Week 42 - Ezekiel 13-16, Revelation 13 (Oct. 15-22)
Notes
EZEKIEL 14:14: NOAH, DANIEL, AND JOB
Here in Ezekiel 14, God is making the point that Jerusalem will not be saved just because it has a few righteous people in it. He uses three characters of faithfulness to make His point, that the righteousness of a few will not shield an entire wicked people, clarifying that even these heroes would only be able to save themselves from the coming judgment. Noah is the perfect case study for this teaching because only he and his family were saved from the destruction of the flood. Job is a man who generally remained faithful through suffering and was considered righteous by God himself. Daniel is a really strange inclusion to this list. Daniel is a contemporary of Ezekiel! He would have still been alive when Ezekiel wrote these words. Daniel was deported to Babylon in 605 BC, just 8 years before Ezekiel was, they likely knew each other!
It has seemed unlikely to many interpreters that Ezekiel would place a contemporary prophet, Daniel, in this group. This chapter however, likely dates from the late 590s. By that time Daniel had been in Babylon for almost fifteen years and would have been in his late twenties or early thirties. His (Daniel’s) success had come early, so he had been in a high position in the court for a decade. Nevertheless, Daniel does not mesh easily with the profile of the other two. First, both of them (Noah and Job) are non-Israelites….some interpreters have considered it possible that the Daniel mentioned here refers to “Danil,” the wise king of ancient Ugarit who was the father of the hero Aqhat.
IVP Bible Background Commentary
EZEKIEL 16:49 “your Sister Sodom
This highlighted region is the general location of Sodom and Gomorrah which have never been definitively located
There are a couple of very remarkable aspects of this passage that we find in Ezekiel 16:
49 “‘Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.
First is that God here refers to Judah - his own chosen people - as the sisters of Sodom who is infamous in scripture for their wickedness and deserved destruction. It is another indication of the increasingly fractured relationship between God and his people through the major prophets (Isaiah -> Jeremiah -> Ezekiel). What began with a dire warning about the need for repentance and purity in Isaiah (in regards to Judah - the northern tribes of Israel were in a more severe situation), changed to certain promises of judgment with less frequent invitations to repentance and restoration in Jeremiah. Now, in Ezekiel, the opportunity to reverse or even lessen the severity of the impending judgment and the fate of Judah now runs parallel with the greatest example of God’s wrath in scripture, Sodom.
The second remarkable aspect of verse 49 is the sin that Sodom is said to have committed. We famously remember Sodom for its sexual sins which are certainly featured in Genesis 19 when angels visit that town and stay with Lot, the nephew of Abraham. But notice here that the sins that Sodom is remembered by God for here are arrogance, gluttony, and neglecting the poor and needy. What we may see here is God correcting Judah’s impression that because they were not guilty of the wonton sexual immorality of Sodom, they would not face a similar judgment. God points out that the sins for which he will soon punish Judah were also practiced in Sodom, and part of their judgment - thus there will be no exemption for Judah.
Revelation 13: The Beasts
too many people have spent an unfortunate amount of time trying to map the beasts of revelation onto modern current events and missing a crucially important literary dynamic of the book of Revelation: Immediacy. The beasts and battles and other oddities of this vision made sense to the audience of late 1st Century Churches in Asia Minor. Not as exact depictions of worldly conflicts, but as a spiritualized sketch of the larger, darker picture that stood behind/above the reality they could see in the local struggles of the their churches. It is not unusual for God/John to use “beasts” in this depiction because the recipients of Revelation would have been thoroughly familiar with a key text in the Prophets which does just that. Here is NT Wright on the important connection between the beasts of Revelation 13 with Daniel 7:
We talk about 'forces' or 'powers' ('economic forces', cultural pressures, and so on); ancient Jews used more vivid language. The present section draws heavily on a biblical passage that was hugely popular in the first century, namely Daniel 7. Many believed that this chapter, together with chapters 2 and 9, predicted the overthrow of pagan empire and the ascent to power of God's people, Israel (or at least the righteous within Israel). The chapter was therefore studied intensely in the hope of finding a clue to what exactly was going on. Fresh expositions of it were offered (perhaps the best known is in the book called 4 Ezra or 2 Esdras, written after the fall of Jerusalem towards the end of the first century). Jesus himself made this chapter one of the key themes in his understanding of his own role in God's purposes.
