The Aim of This Series
Over the course of this fall sermon series, we are witnessing a series of encounters between ordinary people and extraordinary God. These encounters are called visitations and they are almost always following a crisis of some kind. There’s a crisis, an extraordinary time when people seek God, and there’s a visitation.
A revival is a time when sleepy Christians wake up, when nominal Christians convert to Christ, and when non-Christians come to faith in Christ. This is accompanied by an increase in the conviction of sin, an increase in the consciousness of God’s mercy and our unworthiness. You see, a revival is the ordinary operations of the Holy Spirit (I’m not speaking of signs and wonders) when the Spirit convicts of sin, brings assurance of salvation, and makes the sense of Jesus Christ intensely real.
Sermon Preview
If you were asked to describe God, how would you? For many people, God is a mystery. Some people aren’t sure if He exists, or if He does, how you could know. Yet, I want to take us back in time to ancient Iraq where Ezekiel’s tells of a vision of a great God. The ancient rabbis of ancient of Israel did not want anyone under the age of 30 reading Ezekiel’s prophecy. They knew when you read this portion of Ezekiel, you are standing on holy ground. This morning, there should be a “holy silence” over us as we witness one man’s experience of Almighty God.
1. Ezekiel’s Vision
Reading this for the first time, you might think of this as a sci-fi novel. Yet, what’s in front of you is much more than a Hollywood creation. Make no mistake about it, this is the closest description of the appearance of God you’ll hear for Ezekiel tells us: “Such was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD” (Ezekiel 1:28b). This vision will haunt the prophet until the day he dies.
Now, this is the wildest and most detailed vision of the glory of God in all the Bible. Nevertheless, it’s not easy to envision exactly what Ezekiel sees. One individual went so far as to suggest that this is a description of some kind of ancient alien helicopter! Ezekiel is given a glimpse of the world beyond our understanding and he attempts to put words to an indescribable experience.
Again, as we have seen throughout this series, this is a theophany. A theophany literally means “God appears.” This is where the very presence of God’s presence is made known.
Ezekiel gives us a picture of a door to heaven opened and we see the heavenly throne room of God: “the heavens were opened” (Ezekiel 1:1b). An invisible barrier has been opened between heaven and earth, allowing us to see what is going before the very presence of God.
The Emotion of Ezekiel’s Vision
The prophet is stunned. He’s excited by what he sees and the words excitedly come tumbling out of his mouth. He was so stunned that he later tells us he sat silent for seven days (Ezekiel 3:15b). It is one massive multimedia experience; no wonder he’s so excited to write this down. He refers throughout this account of his vision to what “looked like” this or that, what had the “appearance” of this, or the “form” of that (verses 4, 5, 7, 10, 13, 16, 22, 24). He’s not even sure how to put in all into words.
The Four Elements of the Vision
You’ll note the vision has four elements to the vision: the storm, the living creatures, the wheels, and on top all this is the main attraction: the throne of God. Ezekiel continually zooms closer into the vision – he starts with a wide angle lens to a close up view, if you will. The vision begins with a storm (verse 5) and ends with a throne (verse 26). Let’s look at each element briefly.
The Storm
Several things strike you about this storm. It was both intense and immense. There were successive bursts of lightning darting back forth inside the storm, creating an intense electrical display. The storm was so intense that it illuminated the clouds like flashing fire. Inside the very heart of the storm was lit up like the brightness of molten metal in a smelter. Why would God communicate His presence through a storm? Before nuclear power, the most potent source of sheer power was an electrical storm.
The Four Living Creatures (verses 5-14)
In the middle of the storm are four living creatures.
1) Each of the four living beings had the form of the appearance of a human but they were not human (verse 5). In other words, you can think of them in human form without being human.
2) These four strange creatures had four faces, combining features of humans, beasts, and heavenly beings (verse 5b-6a). The four faces pointed to the four points of the compass (verse 10). Each face represented the highest forms of life. These four faces communicate God’s perfect nature – let me show you.
The face to the right was a lion and represented wild, undomesticated animals. A lion makes you think of God’s strength, His ferocity, and His royal courage. The second face pointing to the left was like an ox and the ox represented strength. Pointing to the rear was a face like an eagle, the noblest and the most swift of all birds. The eagle is the most magnificent of God’s winged creatures – why else would America choose this bird as symbol of our nation? And lastly, pointing forward was a human face, representing intelligence.
Because these four living creatures carried the throne of God, their individual characteristics speak something of the value and strength of God Himself. God has the strength and majesty of a lion, the swiftness and mobility of an eagle, the procreative power of the bull, and the wisdom of humanity.
