idol worship of the temple priests. That five angels were directed to kill, while only one marked the righteous to be spared, suggests that the number slain far outnumbered those who were spared. It may be the same way at the end of the age when Christ returns.

In chapter ten, Ezekiel saw in a vision the glory of God departing the temple. When Solomon dedicated the temple in Jerusalem the shekinah glory of God so filled the sanctuary that the priests could not enter. God’s presence dwelt in the Holy of Holies on the Mercy Seat above the bowed wings of the cherubim over the ark of the covenant.

You might notice the connection between the cherubim whose wings formed the mercy seat, and the cherubim in Ezekiel’s visions. Cherubim are the guardians of God’s glory, like the cherubim who guarded the entry into the Garden of Eden with flaming swords when Adam and Ever were ejected.

Now in Ezekiel 10, God spoke to the man clothed in linen who marked those who would be spared from God’s wrath. He instructed him to “Enter between the whirling wheels under the cherubim and fill your hands with coals of fire from between the cherubim and scatter them over the city.” What a vivid image of divine judgment – fiery coals from the wheels of the cherubim being scattered over a city doomed for destruction! Reading from vv. 3-5:

Now the cherubim were standing on the right side of the temple when the man entered, and the cloud filled the inner court. ⁴ Then the glory of the Lord went up from the cherub to the threshold of the temple, and the temple was filled with the cloud and the court was filled with the brightness of the glory of the Lord. ⁵ Moreover, the sound of the wings of the cherubim was heard as far as the outer court, like the voice of God Almighty when He speaks.

Ezekiel saw was the glory of the Lord filling the temple court as God’s presence prepared to leave Jerusalem. The brightness of God’s presence and the roaring of the cherubim wings resounded throughout the temple mount. Ironically, the people of Jerusalem themselves were utterly unaware and indifferent to the momentous departure about to take place. Reading on from verse 6:

It came about when He commanded the man clothed in linen, saying, “Take fire from between the whirling wheels, from between the cherubim,” he entered and stood beside a wheel. ⁷ Then the cherub stretched out his hand from between the cherubim to the fire which was between the cherubim, took some and put it into the hands of the one clothed in linen, who took it and went out. ⁸ The cherubim appeared to have the form of a man’s hand under their wings.

⁹ Then I looked, and behold, four wheels beside the cherubim, one wheel beside each cherub; and the appearance of the wheels was like the gleam of a Tarshish stone. ¹⁰ As for their appearance, all four of them had the same likeness, as if one wheel were within another wheel. ¹¹ When they moved, they went in any of their four directions without turning as they went; but they followed in the direction which they faced, without turning as they went. ¹² Their whole body, their backs, their hands, their wings and the wheels were full of eyes all around, the wheels belonging to all four of them. ¹³ The wheels were called in my hearing, the whirling wheels. ¹⁴ And each one had four faces. The first face was the face of a cherub, the second face was the face of a man, the third the face of a lion, and the fourth the face of an eagle.

¹⁵ Then the cherubim rose up. They are the living beings that I saw by the river Chebar. ¹⁶ Now when the cherubim moved, the wheels would go beside them; also when the cherubim lifted up their wings to rise from the ground, the wheels would not turn from beside them. ¹⁷ When the cherubim stood still, the wheels would stand still; and when they rose up, the wheels would rise with them, for the spirit of the living beings was in them.

¹⁸ Then the glory of the Lord departed from the threshold of the temple and stood over the cherubim. ¹⁹ When the cherubim departed, they lifted their wings and rose up from the earth in my sight with the wheels beside them; and they stood still at the entrance of the east gate of the Lord’s house, and the glory of the God of Israel hovered over them.

²⁰ These are the living beings that I saw beneath the God of Israel by the river Chebar; so I knew that they were cherubim. ²¹ Each one had four faces and each one four wings, and beneath their wings was the form of human hands. ²² As for the likeness of their faces, they were the same faces whose appearance I had seen by the river Chebar. Each one went straight ahead.

