Many prophets behaved unusual for those around them, one might say, they were foolish. Especially strange was the behavior of the prophet Ezekiel, an Israelite priest who lived in the first half of the 6th century BC and preached among the Jews who had been taken to Babylon by King Nebuchadnezzar.
Of course, from the outside it all looked like the behavior of a madman. But maybe he can find some reasonable explanation?
What explanation can be offered here
The main sin of which the Lord accuses the Jews through the mouth of Ezekiel is idolatry, a deviation from the very first commandment of the Old Testament: let you have no other gods before Me (Ex 20: 3). Words, obviously, had little effect on people, explains Archpriest Gennady Yegorov, Vice-Rector for Academic Affairs of St. Tikhon's Orthodox Humanitarian University. For them, you are like a funny singer with a pleasant voice and good performance; they listen to your words, but do not obey them, - says the Lord to Ezekiel (Ezekiel 33:32). Therefore, the prophet tries to attract the attention of people with at least symbolic actions, as we would say today, arranges a performance. Apparently, this was the only way to reach out to indifferent compatriots.
430 years - so much passed from the moment of the foundation of the Jerusalem temple under King Solomon until its destruction under Zedekiah, and all this time God endured the iniquity of the Israelite people, explains the Monk Ephraim the Syrian.
Professor of the St. Petersburg Theological Academy Alexander Pavlovich Lopukhin suggested counting the years of "lawlessness", starting with the division of Judea and Israel - then we get similar numbers too. “But an exact match is hardly needed here,” he writes. "The lawless existence of the Kingdom of Israel really refers to the lawless period in the Kingdom of Judah, as 390 to 40, and approximately the same proportion exists between the long captivity of the first and the short of the second."
Ezekiel is not just acting like a fool, portraying the fate of the Israeli people - he exposes himself to very real suffering. Moreover, God takes away from the prophet the "joy of the eyes", his wife, and even forbids crying for the dead. The prophet likens the death of his beloved wife to another catastrophe - the destruction of the temple:
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And here another important question arises: why did God impose such a heavy punishment on Ezekiel when it was not the prophet personally, but the people who were guilty? Ezekiel himself was a man, apparently quite pious and faithful to God. Why did he have to endure all this suffering - longing for his dead wife, lying on the ground for more than a year, eating unclean food, pretending to be a madman?
Many commentators of the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel agree that the prophet was the image of God, who, on the one hand, had long endured insults from the wicked Jews and Israelites, and on the other, should have suffered even more, becoming a man and enduring all the torments of earthly life up to the shameful death on the cross. Ezekiel “suffered hard for the whole people, imitating the sufferings of Christ for the world,” wrote Professor A. P. Lopukhin, citing one stichera from the service to the prophet in support of this idea: we torture, prescribing salvation, theophany, and deliverance that wants to be honest for the sake of the cross to be the world "(" Oh, Ezekiel, beloved of God!deliverance and manifestation of God through suffering on the cross”).
The question of the justice of the suffering of good and kind people does not find a final answer on earth. From the Bible, we know, for example, that the righteous Job was deprived of everything he had, and nevertheless remained faithful to God. And Ezekiel was not just a righteous man - he was God's chosen one, carried out a prophetic ministry, proclaiming the will of God to people. And the fate of the prophets was often tragic …
Michelangelo. Prophet Ezekiel.
Why is this prophecy important?
Ezekiel's prophecies show that the fate of a community of people and an individual is always closely related, and that an individual can take on at least some of the responsibility for the sins of others. This is exactly what - but in full measure - the Lord Jesus Christ did.
Author: TSUKANOV Igor
The editors would like to thank the Associate Professor of the Department of Biblical Studies of the Orthodox St. Tikhon University for the Humanities, Candidate of Theology Mikhail Anatolyevich Skobelev for help in preparing the material