All-In [29910]
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Religious Pron: The End Times, 5A of ?
3
Apr 22, 2024, 3:04 PM
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It’s Passover all week long, so don’t forget to paint your doorposts, and anything else that might need painting…
We’ve been building up a collection of prophecies that culminate with John’s view of the End Times in Revelation. And the end of the world is something that each of us must decide how to deal with.
This time, we move to Ezekiel, and his visions.
Ezekiel is yet another whopper of a book, with 40,000 words or so, and about 6 separate visions in total.
It’s so long I broke it into two parts for these posts. There’s a ton of good stuff in Ezekiel, but not all of that is about the End Times.
For instance, to my knowledge, the term “Son of Man” is first used in the Book of Ezekiel. And it’s used a LOT. In 48 chapters, God calls Ezekiel “Son of Man” a whopping 95 times.
In Ezekiel’s context, it means just what it says…a son of a man, ie, a human. The term also appears in Daniel, and Micah, and some apocryphal texts, where it is also generally used to distinguish us regular mortal folks from the divine. And in the New Testament it refers to Jesus, who is of course considered both human and divine.
Like Isaiah, Ezekiel gives us very specific dates on when he is writing. And that’s great. It’s between 593-571 BCE on our timeline.
And in Ezekiel’s world, this is what was going on:
Like the rebels at the end of The Empire Strikes Back, the Hebrews were hanging on by a thread.
Israel had been destroyed 100 years earlier, and Judah was tiny territory, swallowed up by the Babylonian Empire, and in danger of being assimilated out of existence, forever.
Sort of like our heroes being trapped in an Imperial Cruiser trash disposal, about to be crushed to death.
Meanwhile, Ezekiel was over in Babylon itself, in exile, fuming about the fate of the Israelites.
Jerusalem and the Temple were occupied by the Babylonians, but still standing, and the city was run by the Jewish puppet king Zedekiah. Spoiler, he was the last Jewish king, ever. Times were desperate.
And in that tense and tenuous situation, with the future of the Hebrews in the balance, King Zedekiah fugged up; big time.
Sensing a shift in the political winds, Zedekiah assumed that the new pharaoh and his Egyptian army would destroy Babylon. So he rebelled against his Babylonian masters and joined the Egyptian Empire. A bad move for a tiny border state like Judah.
Instead, Babylon defeated Egypt, and then went looking for traitors. Traitors like Jerusalem and King Zedekiah.
You can read all the gory details in 2 Kings 25, but the long and short of it is that Jerusalem, and the Temple, were burned to the ground and wiped out for their disloyalty. Zedekiah got to see his children killed in front of him, and then had his eyes poked out, and then died in Babylonian captivity in chains. Oof.
And Ezekiel was watching all this happen, from Babylon, and getting angrier and angrier, and it shows in his writings. I think that’s him walking across the bridge.
The first 24 chapters of the Book of Ezekiel explain his calling to God, and then him lambasting Jerusalem and Zedekiah with words we haven’t seen since Amos. Jerusalem is described again and again as a shameless and sultry harlot, presumably for “sleeping” with first the Babylonians, and then switching to the Egyptian bedchamber.
In his defense, King Zedekiah was only trying to save his city; he played the odds and lost. But his people, the folks in Jerusalem itself, were also up to some pretty bad stuff. Stuff like this:
Ezekiel 22:11 “…[he] violates his sister, his own father’s daughter.”
And that was the least of the Israelites transgressions.
Ezekiel 23:39 “On the very day they sacrificed their children to their idols, they entered my sanctuary and desecrated it.”
Yikes. That would be among the worst.
Ezekiel was having none of any of that. And his outrage leads to some of the harshest and most pronographic stuff in the whole Bible. Writings so salacious and so bad that they almost got his book rejected by the Jewish priests themselves.
All of which I have extensively researched for your consideration and review.
Ezekiel 16:5 …on the day you [Daughter Jerusalem] were born you were despised. [by your kin in Samaria]
Ezekiel 23:3 “…In that land [Egypt] their [Jerusalem and Samaria] breasts were fondled and their virgin bosoms caressed.”
Ezekiel 23: 16 “…[Daughter Jerusalem] spreading your legs with increasing promiscuity to anyone who passed by.”
Ezekiel 23:19 “Yet she [Jerusalem] became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt. There she lusted after her lovers, whose gen itals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.
Ezekiel 23:21 “…you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when in Egypt your bosom was caressed and your young breasts fondled.”
Whoa.
After he’s done slud-shaming and raging on Jerusalem for a few chapters, Ezekiel’s next 8 chapters rage against everyone and everything else in the ancient world who has ever wronged the Hebrews.
In Ezekiel 25 alone, there’s…
A Prophecy Against Ammon (Damascus)…
A Prophecy Against Moab…
A Prophecy Against Edom…
A Prophecy Against Philistia…
A Prophecy Against Tyre…
A Prophecy Against Sidon…
A Prophecy Against Lebanon…
and…A Prophecy Against Egypt.
Ezekiel, You mad, bro?
Finally, in the last 15 chapters, Ezekiel does calm down, and imagines a better life where he and all of Israel return home, and everybody loves Yahweh. Straight from our ongoing list of End Times criteria.
And that’s my point exactly, Frodo. Many of the very same images we’ll see in just a moment in Ezekiel appear in Revelation, written over 600 years later. Don’t think of it as a circle, but as a growing body of End Time prophecy.
So what does any of this background information have to do with John’s Revelation itself? Well, not much, yet. That’s why you’ll just have to come on over to Part 5B to find out…
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