📖 Old Testament Survey — Unit 11: The Major Prophets – Part 3 (Ezekiel & Daniel)

I. Two Voices in One Captivity

Picture two young men standing on the road out of Jerusalem in the early sixth century BC, watching their world come apart. The Babylonian armies have come, the temple of Solomon has been emptied, and they are roped together with thousands of others on the long march east to a country whose language they do not speak. Their names are Ezekiel and Daniel. Neither will ever see Jerusalem again. And yet from inside that exile God will raise up two of the greatest prophetic voices in the Old Testament, speaking on parallel tracks to the same heartbroken nation.

Ezekiel was a priest, taken in the second deportation in 597 BC, settled with the exiles by the Chebar canal, and called to prophesy from there to a people whose temple was about to fall. Daniel, a young nobleman, was taken in the first deportation in 605 BC, conscripted into the king's palace school, and called to live out his faith inside the very court of the empire that had destroyed his country. Ezekiel's audience was the captives in the camps. Daniel's audience was the kings on the throne. Together their two books answer the question every exile asks sooner or later: Is God still in charge?

Ezekiel is rightly the prophet of God's glory. From his opening vision of the divine chariot in chapter 1 to his closing vision of the new city named "The Lord Is There," Ezekiel cannot stop talking about glory — glory that comes, glory that warns, glory that withdraws, glory that returns. And Daniel, on the other side of Babylon, cannot stop talking about kingdoms — kingdoms that rise, kingdoms that fall, and one Kingdom that lasts forever. The two books are bookends propping up the same grand truth: God reigns, even when His people are in chains.

II. Ezekiel: The Prophet of the Glory

A. The Vision That Changed Everything (chapter 1)

Ezekiel's call vision is one of the most extraordinary scenes in all Scripture. By the river Chebar, far from the temple where he had expected to serve as a priest, the heavens open and Ezekiel sees a great storm rolling in out of the north. Inside the storm is a chariot — four living creatures (later identified as cherubim), each with four faces, propelled by wheels within wheels, "and their rims were full of eyes all around" (Ezekiel 1:18). Above the wheels is an expanse like crystal; above the expanse is a sapphire throne; and on the throne is a likeness with the appearance of a man (Ezekiel 1:26). Ezekiel sees the rainbow, and falls on his face.

The exiles thought their God had been left behind in Jerusalem. Babylon had its own gods; surely Yahweh was tied to the temple seven hundred miles to the west. But this God moves. His throne has wheels. He has come to Babylon. He has come to find Ezekiel. And He is about to say something every exile, every refugee, every prisoner of conscience in every century needs to hear: I am still here. Wherever the people of God are scattered, the chariot of God is over them.

B. The Glory Departs (chapters 8–11)

In one of the saddest passages in the Old Testament, Ezekiel is taken in vision back to the temple in Jerusalem. There he sees, behind closed doors, what is really going on: idols set up in the very courts, women weeping for the false god Tammuz, twenty-five elders bowing east to worship the sun. The temple has become a brothel for foreign gods, and the Lord will not stay. Step by step, the glory of the Lord rises from above the cherubim, pauses at the threshold, lifts to the east gate, and at last departs over the Mount of Olives (Ezekiel 11:23). The temple has been abandoned by its God before Nebuchadnezzar ever lays a hand on it. When God leaves, He leaves quietly — but He leaves.

C. The New Heart and the Dry Bones (chapters 36–37)

And yet Ezekiel is not finally a prophet of departure but of return. In the very middle of the book the tone shifts, and the most beautiful promises in the Old Testament come pouring out. "I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh" (Ezekiel 36:26). The captivity will not produce reformed Israelites. It will produce regenerated Israelites — people whose hearts have been replaced. This is the New Covenant promise of Jeremiah 31, restated; and the New Testament tells us it was fulfilled at Pentecost when the Spirit came to live inside the people of God. If you are a Christian tonight, the heart beating inside your chest is the heart Ezekiel saw from a hillside in Babylon two and a half millennia ago.

