Then I said to them, “The word of the LORD came to me:
The people have watched Ezekiel bury his wife without a single tear, and they ask him what it means for them (v. 19). His reply gives them nothing of his own — a message came to him, and the rest of the chapter is that message.
Why the People Needed an Explanation
Ezekiel's silence was not ordinary restraint. It clashed with the funeral customs of the day.
F. W. GrantCompared with the loud mourning usual at such times, for which they even hired mourners, this behaviour calls for explanation. It is the mourning for their sons and daughters that is to stop, in view of a mourning that can find no adequate expression.
Not the Prophet's Own Answer
The answer he passes on is not his own reading of his wife's death.
William KellyNow the fresh act from God is explained. The people learn that God would teach them about a trouble with no parallel, one that would leave no room for tears or ordinary mourning. The LORD Himself was profaning the sanctuary by judgment, just as they had profaned it by their transgressions and abominations. The destruction was so sweeping that nothing remained for them but wasting away in their sins and groaning to one another. What a picture of despair, when the sorrow lies too deep for tears, and an overwhelming sense of guilt drives people to give up hope!
What Was Really Being Lost
The message names the sanctuary — the temple — before it names their children. Commentators see the weight of the sign resting there.
F. W. GrantThe city is gone, and the sanctuary with it. The whole nation needed that sanctuary. It was the only place where anyone could offer the blood of sacrifice to God. So the destruction of the sanctuary was the end of all relationship. What could remain between a holy God and a people for whose sins no atonement could be made? This is the overwhelming disaster which, for the people, might well make every other loss seem small. Even the sound of mourning fell silent in this despair.
The sign is a wife's death, not a child's, and one writer explains what that stands for.
F. W. GrantThe loss of their sons and daughters, with all its severity, cannot answer to this breaking of a marriage tie under which Ezekiel suffers. For that, we have to think of the sanctuary itself gone. The sanctuary was the pledge and seal of that tie. It spoke of the Lord's presence with them, and gave the people access to Himself. The breaking of that tie might well swallow up every other loss.
Whose Sorrow the Sign Portrays
The blow in this chapter lands on the prophet, not on his audience.
F. W. GrantIt is worth noticing that the stroke falls not on the people but on the prophet himself. Nor is it inflicted on him as a judgment. There is no divorce from God for him because of it. On the contrary, at this very moment he stands before the people fully as the representative of God Himself, speaking and acting in His name… This hints, plainly enough, that the prophet's sorrow is the sorrow of God Himself. The grief is on His side, not on man's. Yet it is a grief that can find no expression among a people as hardened as these. He who has inflicted the blow is the One who feels what He has inflicted.
A Man Whose Life Carried the Message
Ezekiel could carry this word because he had handed his whole life over to it — even his deepest loss.
W. T. P. WolstonOne very striking feature of Ezekiel's history stands out. He gave his whole life and feelings as a man over to the great prophetic work God called him to. He neither speaks nor acts like an ordinary man, but thinks and feels as a prophet. The death of his wife is a striking example of this.
One writer sets Ezekiel beside Aaron, Israel's first priest, who lost his sons and still showed no sign of grief.
C. H. MackintoshSomeone will say that all this was "a sign" to Israel. True. But it proves this: in prophetic testimony, as in priestly worship, we must rise above all the claims and influences of nature and of earth. Aaron's sons and Ezekiel's wife were cut down with a stroke, and yet neither the priest nor the prophet was to uncover his head or shed a tear.
Summary
- Question. The prophet's tearless funeral was nothing like the loud mourning of the day, so the people had to ask what it meant.
- Word. His answer opens with a report, not an opinion: a message came to him, and that message is the whole reply.
- Loss. The heaviest loss is the sanctuary — the one place of sacrifice — and its fall ended the relationship with God.
- Sorrow. The blow fell on the prophet, not the people, and one writer reads his silent grief as God's own grief over a broken tie.
- Cost. Ezekiel could carry such a word because he had given his whole life to his calling.