The uneasy, unsettled surface of relative peace in Sudan cracked to reveal unresolved conflict that may continue for a long time to come. After genocidal dictator Bashir was ousted in 2019, Sudan’s military leaders took temporary control of the country under internationally brokered plans to hand the country back to civilian rule according to a set timeline.
In the past weeks, deadlines were not met, and two military factions began all-out war to secure sole rule over the country. The fighting has been centered in Khartoum, the capital. And Sudanese there and around the world have watched in horror as the heart of their country and culture has spiraled into chaos. Infrastructure has broken down—water, food, and electricity are inconsistent at best, as well as phone and Wi-Fi communication networks and basic travel routes.
Hospitals were first overflowing, then running out of supplies because of looting or inability to restock, and many had to finally close their doors because staff and patients couldn’t get there through the crossfire in the streets. The international airport is bombed and smoldering. People are escaping on foot if they have to, across any borders they can access. Dead bodies lie decaying in the streets because there are no relatives left to bury them, or no way to retrieve them and find a place to put them to rest. As the war has dragged on, wartime atrocities have increased in the chaos, including armed robbery and rape even of young girls. Most Sudanese are in shock. The civilians want nothing to do with this war, and they feel powerless to protect their own families.
A few of my friends are there. Exponentially more of my friends’ families are there. My heart is heavy and I grieve with many of them as they deal with everything from survivor’s guilt to waiting interminably to hear from family members if they’ve survived the last few days. We’ve lamented and cried and prayed. But mostly, we wait. And we try to handle the worry and the fear the best we can from afar. I have turned to stories from the Exile in the Old Testament. They feel so very alive under the shadow of the war.
Studying scripture within a different culture gives different eyes to see it with. When I lived and worked with people who experienced oppression and racism because of their ethnicity, it highlighted new realities in the Bible for me. I personally knew teenaged boys who had both a secret name from their culture, and a separate name in the language and culture they interacted with at school and in daily life outside their homes. The stories about Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah took on a whole new meaning. As those young boys learned to operate in a culture that penalized them for being Hebrews, they had to take on the names and culture and learning of a different people to survive. They walked a difficult tightrope of preserving their culture and their faith in God, while still trying to build a life and a home in a foreign culture. They became Belteshazzar, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.
Living myself in a few different places over the past years, the opening stories in the book of Ezekiel gained fresh life for me as well. God appears to his people exiled to a foreign land in the bizarre shape of a holy throne room that roves the earth attended by angels with many faces, and wheels that can travel vast distances in any direction. Feeling country-less and uprooted myself, I felt with fresh warmth the love of a God whose presence is everywhere with his people, not limited by the geography of a church or a tabernacle. He is not constrained by borders on a map or languages, or even a particular culture’s understanding of what God should look or be like. He can be both foreign and familiar to me when I feel both my new home and my own heart to be a shifting mixture of foreign and familiar. When I feel like I have many different faces in the cultures I travel between, God shows himself and his servants to be all things to all people as well, and to carry many faces looking in many different directions too.
And now that I live in Uganda and rub shoulders with people who daily live the realities of refugees exiled unwillingly from their homeland, the stories from Israel’s exile come alive in whole new ways as well. I returned to Ezekiel again, as I told a friend, “like snuggling into warm blankets.” This book was written by someone freshly grappling with living the rest of his life in a land that felt unfamiliar and hostile. And though he speaks difficult truths to his own people about the depth of their sin and the extent God would go to in order to break them from their self-destructive habits, Ezekiel also shared perfect jewels of hope specifically tailored to comfort these same people. As I watched Sudanese friends here begin to grapple with the effects of the war, I knew I needed to dig deep into these exile stories to better understand their experiences. And I hoped to find answers for my own aching spirit about what possible good the Lord could bring to Sudan and her people out of such abominations.
Many verses and themes in Ezekiel have felt particularly “present” in connection to the war. The vision of God’s four-faced cherubim and the wheels covered in eyes the roam the earth has been a comfort again. It’s a reminder that God is never far from his people, and that his eyes see all the atrocities and his justice will not ignore them. It has been a comfort too, to know that just as God called Ezekiel to be a prophet to his people, so God continues to raise up believing Sudanese to share his Word and his message of salvation with their own people.