Then comes the vision of the dry bones (chapter 37). Ezekiel is set down in a valley full of skeletons — ancient, sun-bleached, scattered, hopeless. "Son of man, can these bones live?" The prophet, wisely, will not commit himself: "O Lord God, you know." Then the Lord commands him to prophesy to the bones, and as he does there is a rattling, the bones come together, the sinews and flesh appear, and finally the breath of God blows over the valley and an exceedingly great army stands on its feet. On its first level the vision means this: the nation Israel, dead and scattered in exile, will live again. And deeper still: in every age there are valleys full of dry bones — dead churches, dead nations, dead families, dead lives — and the Word of God preached in the power of the Spirit of God can still bring them up.

D. The Glory Returns (chapters 40–48)

The book closes with an elaborate vision of a new temple. The dimensions are precise, the courts are clean, and most importantly, the glory of the Lord — the same glory that withdrew in chapter 11 — comes back from the east and fills the house (Ezekiel 43:4). A river flows from beneath the threshold, deepens as it goes, and brings life to everything it touches. And the city has a new name, the most wonderful name in the whole Old Testament: Yahweh Shammah, "The Lord Is There" (Ezekiel 48:35). Whatever the temple's literal future, the point is unmistakable. The Lord who left will return. And the city of God will at last be defined not by its walls or its location but by the simple, eternal fact that He is there.

III. Daniel: Faithful in a Far Country

Daniel was about seventeen when they came for him. A teenager from a noble Jewish family, he was hauled off to the schools of Babylon to be re-educated for the king's service. They changed his food, they changed his name, they changed his curriculum, and they did everything in their power to change his soul. They failed. The first six chapters of Daniel are six tests of a young man's faith inside a hostile culture, and they remain — almost three thousand years later — the most useful chapters in the Bible for any believer who has to work in an office, study at a university, or live in a neighborhood where the name of God is rarely heard except as a curse.

A. The Test of Obedience (Daniel 1)

The first test was a dinner table. The king had ordered the Jewish boys fed from his own kitchen — meats sacrificed to idols, wine poured to false gods, food forbidden by the law of Moses. The pressure was enormous: when in Babylon, do as the Babylonians do; you are a long way from home; nobody will know. "But Daniel purposed in his heart that he would not defile himself" (Daniel 1:8). It was not a thunderous public stand. It was a quiet decision in the heart of a teenage boy. And God honored it. After ten days the four Hebrew young men looked healthier than the boys living on royal food, and at graduation they tested ten times wiser than every astrologer in the empire. That is the way faithfulness almost always begins. Not on a battlefield. At a meal.

B. The Test of Trust (Daniel 2)

Then Nebuchadnezzar had a dream he could not remember and demanded that his wise men tell him both the dream and its meaning, on pain of death. The astrologers were finished. Daniel asked his three friends to pray, and that night God gave him the dream. It was a great image: head of gold, chest of silver, belly of bronze, legs of iron, feet of mingled iron and clay — and a stone, cut without hands, struck the image, broke it to powder, and grew into a mountain that filled the whole earth. The four metals, Daniel told the king, were four world empires: Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, Rome. The stone was the Kingdom of God. Charlemagne, Napoleon, Hitler, Mussolini, and a dozen lesser men have tried to put the Roman Empire back together, and none of them has succeeded. The stone has come — Christ, "cut without human hands" — and the mountain He is building will not stop growing until it fills the earth.

C. The Test of Fear (Daniel 3)

Then came the golden image and the fiery furnace. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were given a simple choice: bow or burn. They answered, "Our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and He will deliver us from your hand, O king. But if not, let it be known to you, O king, that we do not serve your gods, nor will we worship the gold image which you have set up" (Daniel 3:17–18). If not. Two of the smallest words in the Bible and two of the strongest. Faith does not need a guarantee of rescue in this life; it needs only the certainty of God in the next. The three were thrown in. The furnace killed the soldiers who threw them. And when Nebuchadnezzar looked into the flames he saw four men walking, and the fourth "is like the Son of God" (Daniel 3:25).

