Ezekiel 1:2

Ezekiel’s ministry begins with an act of God. “The heavens were opened” puts the opening entirely in God’s hands. Ezekiel did nothing to bring it about, and what he saw came to him from God’s side. The word for heavens, shâmayim, comes from a root meaning to be lofty, and it names the sky above us and heaven, where God is. Here heaven opens so that a man on earth can see what is normally hidden from human eyes.

What he saw were “visions of God”. The word for vision, marʼâh, comes from the verb to see, and it can also mean a mirror. Here it means sights that God himself gave, and the word is plural. The whole book rests on them, because Ezekiel speaks of what God showed him. The first of these visions follows at once, as Ezekiel describes the throne-chariot of God, the cherubim and the glory of the LORD (Ezekiel 1:4–28).

The place is as striking as the vision. Ezekiel was “among the captives”, and the word, gôwlâh, means exile, or the exiles themselves, the deportees taken together as one people. He shared their lot, and God opened heaven to him there, beside a waterway in a foreign land, far from the temple in Jerusalem. Isaiah saw the Lord in the temple (Isaiah 6:1), and the word of the LORD came to Jeremiah in his own land (Jeremiah 1:4–5). Ezekiel’s call came to a man in exile, and that tells the exiles that the God of Israel is with them in Babylon.

The thirtieth year is most widely understood as Ezekiel’s age. Thirty was the age at which men began their service at the tabernacle (Numbers 4:3), so in the very year Ezekiel would have taken up his work as a priest, he was a captive in Babylon with no temple to serve in. God met him there and gave him a calling of his own.

The month and the day are given as well, the fourth month and the fifth day. The visions that follow are strange and full of symbols, and this exact date at the head of the book sets them in history. They happened on a day Ezekiel could name, to a real man in a real community of exiles, and God chose the time.

Verse 2 repeats the day and fixes the year. “Fifth” stands twice in the verse, once for the day and once for the year, and the Hebrew uses both the number châmêsh, “five”, and its ordinal chămîyshîy, “fifth”. The word for month, chôdesh, comes from a root meaning new, because in Israel’s calendar a month began with the new moon. The KJV supplies “day” in “the fifth day of the month”, which the Hebrew leaves to be understood, since a Hebrew date names the day of the month by its number alone.

King Jehoiachin was taken from Jerusalem to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar in 597 BC after a short reign, and many leading men and skilled craftsmen went with him (2 Kings 24:10–16). Ezekiel was among them. The fifth year of that captivity is about 593 BC. The word gâlûwth, “captivity”, means being carried away from one’s homeland, and it can also mean the whole body of exiles. Daniel had his own captivity in Babylon (Daniel 1:1–2), and a psalm remembers the exiles weeping by the rivers of Babylon (Psalm 137:1). Through Jeremiah the LORD had promised to restore his people at the end of their years in Babylon (Jeremiah 29:10). The exiles had lost their land and their king, and they were asking where God was and whether he was still faithful to them. His word came to them in the middle of that.

“The word of the LORD” is the phrase the prophets use for a message from God. The noun dâbâr means a word or speech, and in a separate sense a matter or thing. Here it is the message God gives his prophet, and all the prophecy of this book comes from it.

“Expressly” translates a Hebrew doubling, hayoh hayah, an infinitive absolute set beside the verb, and it means that the word “came, indeed came”, or came certainly. Ezekiel received it clearly, and there was no doubt where it came from. So the opening gives us both sight and word: in verse 1 Ezekiel sees visions of God, and in verse 3 the word of the LORD comes to him.

Verse 1 speaks in Ezekiel’s own voice (“I saw”), and verse 3 is where he is first named, together with his office, his father and his place.

Ezekiel was a priest, kôhên, one who served in the sacred rites. As a priest he had been trained in the Law and in the worship of the temple, and he knew how holy God’s presence is and what Israel’s covenant required. That shaped his prophecy. Much of the book deals with the defiling of the temple and the idolatry of the people, as in the abominations shown to him in Ezekiel 8, and with the cleansing and restoration God would bring. Exile cut him off from his priestly duties, and God gave him a new way of serving his people, as the prophet who would make known his judgments and his promises through the rest of Ezekiel 1 and the whole book.

Naming him as “the son of Buzi” gives his family line and his settled standing among the people, even in exile.

The land of the Chaldeans is Babylonia, the land of Israel’s captors. The river Chebar was most likely a large irrigation canal near the city of Nippur, and the exiles lived there as a settled community. For a priest whose life had been centred on the temple, being called there disrupted all he had expected, and it showed the exiles that God was present and at work far from Jerusalem. David prayed that there is nowhere he could go from God’s Spirit or flee from his presence (Psalm 139:7–10), and Ezekiel learned the same truth beside a canal in Babylon. Later he sees the glory of the LORD again “as the glory which I saw by the river of Chebar” (Ezekiel 3:23).

This brought the exiles comfort and a challenge together. God had not abandoned them, and he was speaking to them where they were. Yet their own sin had brought them to Babylon, and God was sending Ezekiel to speak to a rebellious house, whether they would hear or refuse (Ezekiel 2:3–7).

The word yâd means hand, and Scripture uses it for power, direction and control. “The hand of the LORD was there upon him” means that God’s power laid hold of Ezekiel. It prepared him to receive the visions and equipped him for a hard ministry. The phrase comes back in the book, when the hand of the LORD is upon Ezekiel again by the river (Ezekiel 3:22) and when it falls on him before the vision of the temple in Jerusalem (Ezekiel 8:1). With a preposition the same noun gives the familiar phrase “by the hand of”, which names the one through whom something is done, as when God sends his word by the hand of his prophets.

The heavens were opened to Ezekiel for a time, and they were opened again over Jesus. At his baptism “the heavens were opened unto him”, the Spirit of God came down upon him, and the Father spoke (Matthew 3:16). Jesus told Nathanael that his disciples would see heaven open and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man (John 1:51). In him the way between heaven and earth stands open.

Ezekiel saw visions of God, and Jesus is the one in whom God is seen. No man has seen God at any time, and the only begotten Son has declared him (John 1:18), and he is the image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15). The word of the LORD came to Ezekiel, while Jesus is himself the Word, who was God and was made flesh (John 1:1, John 1:14). Ezekiel was a priest who could no longer serve at the altar, and Christ is our great high priest, who offered himself once for all and now intercedes for us (Hebrews 4:14–16).

The captivity of verse 2 also points beyond itself. Everyone who commits sin is the servant of sin (John 8:34), and Jesus came to preach deliverance to the captives (Luke 4:18). God sent his Son in the fulness of the time (Galatians 4:4), as he set the day for Ezekiel’s call, and he has delivered us from the power of darkness (Colossians 1:13). The return from exile that Ezekiel would later promise is fulfilled most fully in the new covenant Christ made by his own blood (Hebrews 9:11–14). The Spirit who empowered Jesus came upon the church at Pentecost (Acts 2:1–4), so the power that rested on Ezekiel now rests on all who belong to Christ.

These verses show us a God who keeps track of the days of his people’s sorrow and chooses the day to speak. He opened heaven over a canal in a foreign land, to a priest who had lost his temple, among people who had lost their home because of their own sin. He came to them in judgment and still came to them. When God calls someone, he gives his word clearly and lays his hand on that servant to equip him. The same God has opened heaven in his Son and given his Spirit to his people, and there is no place of exile, loss or hardship where he cannot meet us.