An End Is Come

Two chapters with almost no comfort in them — and one word tolling through both until it cannot be mistaken for anything else.

A Bible study on Ezekiel 6–7 · Arthur Baldwin · StandUp4Jesus.Org · 11 min read

These are the two chapters of Ezekiel people skip. There is no wheel, no valley of bones, no shepherd and no river — only judgment, delivered twice over, at length. And yet chapter 7 contains one of the most quoted sentences in the prophets, and chapter 6 contains a promise so quietly placed that most readers go straight past it.

Preaching To Mountains

“Son of man, set thy face toward the mountains of Israel, and prophesy against them, And say, Ye mountains of Israel, hear the word of the Lord GOD; Thus saith the Lord GOD to the mountains, and to the hills, to the rivers, and to the valleys; Behold, I, even I, will bring a sword upon you, and I will destroy your high places.”

Ezekiel 6:2, 3

A prophet is told to preach a sermon to geography. It sounds absurd until you remember what was on those mountains.

The high places. Every ridge and hilltop in the country had been fitted out with an altar, a pillar, a grove, an image — the whole apparatus of Canaanite worship, absorbed into Israel over centuries and never fully removed even by the good kings. The land itself had been converted into a religious system. So God addresses the terrain, because the terrain is the defendant.

And then a detail so grim it is easy to misread as spite:

“And your altars shall be desolate, and your images shall be broken: and I will cast down your slain men before your idols. And I will lay the dead carcases of the children of Israel before their idols; and I will scatter your bones round about your altars.”

Ezekiel 6:4, 5

The bodies fall in front of the idols. That is not cruelty for its own sake; it is an argument made in the plainest possible terms. These gods were worshiped for one reason — they were supposed to deliver. Fertility, harvest, rain, protection. And here are their worshipers, dead at their feet, and the images have not moved.

Elijah made the same case with fire on Carmel, and Isaiah made it with sarcasm — a man cuts a tree in half, cooks his dinner over one end, and bows down to the other (Isaiah 44:16, 17). Ezekiel is not permitted sarcasm. He is given the scene itself.

Ye Shall Know That I Am The LORD

Now watch what these two chapters keep saying. It closes verse 7, and verse 10, and verse 13, and verse 14. It closes chapter 7 as well, and it will close scene after scene for the next forty chapters:

“And the slain shall fall in the midst of you, and ye shall know that I am the LORD.”

Ezekiel 6:7

Some form of that sentence appears in sixty-three verses of this book. It is the single most repeated line Ezekiel was given, and it tells us what the judgments are for.

Not to settle a score. Not to relieve God’s feelings. The stated purpose, over and over, is that they may know Him — the very thing the high places had made impossible. A nation that had spent four centuries confusing the Lord with Baal is going to find out, at terrible cost, exactly who He is and who He is not.

That reframes the whole book. Judgment in Ezekiel is not the opposite of revelation. It is a form of it — the last one available when every gentler form has been refused.

Yet Will I Leave A Remnant

And then, in the middle of it, the sentence almost nobody quotes from this chapter:

“Yet will I leave a remnant, that ye may have some that shall escape the sword among the nations, when ye shall be scattered through the countries. And they that escape of you shall remember me among the nations whither they shall be carried captives… and they shall lothe themselves for the evils which they have committed in all their abominations.”

Ezekiel 6:8, 9

Yet will I leave a remnant. Three chapters into the harshest stretch of the book, God interrupts His own sentence to say that He is not finished with this people.

But look where the remembering happens: “among the nations whither they shall be carried captives.” Not in the temple. Not in the land. In exile — in the very scattering that was itself the punishment. The judgment and the mercy are the same event, seen from two ends.

And notice what the repentance looks like when it finally comes. Not they shall loathe their circumstances, or their captors, or their luck. “They shall lothe themselves for the evils which they have committed.” That is the difference between regret and repentance, and it is a distinction worth sitting with. Regret is grief that something happened. Repentance is grief at what I am.

There is one more phrase in verse 9 that ought to stop us. God says the reason He acts is “because I am broken with their whorish heart, which hath departed from me.” Broken. The word is used of God, about His own people’s unfaithfulness. Whatever else is happening in these two chapters, it is not happening to a God who feels nothing.

An End Is Come

Chapter 7 changes register. Chapter 6 argued; chapter 7 tolls.

“An end, the end is come upon the four corners of the land. Now is the end come upon thee… An evil, an only evil, behold, is come. An end is come, the end is come: it watcheth for thee; behold, it is come.”

Ezekiel 7:2, 3, 5, 6

Read that aloud and you will hear what the exiles heard. It is not an argument. It is a bell.

The word had been used once before by a prophet, in a vision of a basket of summer fruit — ripe produce, at the point where ripe turns to rotten:

“And he said, Amos, what seest thou? And I said, A basket of summer fruit. Then said the LORD unto me, The end is come upon my people of Israel; I will not again pass by them any more.”

Amos 8:2

Amos said it to the northern kingdom, and within a generation the northern kingdom was gone. Now Ezekiel says it to Judah, and it means precisely what it meant the first time.

