For most of the book of Jeremiah, Babylon was on top of the world. The great empire crushed nation after nation under its feet on a climb to global domination. Drunk on their own power, the Babylonians even reached for the heavens—the Hebrew word shamayim, which, as you’ll learn in the video, refers not only to the skies, but also to the divine realm beyond them. It’s not the first time we’ve seen a towering Babylon defy God’s authority. By hyperlinking the audacity of Nebuchadnezzar’s empire to humanity’s rebellion in Genesis 11 (at the tower of “Babel”), Jeremiah presents Babylon as an archetype of all arrogant nations who gain wealth and power with violence rather than trusting and following Yahweh. But now, Jeremiah announces that the cosmic waters of de-creation will consume Babylon. He adds a dramatic flourish to his final words by writing Babylon’s fate on a scroll and having it thrown into a river, where the raging waters swallow it whole. The final chapter of the book vindicates Jeremiah’s message by reporting, in excruciating detail, how all the prophet’s warnings of judgment ultimately came to pass. Still, the story ends with a small glimmer of hope. In the very last paragraph of Jeremiah, one of David’s descendants is released from prison and eats at the king’s table in Babylon. Despite Israel’s heart-wrenching spiral into rebellion and ruin, Yahweh has not abandoned his people or the promise of a future king from David’s line. Israel faces a long, dark night of exile—but dawn will eventually break.
The book of Ezekiel opens with one of the most depressing birthday parties of all time. Ezekiel is one of the exiled people of Israel. On the day he turns 30, he sits on the bank of an irrigation canal. To say that Ezekiel’s had a rough year would be an understatement. Ezekiel was supposed to be ordained as a priest in Jerusalem during that year, which means he would have been serving Yahweh in the golden splendor of Jerusalem’s great temple. Instead, he’s serving the Babylonian empire as a political prisoner in a refugee camp. Ezekiel has no idea whether he’ll ever see his home again. Then Ezekiel’s birthday takes a wild turn. The sky fills with fire and lightning, brightness and burning. Wheels spin within wheels, eyes blinking from their rims. At the center of it all is a glowing throne-chariot contraption, held up by hybrid human-animal creatures with four faces. Brace yourself: The story only gets stranger from there. Watch the video to learn about the bizarre and hopeful book of the Hebrew Bible’s third major prophet, Ezekiel.Apocalyptic disaster will march down from the north, the prophet warns. It stalks the world like a lion, pouncing on nations and tearing them apart. It howls like a wild desert wind. Its warhorses plunge forward like eagles diving for prey, chariots kicking up a storm of dust behind them. Jeremiah hears the blast of its trumpets and weeps. Jeremiah sees more than an invading army when he looks north. He sees his world’s very foundations give way. The mountains teeter unsteadily on their granite feet. The lush, green plants carpeting the land will shrivel and fall, leaving a barren desert in their wake. The skies blacken to a gaping void that bears down on the empty world. Nothing remains but wild and waste—the pre-creation state of emptiness and chaos described in Genesis 1. Not even the end of the world gets the Israelites’ attention. They close their eyes and ears to Jeremiah’s grim message. They instead choose to listen to false prophets and their flattering chorus of positive assessments, always promising prosperity and peace, when neither is real. The fiction of the false prophets is simple and cheap, easily molded to provide comfort. Truth is complex and costly, often exposing uncomfortable realities. Fake news was as popular back then as it is today. The false prophets craved the social favor they could gain by falsely comforting people with positive-sounding fiction. What will it take for the people to turn their attention away from falsehood, toward the truth God is speaking through his prophetic messenger?
