5 “Thus says the Lord God: This is Jerusalem. I have set her in the centre of the nations, with countries all around her. 6 And she has rebelled against my rules by doing wickedness more than the nations, and against my statutes more than the countries all around her; for they have rejected my rules and have not walked in my statutes. 7 Therefore thus says the Lord God: Because you are more turbulent than the nations that are all around you, and have not walked in my statutes or obeyed my rules, and have not even acted according to the rules of the nations that are all around you, 8 therefore thus says the Lord God: Behold, I, even I, am against you. And I will execute judgements in your midst in the sight of the nations. 9 And because of all your abominations I will do with you what I have never yet done, and the like of which I will never do again. 10 Therefore fathers shall eat their sons in your midst, and sons shall eat their fathers. And I will execute judgements on you, and any of you who survive I will scatter to all the winds. 11 Therefore, as I live, declares the Lord God, surely, because you have defiled my sanctuary with all your detestable things and with all your abominations, therefore I will withdraw. My eye will not spare, and I will have no pity. 12 A third part of you shall die of pestilence and be consumed with famine in your midst; a third part shall fall by the sword all round you; and a third part I will scatter to all the winds and will unsheathe the sword after them.
13 “Thus shall my anger spend itself, and I will vent my fury upon them and satisfy myself. And they shall know that I am the Lord—that I have spoken in my jealousy—when I spend my fury upon them. 14 Moreover, I will make you a desolation and an object of reproach among the nations all around you and in the sight of all who pass by. 15 You shall be a reproach and a taunt, a warning and a horror, to the nations all around you, when I execute judgements on you in anger and fury, and with furious rebukes—I am the Lord; I have spoken— 16 when I send against you the deadly arrows of famine, arrows for destruction, which I will send to destroy you, and when I bring more and more famine upon you and break your supply of bread. 17 I will send famine and wild beasts against you, and they will rob you of your children. Pestilence and blood shall pass through you, and I will bring the sword upon you. I am the Lord; I have spoken.”
Ezekiel's message is that the Holy Land and the Holy City must pay the price for Israel's failure to be true to her covenant with God. This is his basic thesis in the first 24 chapters of his prophecy, and we will see as we read them, the monotonous regularity of the awful thunder of doom and judgment. But we know that the second half of his prophecy is very different, and it is not for nothing that he is spoken of as a prophet of hope. This bears a very important and significant message for us today. For, paradoxically, Ezekiel's function, as was Jeremiah's, was to restore to Israel her true faith in God and her belief in her own destiny. And the consensus of Old Testament scholarship is that these prophets did just that, and that it was through their ministry that this people, brought into captivity, did not go completely down and become lost in despair and hopelessness, but on the contrary came back in the fullness of the time, when God's disciplines were worked out in their corporate life. We have only to look on to the historical books of Ezra and Nehemiah, with their record of the rebuilding of the Temple and the walls of Jerusalem, to see the fruit of Ezekiel's ministry - to see also that his word of doom in the earlier chapters was necessary, however unsparing and indeed unpopular it might have been, and that his word of promise in the later chapters was an authentic word from God. Is not this also a twofold word in times of declension and barrenness in the Church's life today? What if, in the providence of God, hard and unsparing denunciation is a necessary preliminary to a word of renewal and hope for our time? And is there any sign that we today might be prepared to countenance the one, in our longing for the other?