What makes chapter 7 so hard is the withdrawal of a mercy the prophets normally hold out: “And mine eye shall not spare thee, neither will I have pity” (7:4). We met that sentence in Begin At My Sanctuary, where it accompanies the marking of the faithful and the execution that follows. It is the language of a case that has been heard and closed.

And one line explains why the case closed. “The rod hath blossomed, pride hath budded” (7:10). Sin in this chapter is not an accident or a lapse. It is agricultural — planted, tended, grown to harvest. What is being reaped had been carefully cultivated.

The Day Money Stops Working

Then the chapter does something remarkable. It goes to the economy.

“The time is come, the day draweth near: let not the buyer rejoice, nor the seller mourn: for wrath is upon all the multitude thereof.”

Ezekiel 7:12

Under the law, land sold in hardship returned to the family at the jubilee, so a seller had cause to grieve and a buyer cause to celebrate. Ezekiel cancels both. When the whole nation is going into captivity, the deeds mean nothing. The man who got the bargain and the man who was forced to sell are about to arrive at the same place, in the same column, under the same escort.

And then the sentence this chapter is remembered for:

“They shall cast their silver in the streets, and their gold shall be removed: their silver and their gold shall not be able to deliver them in the day of the wrath of the LORD: they shall not satisfy their souls, neither fill their bowels: because it is the stumblingblock of their iniquity.”

Ezekiel 7:19

They shall not satisfy their souls, neither fill their bowels. In a siege, silver will not become bread. The metal that measured a man’s whole standing turns out to be, precisely, metal — and men throw it into the street because carrying it is not worth the weight.

Ezekiel is not alone in this. Zephaniah, prophesying in Judah in the same era, wrote almost the identical line:

“Neither their silver nor their gold shall be able to deliver them in the day of the LORD’s wrath.”

Zephaniah 1:18

And the New Testament picks the figure straight up and points it at the last days: “Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you… Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days” (James 5:3).

So this is a local prophecy about 586 BC with a long shadow. Ellen White, describing the day of God at the end of the age, gathers the prophets who spoke of it and quotes Isaiah’s version of exactly this scene:

“In that day a man shall cast the idols of his silver, and the idols of his gold, which they made each one for himself to worship, to the moles and to the bats; to go into the clefts of the rocks, and into the tops of the ragged rocks, for fear of the Lord, and for the glory of His majesty, when He ariseth to shake terribly the earth.”

Ellen G. White · The Great Controversy, p. 638

She is quoting Isaiah 2:20, 21 — from the margin, as she notes, which is why it reads the idols of his silver where the King James text has his idols of silver. Either way the point is the same one Ezekiel makes in verse 19, and it is worth catching: in Isaiah the silver is called outright what Ezekiel calls it — an idol, a stumblingblock of their iniquity. The thing they trusted became the thing they tripped on.

It is worth being clear about what Ezekiel is and is not saying. He is not saying money is evil, and he is not predicting a market crash. He is saying that on a particular day, an entire category of security will be revealed as having no purchasing power at all against the one thing that finally matters. That day came for Jerusalem. Scripture says plainly that it comes again.

When There Is Nobody Left To Ask

The last blow in chapter 7 is not military. It is the collapse of every channel through which a person could get an answer from God:

“Mischief shall come upon mischief, and rumour shall be upon rumour; then shall they seek a vision of the prophet; but the law shall perish from the priest, and counsel from the ancients.”

Ezekiel 7:26

Three offices, and all three fail at once. The prophet has no vision. The priest has lost the law he existed to teach. The elders have no counsel. People who had ignored all three for years suddenly want them desperately — and find the cupboard bare.

Amos had named this judgment too, and it remains the most frightening one in the prophets:

“Behold, the days come, saith the Lord GOD, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD.”

Amos 8:11

Notice that God does not have to do anything active to bring this about. The prophets had been telling the truth for decades and been ignored; the priests had been trading the law for whatever the court preferred; the elders had been counseling what people wanted. By the time anybody wanted a real word, there was no one left in the habit of giving one.

Which brings us back to Eat This Roll. This is precisely why Ezekiel was made a watchman, given a scroll to swallow, and told to speak whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear. The famine of hearing does not arrive all at once. It is built, one unspoken warning at a time.

What This Asks Of Us

Judgment in this book is aimed at knowledge. Sixty-three verses end with some form of ye shall know that I am the LORD. God is not venting. He is making Himself unmistakable to a people who had spent centuries mistaking Him.

Look at what is lying at the foot of the idol. Ezekiel’s argument against the high places is not theoretical. It is the corpses in front of the images that were supposed to protect them. Whatever we are actually trusting will eventually be asked to deliver, and we should ask now what it is likely to say.

The remnant remembers in exile. Not in the temple, not on a good day — among the nations, after everything had gone. If God has let a comfortable thing be taken from you, that is not automatically evidence He has finished with you. In chapter 6 it is the mechanism of the remembering.

Repentance loathes itself, not its circumstances. That single phrase in verse 9 separates the real thing from its imitation more sharply than any definition could.

And the famine of hearing is built quietly. Every generation of prophets, priests and elders decides whether the next generation will have anyone to ask.

Next in this series: Ezekiel 12 through 14, where the prophets who daub with untempered mortar meet the wall they have been whitewashing — and where God names three righteous men who could not have saved anybody but themselves.