The Keys That Open This Book

Ezekiel is not a sealed book. It is a locked one — and the keys have been lying in the open for a long time.

A Bible study on the book of Ezekiel · Arthur Baldwin · StandUp4Jesus.Org · 12 min read

Most people who set out to read the Bible straight through slow down in Ezekiel. Chapter 1 is famous and baffling. Chapter 37 is famous and moving. Between and after them lie forty-odd chapters of dated oracles, acted signs, city-states, temple measurements and animal names, and the ordinary reader — who is not lazy and is not unspiritual — closes the book with the honest thought that this one is not for him.

This series has now been through the whole of it, chapter by chapter. What became obvious somewhere around the fifth article is that the difficulty is not obscurity. Ezekiel is not vague. It is specific to the point of giving the day of the month. The trouble is that several of its doors need particular keys, and a reader who does not have them does not experience the book as locked — he experiences it as noise.

This closing study is about five of those keys.

A Careful Claim, Made Carefully

Before the keys, the claim — because there is a version of it that is false and a version that is true, and they sound similar for about four words.

What is not being said is that God wrote Ezekiel for one modern denomination, or that nobody outside it can read the book. Neither is true. Ezekiel was a priest deported in his twenties, writing to real refugees in a settlement by an irrigation canal in Babylonia, about a real city that was about to burn. Christians have been fed by this book for two and a half thousand years — by the valley of dry bones, by the shepherd who goes after the one that is lost, by the new heart and the new spirit — without any of the apparatus below.

What is being said is narrower and, we think, demonstrable: there are five interpretive keys that open particular doors in this book, and where a reader lacks them those doors stay shut. None of the five was invented in the nineteenth century. The year-day principle was being used by expositors centuries before the Advent movement existed; the reading of prophecy as continuous history runs back through the Reformers and beyond them. What happened in the 1840s was a recovery and assembly of keys that had been made and then mislaid, and the assembling of them is what makes Ezekiel readable end to end.

The distinction matters practically, not just in manners. Say this book was written for us and a stranger closes the tab, correctly, because you have just told him it is not for him. Say here are the keys that open it and you have handed him something. Keys are for giving away. That is the whole reason a page like this exists in public.

Key One: The Sanctuary

Two of the least-read blocks in the Bible are Ezekiel 8–11 and Ezekiel 40–48. Both are about a building.

Without a sanctuary framework, chapters 8–11 read as a tour of assorted misbehaviour and chapters 40–48 read as an architect’s specification nobody ever built from — which is exactly why most readers skip both. With it, they are the two ends of one arc, and the arc is the shape of the whole book.

In chapter 8 the prophet is carried to Jerusalem and shown what is happening inside the temple courts — the image of jealousy at the gate, seventy elders with censers in a hidden chamber, women weeping for Tammuz, and twenty-five men at the door of the temple with their backs to it. In chapter 9 the sentence is executed, and the order given is not begin at the palace or begin at the marketplace:

“Slay utterly old and young, both maids, and little children, and women: but come not near any man upon whom is the mark; and begin at my sanctuary.”

Ezekiel 9:6

Then the glory of God leaves the building by stages — from the cherub to the threshold, from the threshold to the east gate, from the gate to the mountain on the east side of the city (10:18, 19; 11:23). It is the slowest departure in Scripture, and it is a departure from a sanctuary.

Thirty-two chapters later the glory comes back, and the text goes out of its way to tell you it is the same glory and the same door:

“Afterward he brought me to the gate, even the gate that looketh toward the east: and, behold, the glory of the God of Israel came from the way of the east… And it was according to the appearance of the vision which I saw, even according to the vision that I saw when I came to destroy the city: and the visions were like the vision that I saw by the river Chebar.”

Ezekiel 43:1–3

Out by the east gate; back in by the east gate. The Adventist scholar William H. Shea put the frame in the title of one essay — “The Investigative Judgment of Judah: Ezekiel 1–10” — and it holds up on a plain reading: this is a court convening in a sanctuary, and everything else in the book hangs off it. The studies on chapters 8–11 and chapters 40–48 follow that arc from both ends.

Key Two: The Investigation Comes First

Look closely at the order of operations in chapter 9, because it is the key itself, sitting in plain sight.