Ezekiel described the departure of God’s presence from the Holy Temple, the center of Israel’s worship, for the first time in over 800 years! Ezekiel’s vision began a year earlier – seven years before the destruction occurred in 586 BC. Seven is the biblical number of perfection. Tragically, in this case, the seven years represented a perfect judgment of tribulation. These seven years could be a type, or foreshadowing, of a future seven-year period of tribulation that will precede our Lord’s Return to reclaim the earth.

Chapter 11 describes the culmination of Ezekiel’s vision, with the final departure of God’s presence from Jerusalem. But in this chapter, there is a promise of repentance return for the people of Judah that points to the New Covenant that Jesus inaugurated for us all. Reading from v. 1:

Moreover, the Spirit lifted me up and brought me to the east gate of the Lord’s house which faced eastward. And behold, there were twenty-five men at the entrance of the gate, and among them I saw Jaazaniah son of Azzur and Pelatiah son of Benaiah, leaders of the people. ² He said to me, “Son of man, these are the men who devise iniquity and give evil advice in this city, ³ who say, ‘The time is not near to build houses. This city is the pot and we are the flesh.’ ⁴ Therefore, prophesy against them, son of man, prophesy!”

You might notice that the number of men described here, 25, is the same number who had their backs to God’s altar prostrating toward the sun in Ezekiel 8. These were the power brokers who ruled Jerusalem, and swayed King Zedekiah to rebel against the King of Babylon, sealing their own doom. Reading from v.5:

⁵ Then the Spirit of the Lord fell upon me, and He said to me, “Say, ‘Thus says the Lord, “So you think, house of Israel, for I know your thoughts. ⁶ You have multiplied your slain in this city, filling its streets with them.” ⁷ Therefore, thus says the Lord God, “Your slain whom you have laid in the midst of the city are the flesh and this city is the pot; but I will bring you out of it. ⁸ You have feared a sword; so I will bring a sword upon you,” the Lord God declares. ⁹ “And I will bring you out of the midst of the city and deliver you into the hands of strangers and execute judgments against you. ¹⁰ You will fall by the sword. I will judge you to the border of Israel; so you shall know that I am the Lord. ¹¹ This city will not be a pot for you, nor will you be flesh in the midst of it, but I will judge you to the border of Israel. ¹² Thus you will know that I am the Lord; for you have not walked in My statutes nor have you executed My ordinances, but have acted according to the ordinances of the nations around you.”’”

God’s judgment against the leaders of Judah was not just their betrayal of God in false worship, but their indulgence in murder against the righteous in Jerusalem, which began under wicked King Manasseh and then resumed after the death of righteous King Josiah. God brought immediate judgment on one of these idolatrous leaders:

¹³ Now it came about as I prophesied, that Pelatiah son of Benaiah died. Then I fell on my face and cried out with a loud voice and said, “Alas, Lord God! Will You bring the remnant of Israel to a complete end?”

¹⁴ Then the word of the Lord came to me, saying, ¹⁵ “Son of man, your brothers, your relatives, your fellow exiles and the whole house of Israel, all of them, are those to whom the inhabitants of Jerusalem have said, ‘Go far from the Lord; this land has been given us as a possession.’ Notice how those who had not been sent into exile regarded with contempt the exiles, as if God had given the land to them. To the contrary, those who remained in Jerusalem were appointed for judgment, and the exiles for restoration to the land.

¹⁶ Therefore say, ‘Thus says the Lord God, “Though I had removed them far away among the nations and though I had scattered them among the countries, yet I was a sanctuary for them a little while in the countries where they had gone.”’ ¹⁷ Therefore say, ‘Thus says the Lord God, “I will gather you from the peoples and assemble you out of the countries among which you have been scattered, and I will give you the land of Israel.”’ ¹⁸ When they come there, they will remove all its detestable things and all its abominations from it. ¹⁹ And I will give them one heart, and put a new spirit within them. And I will take the heart of stone out of their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, ²⁰ that they may walk in My statutes and keep My ordinances and do them. Then they will be My people, and I shall be their God. ²¹ But as for those whose hearts go after their detestable things and abominations, I will bring their conduct down on their heads,” declares the Lord God.

