Missing the Beauty

We are currently doing a survey of the Old Testament in our Sunday Evening Bible study. We were looking at the book of Ezekiel and I was taking them through the beauty of the book. How Ezekiel is trying to tell these captives that there will come a day that will be so much better that what they were experiencing at that time in their history.

I was struck by the beauty of what he told them. It really seems as if Ezekiel and the prophets are talking in materialistic terms at times. But they are not.

This is how we concluded:
Just to say this, it can seem, when you read the Prophets, that they are talking materialistically, just as it can seem in the New Testament as you read about streets of gold in Jerusalem and so on, and you say, “Oh gee, it is all materialistic.” That is a misunderstanding. With Ezekiel, when you read about the supposedly material restoration, like you will get your land back, but it is not the same land. You will get your city back but it is not the same city. You will get your temple back but it is not the same temple. Everything changes. What he is really saying is, “We prophets do give our predictions in what sounds like material terms, land and vineyards and abundance and all that. But if you really examine what we are doing, we are using that as a means of conveying the fact that there is something ahead that we don’t even understand. It is beyond; it is great. You don’t understand it; we don’t understand it. It is something fabulous in the plan of God. We can only describe it from the point of view of the material but that is not really what we are thinking.” If you understand that, you can see it so well in Ezekiel 40-48. It will be like a prism through which you can, also then, suddenly understand what Amos means, for example, when he says, “The days are coming when the person trying to plant his field will tell the person who is still harvesting, 'Would you please get out of the way, I need to plant the crops',” because the harvest will be so abundant that they will go right around to planting time again. That is just crazy in any agricultural society; you do not have harvests like that. It is a way of saying, using material terminology, something great and wonderful is ahead that we do not really have any ability to portray as well as we would like to.

This is what John did. Will Heaven have streets of Gold or is God really Jasper and Carnelian? No but it is just the best way I can think to describe it, John would say.

Sometimes we miss the beauty of the prophets and Revelation because we think they predict the end of the world but they don't and when we realize that the beauty and exictement of what they are really saying can wash over us.