“Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue?”
—JRR Tolkien, The Return of the King
Our Compassionate Shepherd (Ezekiel 34:1-6, 11-16)
“Go on up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good news; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good news; lift it up, fear not; say to the cities of Judah, ‘Behold your God!’ Behold, the Lord God comes with might, and his arm rules for him; behold, his reward is with him, and his recompense before him. He will tend his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms; he will carry them in his bosom, and gently lead those that are with young.”
— The Prophet Isaiah
One Lord Over All (Ezekiel 28:25-26)
“The LORD passed before him and proclaimed, ‘The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.’”
— Exodus 34:6-7
“And now the LORD says…
‘It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
to raise up the tribes of Jacob
and to bring back the preserved of Israel;
I will make you as a light for the nations,
that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.’”
— Isaiah 49:5-6
Radical Solidarity (Ezekiel 20:33-38)
“We follow One who stood and wept at the grave of Lazarus – not surely, because He was grieved that Mary and Martha wept, and sorrowed for their lack of faith (though some thus interpret) but because death, the punishment of sin, is even more horrible in his eyes than in ours.”
—C.S. Lewis
A Heart to Desire, A Spirit to Inspire (Ezekiel 11:14-21)
“High King of heaven, my victory won
May I reach heaven’s joys, O bright heaven’s sun
Heart of my own heart, whatever befall
Still be my vision, O ruler of all”
—Be Thou My Vision
Awe Inspiring Mercy & Justice (Ezekiel 10-11)
“Be Thou my vision, O Lord of my heart
Naught be all else to me, save that Thou art
Thou my best thought, by day or by night
Waking or sleeping, Thy presence my light”
God Pronounces Judgement on Idolatry (Ezekiel 8:1-6)
God Pronounces Judgement Through Ezekiel's Acts and Speech (Ezekiel 7:1-4)
“Who has believed our message and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.”
— Isaiah
Ezekiel's Call (Ezekiel 2:1-10, 3:1-15)
“The Bible, all of it, is livable; it is the text for living our lives. It reveals a God-created, God-ordered, God-blessed world in which we find ourselves at home and whole.”
— Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading
The Presence of the Lord (Ezekiel 1:1-5a, 26-28)
“Religion is sin when it makes God into something which we can handle.”
— John Webster