During the Second World War, in a Formosan mountain village, a Japanese officer announced that within three days every villager must come to the police station and renounce Christ or be tied with stones and thrown from the high bridge into the river below. The village Christians met at midnight. Some said they would have to give it up; the policeman would surely kill them. Then a young boy stood up and reminded them of Jesus' words about not fearing those who can only kill the body. Every hand in the room was raised: they would die. The next day the policeman, while wading in the river, slipped on a rock, broke his leg, and drowned. While the village was praying, the messenger ran in. The man who was to kill them was already dead. If not. God is still able. And when He is not pleased to deliver, He gives grace to die well — which is, in the end, the very same thing.

D. The Test of Pride (Daniel 4)

Daniel chapter 4 is the only chapter in the Bible written by a Gentile king. Nebuchadnezzar gives his own testimony. He had walked one evening on the roof of his palace, looked out over the hanging gardens of Babylon, and said in his heart, "Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for a royal dwelling by my mighty power and for the honor of my majesty?" (Daniel 4:30). At that moment heaven answered. The great king's mind broke. For seven seasons he lived in a field eating grass like an ox, his hair growing like eagles' feathers, his nails like birds' claws. Only when he lifted his eyes to heaven and acknowledged that the Most High rules in the kingdoms of men was his sanity restored.

Pride walks beside almost all of us, looking constantly for an opening to distort our estimate of ourselves. Don Shula, the legendary coach of the Miami Dolphins, once took his family on vacation to a small town in Maine and ducked in out of the rain to a half-empty movie theater. As he walked in, the few people already seated turned around and began to clap. Shula leaned over to his wife and said, "Imagine — a thousand miles from home and they still recognize me." When he sat down, one of the men came over with his hand out. Shula said, "I can't believe you know who I am." The man smiled. "I don't know you from Adam. The owner just told us they wouldn't show the movie unless ten tickets were sold. Your family makes ten." Pride is always doing that. Nebuchadnezzar lifted his eyes from his city and forgot his Maker. So can you and I, in a much smaller theater, with much less reason. The Most High rules.

E. The Test of Judgment (Daniel 5)

Years pass. Belshazzar, Nebuchadnezzar's grandson, is throwing a drunken banquet for a thousand of his lords on the very night the Persian armies are diverting the Euphrates and slipping under the wall. He calls for the gold cups taken from the temple in Jerusalem and toasts the gods of Babylon out of the holy vessels. At that moment fingers of a man's hand appear and write on the plaster of the wall: MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN. No one can read it but the old prophet, now in his eighties, summoned out of forgotten retirement. "You have been weighed in the balances and found wanting" (Daniel 5:27). That night the king was slain. Babylon fell.

The Bible says God still uses scales. "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23). Our righteousness, as Isaiah said, is filthy rags; we do not weigh sixteen ounces to the pound. Belshazzar's tragedy was not that he failed the test — every one of us fails the test — but that he was offered no second weighing. The cross of Christ is God's gracious provision of another set of scales. There our weight is reckoned in His perfect righteousness, and the verdict for everyone who trusts in Him is the opposite of Belshazzar's: found in Him, not having my own righteousness (Philippians 3:9).

F. The Test of Worship (Daniel 6)

Daniel is now an old man, well into his eighties, prime minister under Darius the Mede. His enemies, unable to find any fault in him, set a trap that exploits the one thing they know he will never give up: his prayer life. They get the king to sign a thirty-day decree forbidding prayer to anyone but Darius himself, on pain of the lions. Daniel goes home, opens his window toward Jerusalem, and prays as he has always prayed, three times a day. The lions get him. God shuts their mouths.

A young woman named Karen Watson left a comfortable job in the United States to work as a missionary in Iraq. Before she left, she sealed a letter and gave it to her pastors with the instruction, "Open in the event of my death." On March 15, 2004, she was killed by gunmen on a road outside Mosul. The letter, opened that night, contained these lines: "When God calls there are no regrets… I wasn't called to a place; I was called to Him. To obey was my objective, to suffer was expected, His glory my reward." Daniel could have written that letter. Karen Watson, two and a half millennia later and half a world away, did write it. The lions never get the last word.