“And, behold, six men came from the way of the higher gate, which lieth toward the north, and every man a slaughter weapon in his hand; and one man among them was clothed with linen, with a writer’s inkhorn by his side… And the LORD said unto him, Go through the midst of the city, through the midst of Jerusalem, and set a mark upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and that cry for all the abominations that be done in the midst thereof. And to the others he said in mine hearing, Go ye after him through the city, and smite.”

Ezekiel 9:2, 4, 5

Seven figures. One of them carries a pen. He goes first, alone, and his entire job is to distinguish one kind of person from another. The six with weapons follow after him and are forbidden to touch anyone he has marked. Nobody’s case is decided by the men with the weapons; their work is executive, and it is done on a list already made.

That sequence — examination, then decision, then execution — is the shape of the judgment this church teaches, and here it is in the sixth century BC, acted out on one city as a working model. Daniel 7 later shows the same court on the universal scale: thrones set, books opened, and only then the dominion taken away. Ezekiel is the local, historical version; Daniel is the cosmic one. Read either without the other and the picture is half-size.

And Ellen White applies this exact scene, weapons and inkhorn and all, to the very end of things:

“The mark of deliverance has been set upon those ‘that sigh and that cry for all the abominations that be done.’ Now the angel of death goes forth, represented in Ezekiel’s vision by the men with the slaughtering weapons… The work of destruction begins among those who have professed to be the spiritual guardians of the people. The false watchmen are the first to fall.”

Ellen G. White · The Great Controversy, p. 656

Note where she says it begins. The same place the angel was told to begin in 9:6.

Key Three: The Mark On The Forehead

The man with the inkhorn marks foreheads. So does the angel of Revelation 7:

“Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees, till we have sealed the servants of our God in their foreheads.”

Revelation 7:3

Same instrument, same body part, same sequence — the destroying held back until the marking is finished. John is not inventing an image; he is picking one up. And Ezekiel tells us what the mark is for and who gets it, which Revelation assumes you already know: it goes on “the men that sigh and that cry for all the abominations that be done in the midst thereof” (9:4).

That is worth sitting with, because it is not the qualification most people would have guessed. The marked are not the ones who fixed the problem, or who protested loudly, or who separated themselves and went somewhere cleaner. They are the ones who grieved over what was being done — inside their own city, by their own people, at their own temple. A whole doctrine of the remnant is packed into that participle, and it is not a flattering one. Grief is the evidence, and grief is not a public act.

The site’s study of the sealing in Revelation 7 works out where that goes at the end.

Key Four: A Day For A Year

In chapter 4 the prophet is told to lie on his side beside a brick with a besieged city scratched on it — three hundred and ninety days on the left, forty on the right — and the reason given is a rule:

“And when thou hast accomplished them, lie again on thy right side, and thou shalt bear the iniquity of the house of Judah forty days: I have appointed thee each day for a year.”

Ezekiel 4:6

That sentence is one of the two places in Scripture where the year-day principle is stated outright rather than assumed — the other is Numbers 14:34, where Israel bears its iniquity forty years, a year for each day the spies were in the land. Ellen White cites exactly those two texts, and no others, when she needs the principle:

“A day in prophecy stands for a year. See Numbers 14:34; Ezekiel 4:6.”

Ellen G. White · The Desire of Ages, p. 233

She writes it in the middle of explaining what Jesus meant by “The time is fulfilled” — that is, she reaches for Ezekiel 4:6 to explain the opening sentence of Christ’s public ministry. Without this key, Daniel’s 2,300 days, the 1,260 days of Daniel and Revelation, and the seventy weeks are three unsolvable puzzles. With it they are arithmetic, and they land where history can be checked.

One detail is worth keeping, because it is the sort of thing that gets lost when a principle becomes a formula. Both of the texts that state the rule attach it to bearing iniquity — somebody carrying, in his own body and over measured time, the consequence of somebody else’s sin. The key is not a piece of prophetic machinery. It was given inside an act of substitution. The study on chapters 4 and 5 stays with that, including the parts of the count that remain genuinely uncertain.

Key Five: The Soul That Sinneth

The fifth key opens far more than Ezekiel, but Ezekiel is where it is cut:

“Behold, all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine: the soul that sinneth, it shall die.”

Ezekiel 18:4

Two words in that verse do the work, and both are usually read straight past. A soul here is a person — the kind of thing that has a father and a son and belongs to God. And what that soul does, if it sins, is die.

