A priest dragged to Babylon who saw God show up beside an irrigation canal, preached with his whole body, and told a people who felt like dry bones that they would breathe again.
Who was Ezekiel in the Bible? He was a priest, the son of Buzi, deported to Babylon in 597 BC, who became a prophet to the exiles living beside the Kebar canal. His message was that God had not stayed behind in Jerusalem.
He warned that the city would fall, grieved when it did, and then promised a new heart, a new spirit, and God's presence living among His people again.
His name, Yechezqel, means God strengthens. For a man who spent his whole ministry far from home, watching the only world he knew come apart, that name reads less like a label and more like a promise he had to keep leaning on.
Nebuchadnezzar takes Jerusalem's young king Jehoiachin and the city's leaders, craftsmen and priests into exile (2 Kings 24:14 to 16). Ezekiel goes with them.
In the fifth year of the exile, by the Kebar canal, he sees visions of God (Ezekiel 1:1 to 3). The book calls it the thirtieth year, most likely his age, the age priests began serving (Numbers 4:3).
In vision he walks through the Jerusalem temple and sees idolatry in its courts, and then watches God's glory leave (Ezekiel 8 to 11).
On the day Babylon's siege of Jerusalem begins, he is told to record the date. The same chapter tells us his wife died (Ezekiel 24:1 to 18).
A survivor reaches the exiles with the words the city has fallen, and the silence God had placed on Ezekiel lifts (Ezekiel 33:21 to 22).
A vision of a restored temple in the twenty fifth year (40:1), and his latest dated word two years after that (29:17).
He was a priest trained for the temple who never served in it. That is the key to reading him. Everything he learned about holiness, clean and unclean, the altar and the presence of God, he had to carry into a foreign country where none of those structures existed.
He was also not alone. Jeremiah was preaching the same hard message back in Jerusalem, and you can read his side in who Jeremiah was. Daniel was in the royal court in Babylon, and Ezekiel names him more than once (14:14, 28:3), which puts the book of Daniel in the same generation. For the empire behind all of this, see Babylon in the Bible, which covers the city and its kings so we do not have to retell it here.
The setting itself is not a pious legend. Joshua Brumbach writes that “Evidence for Jewish settlement in the Chebar region (in Akkadian, naru kabari), is also known from a number of other cuneiform inscriptions discovered at Nippur.” The canal was a real waterway, and later Babylonian records place Judean families along it.
Ezekiel was a displaced person with a house, neighbors and a wife, and elders who came and sat in his home (8:1). His ministry happened in ordinary exile life, far from any sacred building.
Chapter one is famously strange. Let it be what it is: a priest who assumed God lived in Jerusalem watches God arrive in Babylon.
A great cloud with flashing fire (1:4). Babylon's armies came from the north, and so does God. The threat and the presence arrive from the same direction.
Each with four faces and wings, later identified as cherubim (10:20), the same figures carved in the temple and over the ark.
Rims full of eyes that move in every direction without turning (1:15 to 21). The point is mobility. This throne goes wherever the Spirit goes.
Something like a human form, surrounded by brightness like a rainbow. Ezekiel says it was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD (1:28), stacking qualifiers because he refuses to overclaim.
God never uses his name. He calls him son of man, over ninety times, meaning mortal, human. For how Jesus takes that title up, see the meaning of Son of Man.
Then comes the commission. He is made a watchman for the house of Israel (3:17), responsible to warn whether or not anybody listens. He is told plainly that they will not. His job was faithfulness, not results.
“Although I sent them far away among the nations and scattered them among the countries, yet for a little while I have been a sanctuary for them in the countries to which they have gone.”
Ezekiel 11:16 · BSBThat verse is the whole book in miniature. Jerusalem said the exiles were far from the LORD. God answers that He Himself had become their sanctuary.
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Manage My Giving"Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver."2 Corinthians 9:7
Ezekiel did not just speak. For long stretches he could not speak at all except when God gave him a word (3:26 to 27). So he preached with objects, food, hair and his own body, and the whole exile community watched.
He drew Jerusalem on a clay brick, built siege works around it, and set an iron pan between himself and the city (4:1 to 3). A child's model with a grown up meaning.
Three hundred ninety days on his left side for Israel, forty on his right for Judah, eating measured bread and water (4:4 to 11). The years of guilt were being counted out in his body.
He shaved his head and beard with a sword, burned a third, struck a third, scattered a third to the wind, and tucked a few strands into his garment (5:1 to 4). Even in judgment, a remnant is kept.
He packed an exile's bag and dug through a wall at dusk in front of everyone (12:1 to 7), a picture of the king fleeing Jerusalem by night, which is exactly what Zedekiah later did.
Then the vision of chapters 8 to 11. He sees women weeping for Tammuz and men with their backs to the temple bowing to the sun. And he watches the glory pause at the threshold, stop at the east gate, and finally leave for the mountain to the east (10:18 to 19, 11:23). God left slowly, like someone looking back.
Ezekiel 24 is one of the hardest passages in Scripture. His wife, the delight of his eyes, dies, and he is told not to mourn in public, because his silence was itself a sign of the grief coming on the whole city. It was a prophetic act for one moment in history, not a rule for how God's people should grieve.
Jesus wept at a graveside. If you are carrying a loss, you do not have to hold it in to prove your faith. Our prayer team would count it an honor to pray with you.
When the news came that Jerusalem had fallen, the tone of the book turns. The warnings had come true, and now the same prophet begins to talk about what God will build on the other side of the ruin.
“I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will remove your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”
Ezekiel 36:26 · BSBGod does not ask the exiles to try harder. He promises to put His own Spirit inside them. This is Ezekiel's version of the new covenant that Jeremiah announced, and the New Testament says it arrived at Pentecost.
