What did Ezekiel mean by “The end is nigh”?

It’s ninety seconds to midnight according to the atomic scientists’ doomsday clock. Their weapons fuel our insecurity. How long before the world ends?

My parents and grandparents lived through world wars I and II. I grew up with images of doomsday prophets and their sandwich boards proclaiming, “The end of the world is nigh.” I think they were copying Ezekiel:

Ezekiel 7:2-3 (NIV)
² Son of man, this is what the Sovereign Lord says to the land of Israel: “The end! The end has come upon the four corners of the land! ³ The end is now upon you.

But Ezekiel was no weirdo. He wasn’t talking about the end of the world.

Ezekiel was talking about the demise of Israel as a nation (verse 2). The captives in Babylon were asking if this was the end of their nation, since they’d lost the land God promised Abraham. Did they have any further part in God’s project to rescue the world through the family of Abraham, or had God utterly rejected them? (Lamentations 5:22)

Their questions were the ones that plague us when things go wrong. Why does God let such things happen? Where is God when disaster strikes?

Why? Ezekiel’s answer is that the covenant people had violated the covenant. They didn’t want to serve the Lord, so he gave them what they wanted: serving another ruler. They’d driven God from his sanctuary among them (8:6).

Where was God? God was no longer in the Jerusalem temple. Unlike an earthly ruler who will crush you into submission, God doesn’t stay where he’s not welcome.

Slowly, as if waiting for them to miss his glorious presence, God had moved out. That’s what Ezekiel describes over three chapters:

Ezekiel 9–11 (NIV)
9 ³ Now the glory of the God of Israel went up from above the cherubim, where it had been, and moved to the threshold of the temple.

10 ¹⁸ Then the glory of the Lord departed from over the threshold of the temple and stopped above the cherubim.

11 ²³ The glory of the Lord went up from within the city and stopped above the mountain east of it.

Babylon did not capture God when the temple fell. Babylon captured Jerusalem because God had already left.

So, had God given up on them? No, says Ezekiel. God had not moved on. He was right there, waiting over the Mount of Olives, on the hillside nearest to the temple entry. There might still be a future if they invited God back to lead them.

How does it end?

Babylon invaded. God’s nation died. The Holy Land became a battlefield filled with unclean bones.

The Sovereign Lord asked Ezekiel, “Son of man, can these bones live?” The human could only respond, “Sovereign Lord, you alone know” (Ezekiel 37:3). So, you know what happened in the end? (Read Ezekiel 37 if you don’t.)

The end God has in mind for his people is not the eschatological disaster of the doomsday prophets. Heaven has never given up on the earth, as if breathing God’s life into us was a bad idea at the start. Instead, God breathes his life back into the dead bones, raising his people back to life in his anointed, a new Jerusalem embodying the presence and life of our divine sovereign.

The end (according to Ezekiel 48:35) is a community restored into God’s governance, a city where the world can see, The Lord is there!

That’s our eschatology, God’s goal, the end God is bringing into being in Christ.

What others are saying

Lamar Eugene Cooper, Ezekiel, New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1994), 111:

The “end” that Ezekiel announced with such certainty was to come upon all the land, that is, the “four corners,” suggesting no city would be spared (v. 3). So the idea of the end of Jerusalem was expanded to encompass the end of Judah. God promised to punish the whole nation because of their abominations, an idea that looked back to Ezek 6:2–7. …

Again the purpose of this judgment was to bring a new knowledge of God (v. 4). He never judges people capriciously or for the enjoyment of judging. Always God’s goal was redemptive. God is a God of mercy, but he also is a God of justice. He acted against Judah in judgment to produce a repentant heart and open the way for more mercy and grace.

John Goldingay, Lamentations and Ezekiel for Everyone, (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2016), 52:

The most frightening declaration is that Yahweh has turned away from his people in Judah. He’s walked out on his own house, and is happy for alien feet to invade it. When they turn to their prophets, priests, and elders, they’ll find that they have nothing to say. When they turn to their leaders, they’ll find them bemused.

As in Amos, the “end” or “Yahweh’s day” isn’t the end of the world after which there’s nothing, or after which there’s resurrection or life in heaven. It’s an event in history where God shatters all the structures and order of his people’s life in a fashion that might make them face the waywardness of their life and at least “acknowledge that he is Yahweh.”

Related posts

• The enigma of God’s throne (Ezekiel 1)
• The plans I have for you (Jeremiah 29)
• What will the post-apocalyptic world be like?
• It doesn’t end with Armageddon
• Is Israel God’s kingdom today? (Mt 21:40-46)
• The Day of the Lord (video)