Yahweh’s prophets had a tough job. They didn’t get to clock in, write a few poems, make some announcements about the end of the world, and then go home to chill at the end of the day. Prophesying for Yahweh was a whole-life kind of calling. Isaiah walked around stark naked for three years. Jeremiah spent much of his 20-year prophetic career in prison, in tears, or both. But none of Yahweh’s prophets had a more unsavory job than Ezekiel. Today’s reading introduces us to Ezekiel’s sign acts. These public stunts served as in-person, tangible parables illustrating his prophetic message. Some are relatively tame. Ezekiel builds a scale model of Jerusalem and hacks off much of his hair. But Yahweh also tells Ezekiel to lie on his side for more than a year, eating food cooked over flaming piles of human waste. Why? When people see Ezekiel doing this in the middle of his Jerusalem model, they see a sobering picture of the desperation to come. Soon, Jerusalem will fall under siege, fuel and food sources will run dry, and total desperation will set in. Ezekiel’s fellow refugees gawk at his humiliating and horrifying attempts to get their attention, but the message never takes root. As they have turned from Yahweh, they turn from his prophet to choose a different way. Ezekiel has to wonder: If the people ignore feces-fired food, how will Yahweh ever get their attention? Then, with blood-stained hands and hardened hearts, they swagger into the temple and announce that everything is just fine. Brandishing Yahweh’s sacred space like an oversized lucky charm, they insist that Jerusalem is safe as long as the temple stands. They think, “If we have Yahweh’s house, then we have Yahweh’s presence and protection.” The most glorious temple and high-ranking priests don’t matter if you use the whole system for evil. Through Jeremiah, God says that is what they’re doing. As you’ll learn in the video, misusing the sanctity of Yahweh’s temple is a persistent problem in the biblical story. In Jeremiah’s day, crooked religious leaders said the still-standing temple proved God was present with Israel. They believed God’s presence implied that he favored Israel and supported its actions. Jeremiah rebukes such deception. He tells them the presence of a temple won’t secure them in the land; only their willingness to change course and start listening to Yahweh can bring that kind of safety. In today’s reading, Jerusalem’s corruption moves Jeremiah to tears. Centuries later, Jesus too will weep at Jerusalem’s gates, grieving the injustice that rips through the city like a gaping wound. Like Jeremiah, Jesus will declare that the temple has become a haven for robbers, not a house of prayer as God intended. The whole story invites modern readers to think deeply about the life-and-death difference between actually following the ways of God versus putting on a religious show that earns social status. The former brings true peace; the latter only brings suffering and decay.
In today’s reading, Yahweh gives Ezekiel access to divine security camera footage of his temple. Nothing it reveals looks good. The Israelites in Jerusalem are trashing Yahweh’s house. They set up an idol statue on the front porch and vandalized the walls with idolatrous graffiti. Women commandeered the side door to worship a Babylonian fertility god named Tammuz. Men converted the entryway into a celestial shrine, literally turning their backs toward Yahweh’s presence to worship the sun instead. As usual, idolatry drives people to treat one another with greed, violence, and injustice. The people of Judah show contempt for Yahweh’s image-bearers, as they do for Yahweh’s sacred home. They cook up vile corruption in Yahweh’s kitchen and splatter innocent blood all over his living room carpet. The whole place reeks. So Yahweh sends a divine cleaning crew to wash Jerusalem clean with a flood of de-creation. Yahweh undoes the evil humanity builds. Unwilling to bear the revolting stench of Israel’s injustice and idolatry, Yahweh packs up the glory and goodness of his presence and moves out. As Ezekiel watches from afar, the God-mobile leaves its parking spot over the ark of the covenant before driving away. Pay attention to the visceral imagery here. The contaminating filth of the people’s corruption will eventually grow so vile that the land itself will vomit them out of Judah and into exile. But, as always, Yahweh’s warning of severe judgment comes with a promise of hope. On his birthday, Ezekiel saw the mysterious God-mobile come to rest with his exiled people in Babylon. Through everything, God wants to be with his people, and he will be. Jeremiah first argues that idolatry is just plain dumb. Something along the lines of, “You’re telling me you cut down a tree, slapped some shiny metal on it, and are now trusting that material to rescue you and provide a good life? Wood chunks cannot see or speak. How do you expect it to save you, especially from a superpower like the Babylonian army? Are you going to lay your idol down in the road and hope their horses trip over it? That might work … but probably not.” What’s more, idolatry is treacherous. By bowing down to idols, the Israelites are violating their agreement with Yahweh and their commitment to uphold it. This adultery is not a minor issue in need of a little tweak; this willful disregard of their agreement with Yahweh will result in experiencing all the curses that Moses warned them about in Deuteronomy 28. Disaster is coming—a disaster so humiliating that Yahweh has Jeremiah play it out through a prophetic sign act. Judah will become so corrupted and useless that it will be like a piece of clothing left to decay in the dirt. This ruinous fate, Jeremiah says, is conditional and not guaranteed. They can still change course, and choosing to change course will lead to goodness, not corruption. Jeremiah pleads with them to repent of their foolish and faithless idolatry before it is too late. Will they listen?
