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Context No. 950 of 4322 · Ezekiel

Context · Reflection

Ezekiel 4:1-5: in context

1“You also, son of man, take a tile, and lay it before yourself, and portray on it a city, even Jerusalem. 2Lay siege against it, build forts against it, and cast up a mound against it. Also set camps against it and plant battering rams against it all around. 3Take for yourself an iron pan and set it for a wall of iron between you and the city. Then set your face toward it. It will be besieged, and you shall lay siege against it. This shall be a sign to the house of Israel. 4“Moreover lie on your left side, and lay the iniquity of the house of Israel on it. According to the number of the days that you shall lie on it, you shall bear their iniquity. 5For I have appointed the years of their iniquity to be to you a number of days, even three hundred ninety days. So you shall bear the iniquity of the house of Israel.

God gives Ezekiel a strange assignment. Take a clay brick, he says, scratch a picture of Jerusalem on it, and then build a miniature siege against it, ramps, camps, battering rams, and set an iron plate between yourself and the city. This is to be a sign to Israel. Then lie on your left side for three hundred ninety days, bearing the iniquity of the house of Israel, a day for each year of their sin. Ezekiel is to become a living, month-after-month enactment of the coming siege and the weight of the nation's guilt.

This is prophecy done not with words but with the prophet's own body. Ezekiel is called to act out the siege of Jerusalem in the street, day after day, a grown man lying on his side beside a toy city under toy assault, absorbing the mockery and the discomfort, so that a people who would not listen to sermons might see the message with their eyes. It is costly, humiliating, and long. And the deepest part is that he is told to bear the iniquity of the house of Israel, to lie there symbolically carrying their guilt on his own body for the counted days. He does not merely announce their sin from a safe distance; God has him take its weight onto himself, in public, for over a year. There is a shadow of the cross in it, the messenger asked to bear in his own flesh the burden of the people he is sent to, pointing forward to the One who would bear not a symbol of iniquity but the real thing. Sometimes God asks a life, not just a message.

Am I willing for God's word to cost me something in my own body and reputation, not just my words, if that is how the message needs to be seen?

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