In Daniel 7, there are four monsters that come up out of the sea. They are, like so much in this kind of writing, the stuff, of nightmares. The first is a winged lion. The second is a bear with three tusks in its mouth. The third is a leopard with four wings and four heads. Then comes the fourth beast, greater and more terrible, with iron teeth and bronze claws. It has ten horns, with a further little horn growing up beside them.
The interpretation is quite clear. These monsters represent four kingdoms, the fourth of which in particular will become a great and brutal world empire. The horns represent different kings, the last one of whom will make war against God's people and blaspheme God himself. Then comes the great reversal: the Ancient of Days' takes his seat for a court hearing, sitting in condemnation over the last great monster and destroying his power, giving it instead to the 'one like a son of man' who comes to be presented before the Ancient of Days and to receive an everlasting, universal sovereignty.
There is no question but that John has this passage of Daniel firmly in mind. No question, either, how he and many in his day were reading it. They are not interested in actual monsters, great Day-of-the-Triffids creatures crawling up out of the Mediterranean Sea to attack the holy land. They are interested in the earthly reality which these monsters represent. And in the first century the identification was not difficult. John's single monster has telescoped Daniel's four into one, part leopard, part bear, part lion, with ten horns and seven heads. The monster is Rome.
Or rather, as we shall see, the monster is the dark power of pagan empire, straddling the earth, crushing everything in its path, blaspheming other gods who get in the way so that it alone (and the dragon who has given it its power) may be properly wor-shipped. This, perhaps, explains why Pergamum was described in 2:13 as where the satan has his throne: it was a centre of imperial rule and cult, and John sees behind the pomp and the purple to the dark spiritual reality of satanic rule which has enabled the empire to impose itself across so much of the world. Rome is the obvious and only 'monster' candidate in the first century. But the phenomenon of heartless, dehumanized pagan empire, sadly, did not end with the decline and demise of Rome.
That is why the sharp relevance of all this for John's own readers remains, in a different guise, for other readers to this day.
Revelation 13: The Mark of the Beast
The mark of the beast is not a microchip or any symbol on the dollar, nor is it any other modern phenomenon that you’ve heard might be associated with this passage - let that soak in for a minute. We’re wasting our time and attention and turning the Bible into a very silly book when we constantly reassociate some modern technological development with this passage. The mark of the beast in Revelation 13 contrasts with the mark of the Lamb in 14:1 and is simply the indicator for which team (lamb or dragon) a person serves. Increasingly the imperial cult of Rome was requiring pagan sacrifice for one’s participation in commerce which explains verse 17 (Wright, 121) and I offer the following note on the number 666 from NT Wright’s commentary on Revelation:
The final verse of the chapter is one of the most famous in the whole book. It offers the greatest parody of all. It is more or less certain that the number 666 represents, by one of many formulae well known at the time, the name NERO CAESAR when written in Hebrew characters. (Many peoples, and many languages, used letters as numbers, as we would if we devised a system where A=1, B=2 and so on.) The monster who was, is not, and is to come looks pretty certainly to be Nero.
But the number 666 isn't just a cryptogram. It's also a parody. The number of perfection, not least for John, would be, we assume, 777. Some have even suggested that the name JESUS comes out, in some systems, as 888 - a kind of super-perfection. But for John there is little doubt. Nero, and the system he represented and embodied, was but a parody of the real thing, one short of the right number three times over. Jesus was the reality: Nero, just a dangerous, blasphemous copy. We do well to recognize this, but we also do well to search our consciences and our own societies and enquire to what extent we, too, have been deceived by fakes posing as the real thing. It's important to recognize that we too, face choices which may well not be so clear-cut as we would like. We need to pray for discernment to distinguish the reality from the parody, and to act accordingly.