So far, Ezekiel has proven willing to do anything God instructs to get the Israelites’ attention. When societies embrace unjust practices over time, cruel evils become normal. In today’s reading, Ezekiel speaks against these “norms” with creative rhetorical devices from his prophetic toolbox. He’ll do this to expose the corruption of Israel’s leaders, and to warn them about the consequences of their decisions. For the Southern Kingdom’s puppet ruler, Ezekiel uses street theatre. The prophet packs his bags and carries his luggage down the road as a dramatic symbol of Zedekiah’s fate: exile, for both the king and his remaining subjects in Jerusalem. For the false prophets promising peace to the exiles, Ezekiel uses metaphor. These sweet-talking teachers tell sunny lies to the exiles in Yahweh’s name, but their message is like a slapdash paint job on a crumbling wall. When Yahweh’s fierce judgment comes, their tower of tall tales will topple. And for the idolatrous elders of Israel, Ezekiel uses hypotheticals. He argues that if the most righteous mediators in history—Noah, Daniel, and Job—intervened before God, even their prayers wouldn’t convince Yahweh to turn his severe judgment away from Israel. Ezekiel warns these corrupt religious leaders that their idol-worship leads to iniquity—the Hebrew word ‘avon, which can refer to both crooked behavior and its consequences. Watch the video to learn more about the meaning of the word iniquity in the Bible and God’s gracious response to it. The tree of the knowledge of good and bad offers human beings the choice to define good and evil on their own terms. When we choose our own definition of good and bad over God’s, we reject God’s gift of life. The Satan, a deceiver, tells the humans this won’t be a problem. However, God guarantees that rejecting his life leads to one outcome—” dying, you will surely die” (Gen. 2:17). When humans eat from the tree of knowing good and bad, God exiles them from Eden. As you’ll learn in today’s video, trees, along with other woody plants described by the Hebrew word ‘ets, continue to represent Eden-like places outside the garden. Trees represent places of blessing, abundance, and intimacy with God. So when the authors write about the Israelites’ “affairs” with idols under the land’s trees, they’re creating a hyperlink to the Earth’s original trees in Eden. Israel’s behavior is like an extra-strong slap in the face for Yahweh. His people are cheating on him, doing what’s right in their own eyes, and therefore, dying. They do this in the very places they’re supposed to be doing what’s right in God’s eyes and living. Every time the Israelites build an altar to Ba’al under a cedar’s branches or carve an Asherah pole from the gnarled trunk of an olive tree, they repeat humanity’s first failure in the first garden. They snub Yahweh’s gracious offer to receive true life. Instead, they attempt to take life from a tree that surely leads to death. Like Adam and Eve, who did not have the power to survive in themselves, the Israelites are now powerless to stop the waves of violence, drought, famine, and disease that will soon wash out the Southern Kingdom, leaving desolation in its wake. Yahweh does not stop Adam and Eve from making the poor choice. He allows them to experience the natural results. Similarly, Yahweh allows Israel to continue chasing other gods. He allows the natural consequences to unfold. They’re going to lose their life in the promised land and end up in Babylonian chains.
Stories have a unique power to convey truth, especially when truth is uncomfortable and hard to face directly. In today’s reading, Ezekiel uses three stories to confront the Israelites with the brutal truth about their covenant unfaithfulness. In the outer pair of narratives, Ezekiel describes Israel’s rebellious remnant as a scorched and shriveled vine. Yahweh planted his people in fertile soil where they could thrive and produce fruit. But the leaders and people have rejected Yahweh’s life-giving wisdom, causing them to wither into a useless, barren stalk. A long allegorical story sits between the outer pair of stories. It compares Israel to an unfaithful spouse. A word of caution: Some of the language Ezekiel uses here is graphic and disturbing. Two important notes about this passage can help us understand Ezekiel’s challenging message. First, Ezekiel’s portrayal of Jerusalem is a grotesque caricature, intentionally exaggerated for shock value. Nobody would act the way Jerusalem does in Ezekiel’s allegory. (Sex workers don’t generally pay their clients.) Ezekiel is trying to jolt the elders of Israel into recognizing the disastrous results of their unfaithfulness. So he twists the familiar metaphor of Israel’s covenant marriage with Yahweh into the most appalling nightmare he can imagine. Remember, Ezekiel is disrupting his audience in a way that eating dung bread and lying on his side for nearly 400 days did not manage to do. This allegory should be horrifying to read. That’s Ezekiel’s whole point. Second, it’s important to pay close attention to how Yahweh’s judgment works in Ezekiel’s allegory. Yahweh responds to Jerusalem’s adultery by giving the city what it wants: to strip itself of Yahweh’s protection and give itself into the hands of other nations. Ezekiel uses intense imagery to deliver the same essential points made by Isaiah, Jeremiah, and even Moses long before. If the Israelites want to hook up with other gods, Yahweh won’t stop them. But he certainly wants them to avoid that decision and everything that happens after it. So Yahweh cranks up his volume through the prophets to deliver extreme warnings, helping them see what they’re in for before they get there. So it will be with the people of Israel, Yahweh explains. Like he first molded humanity from “clay,” God forms Israel between his palms. He wants to sculpt them into a glorious jar, one he can use to generously pour out his blessing on the world. But now, idolatry and injustice have deformed the Southern Kingdom beyond hope of repair. As a prophetic sign of Judah’s fate, Yahweh tells Jeremiah to buy a clay jar from the potter and smash it to pieces in front of Jerusalem’s priests and elders. This unpopular message gets Jeremiah arrested, beaten, and thrown into a cage meant for livestock. It’s only the latest setback in his spectacularly unsuccessful ministry. Jeremiah wrestles with confusion and frustration in his prayers. Despite his bruises, Jeremiah continues to speak up for justice in Jerusalem. Watch today’s video to learn about the radical justice God requires of his people.