God interprets the vision Himself: the bones are the whole house of Israel, saying our hope is gone. The point is a national resurrection out of exile, with breath entering the way it did in Genesis 2.
Israel's leaders fed themselves and left the flock to scatter. God says, I Myself will search for My sheep, and He will set one shepherd over them, My servant David. Jesus stood up and said, I am the good shepherd.
Judah and Israel, split for centuries, joined in one hand under one king, with God's dwelling among them. Division is not the end of the story either.
In Ezekiel 37, who does God say the dry bones are?
Ezekiel 37:11 settles it. The bones are the house of Israel, and they are saying our bones are dried up and our hope is lost. The vision answers exile despair with the promise of a people brought home and filled with God's Spirit.
Chapters 38 to 48 are where a lot of end times teaching gets built, so it is worth being careful and honest here.
Gog is a modern superpower leading a coalition against the state of Israel in a coming war, and chapters 40 to 48 are blueprints for a third temple, with sacrifices, still to be built.
A symbolic enemy gathered from the edges of the known world is defeated by God alone, and a visionary temple shows God's glory returning to live with a restored people forever.
Here is the other side at its strongest. The temple chapters are full of measurements, gates and room sizes. They read like plans. And no temple matching them has ever stood, so, the argument goes, it must still be coming. The Gog oracle names places and peoples, so it must be a real war that has not happened yet.
We think that reading is wrong, and here is why. God tells Ezekiel to show the design so the people would be ashamed of their sins (43:10 to 11). The vision was a confrontation and a comfort, not a construction order. Its river deepens from ankles to a flood no one can cross and turns the Dead Sea fresh (47:1 to 12). Its city is named THE LORD IS THERE (48:35). That is the point of all nine chapters.
The New Testament then tells us where the picture lands. Jesus calls His body the temple (John 2:19 to 21). He promises rivers of living water flowing from within those who believe (John 7:37 to 39). Paul tells the church that we are the temple of God. And John's new Jerusalem has no temple at all, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple (Revelation 21:22). Hebrews says the sacrificial system was growing old and ready to vanish (8:13), and in AD 70 the temple fell, as Jesus said it would in Matthew 24. Rebuilding animal sacrifice would be going backward from the cross.
Gog is the same story told as a battle. A vast enemy comes against a restored people living in unwalled villages, and God wins without them lifting a sword. It is written in the huge, symbolic strokes Jewish apocalyptic writing uses. When John borrows the names in Revelation 20, he is writing to seven real first century churches about things that were near for them, as we walk through in our summary of Revelation. None of it forecasts a future war, and reading it as tomorrow's headlines has fed a lot of fear and very little faith.
To be fair, the Gog chapters are genuinely difficult, and faithful readers have disagreed on the details for a long time. What we will not do is turn them into a timetable.
The book opens with God showing up where nobody expected Him, beside a canal in a conquered land, and it closes with a city whose name is simply the promise that He is present.
Everything in between is the road from one to the other. The glory leaves a temple that had become a shell, meets a priest in exile, and promises hearts made new and bones made to breathe. That promise found its home in Jesus, who breathed on His disciples and said receive the Holy Spirit (John 20:22).
So if you feel far from where God used to be for you, Ezekiel is your prophet. God did not stay in the building. He came to find the people.
For related reading, see who Isaiah was, what Lamentations is about, and the posts linked above on Jeremiah, Babylon, the cherubim and the new covenant. And if you are on Long Island, come worship with us on a Sunday.
Ezekiel was a priest exiled to Babylon in 597 BC who saw God's glory arrive by the Kebar canal, acted out the fall of Jerusalem, watched the glory leave the temple, and then promised a new heart, breath for dry bones and a city named The Lord Is There, all of which finds its home in Jesus and His people.
Ezekiel's question still gets asked: can these bones live? Send us your prayer request and someone at Sound of Heaven will pray with you by name.
Ezekiel was a priest, the son of Buzi, who was taken from Jerusalem to Babylon in the deportation of 597 BC alongside King Jehoiachin. He lived among the exiles at Tel Abib by the Kebar canal, and in 593 BC he received a vision of God's glory that turned him from a priest without a temple into a prophet. For about twenty two years he warned, acted out his messages in public, grieved the fall of Jerusalem, and then promised a new heart, a new spirit and God's presence among His people again.
Most people know him for the valley of dry bones in chapter 37, where scattered bones come together and stand up when God's breath enters them. He is also known for the opening vision of living creatures, wheels and a throne of fire, for strange public sign acts like lying on his side for months beside a model of a besieged city, and for the promise in chapter 36 that God would replace a heart of stone with a heart of flesh.
He lived in Babylonia, in a settlement of Judean exiles called Tel Abib beside the Kebar canal, which Ezekiel 3:15 names directly. The Kebar was an irrigation channel near the city of Nippur. Cuneiform records from Nippur mention settlement along the same waterway, which fits the book's setting. He was not in a prison or a palace. He had a house where the elders of the exiles came and sat with him, which suggests the deportees lived in their own farming communities.
In Ezekiel 38 and 39, Gog of the land of Magog is a symbolic enemy who gathers far off nations against God's restored people and is defeated by God alone, without Israel lifting a sword. We read it as covenant language painted in huge strokes, the kind of picture Jewish apocalyptic writing uses, rather than a coded forecast of modern countries. John reuses the names in Revelation 20, a book written to first century churches about events that were near for them.
We do not believe so. The temple of Ezekiel 40 to 48 was never built by the returning exiles, and its point is that God's glory comes back and a healing river flows out. The New Testament applies that picture to Jesus, who called His body the temple, and to His people, whom Paul calls God's temple. Revelation's new city has no temple at all, because God and the Lamb are its temple. Rebuilding animal sacrifice would move backward from the cross, not forward.