Behold the great reversal. God appointed those who stayed in the land for judgment because their hearts pursued detestable things in defiance to God. But those who had been humbled by forced exile to Babylon were appointed to thrive and return to the land.

Here is a powerful historical metaphor for God’s contrasting ways of dealing with those appointed for perdition and those for salvation. The Bible says, “God is opposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” Those who refuse to acknowledge their sinfulness before God, who justify their self-centered, self-serving, self-indulgent way of life are like those who remained in the city. Their remaining in a wicked city is a picture of sinful complacency, being content to wallow in a way of life that will send them to hell. God lets them be deceived by their temporal safety, thinking they are free men when in fact they are enslaved to sin. This is how the wealthy of Jerusalem were before Nebuchadnezzar laid siege to the city. This is how the wicked are before death strikes suddenly, and they plummet into hell.

These idolaters refused to heed the prophets God sent to warn them, even as their fathers ignored mighty prophets like Isaiah and Micah before them. These wicked men, supported by venial women, urged wicked kings to murder the prophets, adding sin to sin. So it is with this wicked generation. People shut out the knowledge of God from their ears and persecute those who try to warn others in the public square.

By contrast the exiles of Babylon were like us whom Apostle Peter called “aliens and strangers” in his first letter. We are in this world, but not of this world. We are destined to experience life as aliens in our homeland, because we can never be fully at home in a world that despises the holiness of God, that suppresses the gospel, and justifies idolatry in the name of diversity. We may feel shackled to the world around us, but through Jesus we overcome the world.

You may feel downtrodden for the moment; but as Peter says: you are “a chosen race, a holy nation, a royal priesthood, a people for God’s own possession that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light.” Ezekiel then concluded this chapter:

²² Then the cherubim lifted up their wings with the wheels beside them, and the glory of the God of Israel hovered over them. ²³ The glory of the Lord went up from the midst of the city and stood over the mountain which is east of the city. ²⁴ And the Spirit lifted me up and brought me in a vision by the Spirit of God to the exiles in Chaldea. So the vision that I had seen left me. ²⁵ Then I told the exiles all the things that the Lord had shown me.

I want to conclude by returning to a marvelous promise in chapter 11:19-20: “And I will give them one heart, and put a new spirit within them. And I will take the heart of stone out of their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, ²⁰ that they may walk in My statutes and keep My ordinances and do them. Then they will be My people, and I shall be their God.” Even as the glory of God departed Jerusalem, God promised a change of heart that pointed to our salvation in Christ. God promised to “put a new spirit within them” that would transform a stony heart, hardened by iniquity, into a softened heart that would move people to obey God’s statutes. This change would make them God’s people, and He their true God.

God’s promise to Ezekiel is a picture of the new birth that Jesus brought us through His death on the cross and resurrection from the dead. Most of us had to experience a kind of exile, whether in prison, or in my alienation as a young officer in southwest Oklahoma. So the exiles were promised that God would gather them to Himself back in their land.

You and I are gathered to God’s household, the Church, when Christ enters our life. He gives us a new heart to love our fellow believers in Christ. Though you are confined like the others in this prison, you are only an exile from your true destiny as the people of God. One day you will be completely liberated from this world of sin and death when you enter Heaven.

The powerful symbolic depiction of judgment on Jerusalem is a picture of what can happen to any of us if we give ourselves over to depravity, our deepest sins. Paul challenged the Corinthians: “Test yourselves to see if you are in the faith; examine yourselves! Or do you not recognize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you—unless indeed you fail the test?” Following Christ in His goodness and love, and abstaining from evil, is the way you know you have passed the test. God is cheering you on, and generously graces you to say “YES” to Jesus and “No!” to the sins and wicked friends who would drag you down.

Are you determined to keep saying “YES, Lord!” to Him? Let us pray.