What might a caged lion and a drooping grapevine share in common? For Ezekiel, both symbolize the collapse of Judah’s royal line. In Genesis 49, we read about Judah’s original royal blessing. We heard God referring to Judah as a “lion’s cub” (v. 9). That blessing was going to be amazing, but not now. Ezekiel laments for Israel’s rulers, inverting the imagery from that royal blessing to envision a fierce lion falling into a net, being caged, and led to Babylon. He repeats this idea with imagery of a strong, fruitful vine that is uprooted and shrivels in the scorching east wind. Similar to the structure we saw in yesterday’s reading, the author arranged today’s passage in a three-part symmetry. Ezekiel’s lament poem receives emphasis by being placed at the center, between a pair of passages that focus on Israel’s generational sin and exile. It’s almost like the structure shows readers how, in the middle of all this sin and darkness, Ezekiel laments with poetic detail about the catastrophic corruption of something once beautiful. Ezekiel also disputes one of the exiles’ favorite sayings, a proverb claiming that children suffer the consequences of their parents’ sin. The sullen Israelites had been quoting this proverb to blame their suffering on previous generations: If it hadn’t been for King Manasseh and his child sacrifices, we wouldn’t be in exile. It’s our ancestors’ fault. Yahweh disagrees. This generation is suffering from its own choices. On one hand, this is a harsh reality check. On the other hand, a bit of good news. If Yahweh is holding them accountable for what their ancestors did, there is nothing more they can do. The decisions of others trap them. But if Yahweh judges each generation based on its own actions, these Israelites may still return to God and live. Yahweh urges the Israelites to turn away from their transgressions, using the Hebrew word pesha. This is about relational betrayal. To “transgress” is to relate wrongly with others or God. It’s a common word in the Hebrew Bible because, as Ezekiel argues, the people have long suffered from their pattern of breaking relationship with God. Watch the video to learn more about the meaning of pesha (transgression) in the Bible. Yahweh’s prophets are supposed to be something like covenant lawyers, holding the Israelites accountable to Yahweh’s instruction or law (Hebrew: torah) and reminding them of their agreement to obey it. As you’ll learn in today’s video, God gave instruction to lead people into life and flourishing. But Israel’s corrupt prophets misuse Yahweh’s name to lead the Israelites down the deadly path of idolatry and injustice. Judah’s ruling officials, meanwhile, have become rotten like a basket of putrid figs. So Yahweh promises to raise up a good shepherd for his people, a new king from David’s line who will gather his people and lead them into freedom along a new exodus way. His righteous staff, meaning his strong leadership that promotes right relating with each other and with God, is what will keep the people thriving in their garden land. As for the false shepherds of Israel? They now have a furious lion at their throats. Yahweh roars disaster from his throne, sending his thunderous judgment from Babylon. Jeremiah envisions the Babylonian army as Yahweh’s cup of just anger. It’s the loving kind of anger parents feel when their children are being deceived and harmed. It may be loud and intense, but its aim is kind, intending to nourish good life and protect from harm. Judah and all the nations will experience this divine, loving anger until they finally bend their knees and accept reality—Yahweh alone is the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to goodness and safety by doing what’s right in their own eyes or by trusting material things. The shepherds have led their flock astray. Now both shepherds and sheep stagger under Yahweh’s fierce judgment.