IV. The Apocalyptic Visions and the Son of Man

The second half of Daniel's book turns from biography to prophecy. In chapter 7, the same four empires appear again, but this time as four wild beasts rising from a stormy sea. Then the scene shifts to heaven. "I watched till thrones were put in place, and the Ancient of Days was seated; His garment was white as snow, and the hair of His head was like pure wool. His throne was a fiery flame, its wheels a burning fire" (Daniel 7:9). The Ancient of Days is God Himself; the white garment, His holiness; the burning throne, His judgment. And then a second figure approaches. "I was watching in the night visions, and behold, One like the Son of Man, coming with the clouds of heaven! He came to the Ancient of Days, and they brought Him near before Him. Then to Him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve Him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and His kingdom the one which shall not be destroyed" (Daniel 7:13–14).

Six hundred years later, in front of the Sanhedrin, on the night before His crucifixion, Jesus of Nazareth was put under oath and asked whether He was the Christ, the Son of the Blessed. He answered with two clauses, the second of them taken straight out of Daniel 7: "I am. And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven" (Mark 14:62). The high priest tore his robes. He understood exactly the claim being made. Jesus was telling them, in the language of Daniel's vision, that He was the eternal King receiving the everlasting Kingdom. The cross, three hours later, was not the end of that claim but the beginning of its fulfillment.

Daniel 9 contains another remarkable prophecy: the seventy weeks. Daniel is reading Jeremiah, calculating that the seventy years of exile are nearly up, and praying for his people, when the angel Gabriel arrives with a longer timeline. From the decree to rebuild Jerusalem until the Anointed One is "cut off" will be sixty-nine weeks of years (Daniel 9:25–26). Take a calculator and start at the decree of Artaxerxes in 445 BC; the math lands at exactly the right week of the right year for the cross. Daniel was given, six centuries in advance, the date of Calvary. The God who walks His people through history is the God who walks the calendar of redemption.

V. The Bowling Ball on the Boxcar — and Christ in Both Books

Imagine a man on a freight train rolling forward at twenty miles an hour. He sets a bowling ball on the floor of the boxcar and rolls it gently from the front of the car toward the back. From his point of view, the ball moves at twenty miles an hour from front to back. From the point of view of a man standing beside the tracks, the train is moving forward at twenty and the ball is moving backward at twenty: the ball is standing perfectly still. Now imagine an astronaut watching from orbit. The earth itself is spinning at a thousand miles an hour, and from where he sits the ball is hurtling around the planet at a thousand miles an hour, train or no train.

That is exactly the message of Daniel's book, and of Ezekiel's. When you and I look at our own lives, all we can see is the bowling ball rolling backward — illness, exile, lions, furnaces, fired pastors, broken marriages, captive nations. But step out of the boxcar and stand by the tracks, and you discover that what looks like loss is actually being carried forward. Step further still, into orbit, and you see a vast plan moving at a speed our perspective could never measure. The whole point of these two books is to lift the people of God out of the boxcar long enough to see that God is in charge of the train. Ezekiel sees the chariot. Daniel sees the throne. Both see the Son of Man. Both leave us with the same news: God reigns over our captivities.

Christ stands on every page. In Ezekiel He is the Good Shepherd who searches out His scattered sheep (Ezekiel 34:11–16); the Cleansing Fountain who sprinkles clean water on us and gives a new heart (36:25–26); the Breath in the Bones who raises a dead nation to life (37:9–10); the Glory that Returns to fill the new house (43:4); and Yahweh Shammah, the Presence whose name is the city's name (48:35). In Daniel He is the Stone Cut Without Hands that breaks every empire (2:34); the Fourth Man in the furnace (3:25); the Son of Man who receives an everlasting Kingdom (7:13–14); and the Anointed One who is cut off — not for Himself, but for many (9:26).

Two captives, in two different parts of Babylon, holding one Bible against the empires of the world, and trusting one Lord. From the camp by the Chebar canal Ezekiel sees the chariot of glory move. From the palace of Nebuchadnezzar Daniel watches kingdoms come and go. Both end in the same place: a Son of Man receiving an everlasting Kingdom, a city whose name is The Lord Is There. He is the Lord who reigns over chariots and thrones, lions and furnaces, dry bones and the river of life. The same Lord, still, today.

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