“The divine sentence, ‘The soul that sinneth, it shall die’ (Ezekiel 18:20), is made to mean: The soul that sinneth, it shall not die, but live eternally.”

Ellen G. White · The Great Controversy, p. 533

Hold that key and several passages in this book stop fighting you. The graveyard of empires in chapter 32 — Asshur, Elam, Meshech, Tubal, Edom, laid out with their weapons under their heads — reads as what it says it is, a burial ground, rather than a chamber of conscious torment. The valley of dry bones in chapter 37 becomes a resurrection rather than a metaphor for cheering up. And chapter 18’s whole argument, that no one inherits a verdict and no one is trapped in one, holds together instead of collapsing at the first funeral. The site’s case is set out at Deceptions, and the chapter 18 study works through the text itself.

How She Actually Used This Book

It is one thing to say the keys fit. It is another to look at how Ezekiel is actually handled by the writer this movement reads most closely, across fifty years, and see what pattern comes out. Laid end to end, it is not what a critic would expect — and, honestly, not quite what this writer expected either.

• Ezekiel 1–2 — ministers are sent to it as a school of organization: “Let God’s workmen study the sixth chapter of Isaiah, and the first and second chapters of Ezekiel” (Testimonies to Ministers, p. 213), with the hand among the wheels as the point.
• Ezekiel 3 — “Please read carefully the third chapter of Ezekiel” (p. 214), one page later, in a passage about who gets the glory for the work.
• Ezekiel 12 — the tarrying-time chapter, which after 1844 was “a source of strength and comfort to believers” (The Great Controversy, p. 392).
• Ezekiel 14 — the idols set up in the heart, applied to “the people professing the truth” (Testimonies, vol. 5, pp. 163, 164); and Noah, Daniel and Job delivering only their own souls, applied to the time of trouble, when “every soul must stand for himself before God” (The Great Controversy, p. 622).
• Ezekiel 21 — “I will overturn, overturn, overturn” read with Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece and Rome, and then: “That time is at hand” (Education, p. 179).
• Ezekiel 33 — “Study faithfully the thirty-third chapter of Ezekiel” (Testimonies to Ministers, p. 416), written while urging ministers to put their congregations to practical work.
• Ezekiel 2 and 3 again — “Thou shalt speak My words unto them, whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear” laid on the messenger of truth in this generation (The Great Controversy, p. 459).
• Ezekiel 9 — the marking and the slaughter weapons, at the close of probation (The Great Controversy, p. 656).

Read that list again and notice who is being addressed. Almost every one of those applications points inward — at ministers, at workmen, at believers, at “the people professing the truth,” at the spiritual guardians who fall first. The book we say we hold the keys to turns out, in her hands, to be aimed mostly at us.

That is an observation about a pattern rather than a statement she makes in so many words, and it is offered as such. But it is hard to unsee once you have looked, and it puts the whole claim of this article in its proper posture. Possessing a set of keys is not a credential. Ezekiel 9 begins at the sanctuary; Ezekiel 14 is about idols in the hearts of people who are still coming to the prophet for a reading; Ezekiel 33 ends with a congregation that loves the sermon and does nothing. If these keys are ours, so is the mail.

What This Asks Of Us

Three things, and the first is the least spiritual-sounding and the most necessary.

Read the book. Not the famous chapters — the book, in order, at whatever pace. Forty-eight chapters is about a month at two a day. Every study in this series exists to be read alongside the text rather than instead of it, and the index at Ezekiel — all articles runs in chapter order for exactly that reason.

Hand the keys over. They were not made by us and they are not held in trust for us. A person who has never heard of the sanctuary doctrine and never met the year-day principle is not an opponent; he is somebody standing at a locked door with no reason to know that a key exists. The whole difference between an argument and an act of service is which of those two things you think you are looking at.

Expect to be the one addressed. Ezekiel was written to a community that already had the covenant, the temple plans, the priesthood and the prophets — people with every advantage, being told the truth by somebody they enjoyed listening to. The danger the book keeps describing is not ignorance. It is possession without practice.

And it ends, after all of it — after the wheels, the siege, the sword, the empires, the bones and the river — with a city getting a new name, and the name is not about the city:

“It was round about eighteen thousand measures: and the name of the city from that day shall be, The LORD is there.”

Ezekiel 48:35

That is what the keys are for. Not a system — a door, and behind it somebody who came back by the same gate He left by.