When the Glory Tiptoed Out the Door

More than a year after Ezekiel ate the honey-sweet scroll, the leaders of the exiles were sitting in his house by the Kebar River when God's hand took hold of him, lifted him by a lock of his hair, and carried him in a vision to Jerusalem.

In the temple courtyard he saw the living creatures again, the same ones from the riverbank. The Bible calls them cherubim. This time Ezekiel heard their wheels given a new name, "the whirling wheels," and every eye on their rims was watching. (That is a great many eyes to be looked at by.)

God spoke to a man dressed in linen. "Go in among the whirling wheels. Fill your hands with burning coals from between the cherubim and scatter them over the city." Jerusalem had filled God's house with idols, and the city would burn.

Then the glory of the LORD rose and moved to the temple doorway. Brightness filled the courtyard, and the wings roared like the voice of God Almighty. At the doorway the glory stopped. Then it moved to the east gate. One step, and a wait, and another step, as if God did not want to go.

At the east gate stood twenty-five leaders of the city, Pelatiah among them.

"No need to build houses," they boasted. "This city is the cooking pot, and we are the meat!" (They meant the walls would keep them safe, like stew in a pot. It is a strange thing to brag about, being meat.)

"Speak against them, son of man," God said. "The people they have killed are the meat in this pot. These leaders will not stay safe inside it. I will drive them out."

While Ezekiel was still speaking, Pelatiah fell down dead.

Ezekiel fell on his face. "Oh, Lord GOD!" he cried. "Will you wipe out everyone who is left?"

God answered his cry. The people left in Jerusalem had been sneering at the exiles: "They are far away from the LORD. This land belongs to us now!" But God said, "I sent them far off among the nations, and there I myself have been their temple. I will gather them and bring them home. I will take the heart of stone out of them and give them a heart of flesh. They will be my people, and I will be their God."

Then the cherubim spread their wings, and the glory rose from the city and stopped on the mountain to the east. The Spirit carried Ezekiel back to the river, and he told the exiles everything God had shown him.

Jerusalem burned, as the vision showed. Years later God's people came home and built the temple again, but the old men who remembered the first one wept, and nobody wrote that the glory came back to fill it. The new hearts were still a promise, and the glory had last been seen on the mountain to the east.

More than six hundred years after Ezekiel's vision, someone came over that mountain, riding a donkey down from the east while crowds shouted. He walked into the temple as if it were his Father's house, because it was. His friend John wrote, "We have seen his glory." That same week he died on a cross, and on the third day he rose. Forty days later he went up to heaven from that same mountain, promising the Spirit who makes stone hearts new. Jesus was the glory of God, come home by the same road it had left on.