3) Ezekiel sees four wings on these living creatures. Wing tips of one creature touched the wing tips of the other creature, while the other two wings covered their bodies (verse 9a, 11). Think of four as forming a hollow box.
4) Their appearance was like fire itself as Ezekiel uses alternate words to describe them as “burnished bronze,” or “torches,” or “coals of fire.”
5) Their movement was like lightening. It must have been difficult for Ezekiel to really get a good look at these creatures for they were in near constant motion, rarely standing still. Yet, when these four living creatures stopped moving their wings dropped (verse 24, 25). They could move in any direction, they did not turn in order to move but only moved straight forward: “Each one of them went straight forward, without turning as they went” (Ezekiel 1:9b). Since they had a face in every direction, they always moved forward. Yes, they were united as one in performing all their tasks.
6) While they possessed legs and even hands, their movement does not seem to be propelled by their wings or their feet.
“So how did they move?” you might ask.
Whenever they move, the prophet doesn’t speak of their legs or their wings, but only the Spirit moving them: “Wherever the spirit would go, they went, without turning as they went” (Ezekiel 1:12b).
The Spirit moved them and they followed the Spirit without hesitation (verse 12b).
7) For the first time, Ezekiel mentions what he hears and not simply what he sees in verse 24: “And when they went, I heard the sound of their wings like the sound of many waters, like the sound of the Almighty, a sound of tumult like the sound of an army” (Ezekiel 1:24). Truly, Ezekiel is at a loss for words to describe what he sees before him. He compares the vision to burning coals of fire, and later torches, still later flashes of lightning, lastly sparks darting back and forth. Yet, none of these images can adequately describe the brilliant radiance of the vision.
The Wheels (verses 15–21)
But the puzzle doesn’t stop with the description of the living creatures. As the prophet is taking all this in, he looked besides the living creatures was a wheel. But this wasn’t just any wheel for these were “a wheel within a wheel” (verse 16b). The construction of these wheels is impossible to portray for modern engineering sensibilities. Some have suggested a gyroscope while others point to freewheeling casters. Perhaps the best image to help us here is a four-wheeled chariot. And while it is hard to describe their actual construction, their function is to give the mobility to the throne of God. The wheels themselves were “tall and awesome” (verse 18b). Further, the outer rim of the wheel was full of eyes. The eyes themselves sparkled or gleamed.
The prophet takes pain to describe how synced together the four living creations, the wheels, and the Spirit were (and are might I add): “And when the living creatures went, the wheels went beside them; and when the living creatures rose from the earth, the wheels rose. 20 Wherever the spirit wanted to go, they went, and the wheels rose along with them, for the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels.” (Ezekiel 1:19-20)
Here we witness perfect unity. A sports team is made up of individuals who may go off in any direction apart from the others. A political administration comprises a number of individuals who may go off in their individual directions. Not so with God, every part of His team is perfectly in sync.
The Throne (verses 22–27)
Ezekiel now looks above to a throne. More accurately, he sees “the likeness of an expanse” (Ezekiel 1:22b) and there above the heads of the four living creatures was “awe-inspiring crystal” (Ezekiel 1:22c). This platform shined brilliantly for it resembled a brilliant layer of ice. Evidently, two wings of the living creatures supported the platform. Above this platform was “the likeness of a throne” (Ezekiel 1:26b) and had the “appearance like sapphire” (Ezekiel 1:26c). Actually, Ezekiel is quite specific when he speaks of the stone that thinks best represents the vision of God: lapis lazuli. God’s throne is made up of a bright blue stone, Lapis lazuli was one of the most sought-after stones in all of human history. But as beautiful as the throne is, it could not hold the prophet’s attention. For on the throne was the outline of a man who was so dazzling in splendor that little could be said.
“And upward from what had the appearance of his waist I saw as it were gleaming metal, like the appearance of fire enclosed all around. And downward from what had the appearance of his waist I saw as it were the appearance of fire, and there was brightness around him” (Ezekiel 1:27). By describing the appearance of God in the outline of a man, Ezekiel has, in effect, reversed Moses in Genesis when he said humans were made in the image of God. It is important to note that Ezekiel doesn’t claim to have seen God Himself, but only “the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord.” (Ezekiel 1:28b).
2. Ezekiel’s Pain
What’s this have to do with our lives? What’s this have to do with who’s in the Homecoming Court? And will I get a second interview this week? What does this bizarre vision have to do with the PSAT or your sadness over loved one’s death? To answer that, you need to know something about Ezekiel, the man.
