Visions

Ezekiel 1:1 In my thirtieth year, in the fourth month on the fifth day, while I was among the exiles by the Kebar River, the heavens were opened and I saw visions of God. 

Have there been moments in your life when something happened for which you have no earthly explanation? I have. For me, they are not numerous. In fact they have been very rare. But they do exist.

I have had some very unexplainable things happen, encounters with people in places that were definitely God moments. There have been events that I still scratch my head about, unable to figure out the exact sequence of events. And a couple that I know were of another world.

Just so you know, I haven’t had electrodes implanted on the mother ship. I don’t wear aluminum foil in my ball cap to keep ‘them’ from reading my thoughts. The CIA isn’t tracking me; I really don’t have much worth tracking. I am a pretty average person, at least I think I am. (If you know differently, keep that to yourself. I like the ambiguity!)

Ezekiel was not someone who was like me. He had encounters with the LORD through visions. Visions of this type are specific communications from the LORD to a human being. They are VERY rare. This is often the form of communication that the prophets received. They had dreams and visions. Visions are during waking moments. Dreams are while we sleep.

Since they are so rare, we don’t really have a really good idea what they are like. We can only guess. We do know that they are often presenting a spiritual lesson or warning using very earthly images. We can connect to them because they are earthly. If the LORD spoke in His language of imagery, we could never get it.

So where is Ezekiel when he receives his initial vision? He is in Exile. He has been taken, along with thousands of others to the land of Babylon, modern day Syria. This has not been a pleasant journey. Many were killed by the Babylonians during the siege and capture of Jerusalem. Many were killed trying to flee. The leaders were either executed or removed and exported.

Ezekiel is also beside the Kebar River. This is a desert land. So being beside a river means life, crops, survival. Think Mississippi river in a desert. The only green of any kind is where water can be diverted from the river to water crops. It is fertile soil and prime real estate for disposed people to grow crops for the empire.

And in this place Ezekiel sees the heavens opened. (Can you hear the beautiful chord being sung by the choir of voices?) This took place on the fifth of the month. I’m not sure why he includes this detail. And what does he see? Not really sure.

Remember, he has to relate what he sees in images of his worldview, not ours. So he speaks of lightening, brilliant light, fire like glowing metal, four living creatures, and a wheel. He can’t speak of cell phones or anything from of our modern image vocabulary. He can only use images from his world to express what he saw.

And this is the problem. We look at what he writes describing what he saw and we substitute our image vocabulary for his. It sounds as though he saw some kind of spacecraft. That is the picture from our world that seems to fit for us. But it isn’t what he saw. He didn’t have spacecraft in his image vocabulary.

And if we try to get a ‘match’ and too closely identify the image, we will miss the whole point of the vision. Visions aren’t simply visual experiences. The visual experience simply conveys the message. The message isn’t the visual experience, a very important distinction.

This is true of so much of Ezekiel and the other prophets. The message is usually stated after the visual descriptions of what he saw.

Take this first vision in the first chapter. The chapter ends with the statement, “This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD.” Ezekiel saw the glory of the LORD and it was so glorious he ran out of words to try to describe what he saw. He saw a glimpse of the LORD’s presence with a host of heavenly beings. They weren’t like anything he had ever seen, and they aren’t like anything we have ever seen. They are indescribable.

And Ezekiel’s reaction tells us the message. He fell on his face. The LORD who sent Israel into exile shows up and the response that Ezekiel has is the response we are to have as well when we come into His presence. Humility, brokenness, poverty of spirit, yielded and ready. This should be our response.