Before the vision came to Ezekiel, he was dismayed. Ezekiel missed home for he had been shipped off – he and many other Jewish leaders were in exile. He was about 700 miles from home when 700 miles was a long way from home.
Today, there’s a refugee camp in Jordan only seven miles from the Syrian border where 80,000 Syrian refugees are living in tiny, steel boxes as far as the eye can see. The camp sprang out of the Jordanian desert in 2012 as millions of refugees poured out of Syria. The crisis is sparked by a civil war in Syria and it is believed it is more 65 million people have been displaced during this time. The Washington Post describes one such refugee camp: “Kids play everywhere. Most of them are filthy. Almost everyone wears plastic sandals, though some of the kids are barefoot. Virtually everyone has cuts or scabs on their fingers and toes. Snow will be coming soon, and nobody here has warm clothes or boots.” For Jews living in Germany in the 1930s or many Hispanics living south of the US border over the past several decades, the story of migration and exile from Syria are nothing new.
Much like the present day Syrian refuge crisis, Ezekiel is probably building a mud hut for his home along the river in what is known as modern day Iraq (Ezekiel 1:3). Ezekiel’s whole nation had been conquered and painfully relocated to a new land. He even gives us the date of his vision, July 31, 593 in our calendars (Ezekiel 1:1), around 120 miles south of modern-day Bagdad. You begin to comprehend the pain Ezekiel is feeling when you read the words of the Psalmist, when he describes the depth of the emotional anguish they were experiencing in exile: “By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion. 2 On the willows there we hung up our lyres. 3 For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors, mirth, saying, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’ 4 How shall we sing the LORD’s song in a foreign land? (Psalm 137:1-4)?
It’s sticky hot as they are on the edge of the desert and his entire world has caved in on him. Like the Holocaust in modern times, exile means that not only do you not have a home, it’s that your enemies have taken your home. You not only don’t know where you belong, but you know you can’t go back home.
Chuck and Marianne were married for nearly 60 years. Theirs was the traditional marriage – he went to work and she stayed home. She made his coffee and a light breakfast in the morning before he went to work. He never went to a mall or went shopping; she bought his clothes for him. He tried them on and what he didn’t like or didn’t fit, she returned. So you can imagine the heartbreak when they went to the doctor many years after his retirement. They both knew something was not right about him but neither had any idea the extent of it. She went to the kitchen and collected herself and then sat down opposite Chuck on the footstool. She took his hands in hers and delivered the news: “The doctor says you have Alzheimer’s disease.” Chuck looked back at her. There was a long moment of silence. And she could see him weighing the reality, and the implications, and a lifetime of things that had been left unsaid. Then he squeezed her hands tightly and looked back into Marianne’s eyes, with the steady, determined gaze she’s seen so many times before. He had just one thing had to tell her: “I will … never … forget who you are,” he said. Then they embraced and dissolved into tears. Like Chuck, Ezekiel’s pain was that he couldn’t go home.
Let me give you three features of why Ezekiel’s vision is significant.
1) The Omnipresence of God
The mobility of the wheels tells us God can go anywhere. God is not bound by our perceptions of Him, or expectations for Him. You do realize, don’t you, that God is not limited to where you last think you saw Him. Yes, God is everywhere.
2) The Omniscience of God
The eyes of the wheels highlight how God sees. If you were to take a moment and count the number of eyes the four living creatures had, you would have thirty-two eyes (provided that they had two eyes per face). In addition to the thirty-two eyes there, you now have wheels full of eyes. This is bullhorn screaming at us that God sees all. It’s a gigantic billboard telling us there’s nothing outside the purview of our Maker. God sees all and knows all.
Plus, the prophet sees a Mobile Ark of the Covenant, if you will. Ezekiel had as a vision really of a chariot, with its great wheels and lightning speed. (Remember there were no cars or jets in ancient Mesopotamia!) And even more significant, did you notice that this chariot was very much like the ark of the covenant? With the creatures with wings outstretched, and a place in the middle for God, high and lifted up? He was hopeless before he recognized God was mobile. But the message becomes clear: God needs no temple.
3) The Omnipotence of God
Lastly, take note that the throne is elevated; it’s high up. See the response of Ezekiel as he helps us sort all this out: “And when I saw it, I fell on my face” (Ezekiel 1:28b). God is over all.
Home is a place of safety, a haven of rest and refuge. When disease takes away even your memory, you can find refuge in an all-knowing, all-powerful God.