It is also a bitter truth that Ezekiel saw God’s Glory, or presence, leaving the temple. He ‘left’ the people of Israel after they repeatedly ignored and disobeyed the very God who had protected them. But even this was a mercy, to show the people that without him, they can only be lost and scattered—fearful, unprotected, unable to fend for themselves. An overwhelming majority of Sudanese are Muslims. One of my recurring prayers has been for this war to help them see their need for God, and to drive them into his embrace where they will experience his sufficiency to meet their needs, peace that passes understanding, and personal, motherly love.
But some of Ezekiel has read like looking in a mirror. As he taught about the siege of Jerusalem, he ate small, measured amounts of food, and sipped his allotment of water anxiously to show the desperation people would feel when they would not be able to find enough food and water to live on. He also graphically demonstrated the fear of violence the people would live under, the city streets scattered with bodies, and the overwhelming amount of death from starvation, disease, and brutality. I’ve heard those same feelings of desperation almost every time someone shares an update from relatives still in Sudan, and some of the exact Biblical words and phrases in the mouths of my friends have sent a chill down my spine.
Those in Jerusalem couldn’t believe Ezekiel when he told them war would come to their city, that their pride and joy, the heart of their country, would be under attack. I have heard that same shock as people here have talked about the war, about the smoke rising and the rockets exploding in their capital. One friend turned to me spoke like an Old Testament prophet herself when she said, “In Khartoum people closed their eyes to the war in Darfur [the genocide in western Sudan for nearly the past twenty years]. They said, ‘nothing will happen to us. We are safe here.’ Khartoum slept and now the war has come for them.”
Like Ezekiel when he fell down and cried out to the Lord to ask if he would destroy the entire remnant of his people, my friends and I have wondered and asked God what will be left of Khartoum, of Sudan when or if this fighting finally stops. The second time Ezekiel falls on his face and asks this question (11:13), the Lord’s answer froze me, and I held my breath as I read:
“… the people of Jerusalem have said of your fellow exiles and all the other Israelites, ‘They are far away from the Lord; this land was given to us as our possession.’
Therefore say: ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Although I sent them far away among the nations and scattered them among the countries, yet for a little while I have been a sanctuary for them in the countries where they have gone.’
Therefore say: ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: I will gather you from the nations and bring you back from the countries where you have been scattered, and I will give you back the land of Israel again.’
They will return to it and remove all its vile images and detestable idols. I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them; I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh. Then they will follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. They will be my people, and I will be their God. But as for those whose hearts are devoted to their vile images and detestable idols, I will bring down on their own heads what they have done, declares the Sovereign Lord.”
Then the cherubim, with the wheels beside them, spread their wings, and the glory of the God of Israel was above them. The glory of the Lord went up from within the city and stopped above the mountain east of it. The Spirit lifted me up and brought me to the exiles in Babylonia in the vision given by the Spirit of God.”
Ezekiel 11:15-24
Wow. The Sudanese refugees mourn their land. It is their family heritage, their possession. I have seen the extra grief of loved ones buried in Ugandan soil, and the burden of knowing they will be left behind if their family can ever return to Sudan. Their ‘exile’ as refugees feels like a punishment, like a sign that God is far from them. But God says otherwise.
The Sudanese are not the same as the Israelites, and they don’t have the same promises and covenant that God gave to them. But God is the same God. And his heart toward his children holds the same loving care and desire to heal and reconcile them to himself. So, like the Israelites, God has sent many Sudanese away from their homeland. And as they have been scattered in Egypt and South Sudan and Uganda and Chad and elsewhere, he has been a sanctuary for them.
God has protected many Sudanese displaced from their homes over these long years of war. He has been a place of comfort and safety for them even if, like the Israelites Ezekiel spoke to, they did not even acknowledge him as their God. But we hope and pray that, like God has done for many of the Jews, he will gently gather back the Sudanese and give them back their homeland.
As I lament and pray, will you pray with me? Will you pray that through this painful and horrific process, when the Sudanese do return home, it will not be with worship and devotion to ancestors or evil spirits or any other false gods in their hearts—that they will return with an undivided heart and a new spirit.
Just as God has done throughout all history for those who have believed and followed him, he can take away the Sudanese’s hearts of stone that are dead and numb and enslaved to sin. And he can give them soft hearts that turn toward him. We pray it may be so, Holy Spirit. May the Sudanese be your people, and you their God. Let those who have begun this war, who continue to hunger for violence, bring down their own punishment on their heads.
Lord, may your glory and your presence still hover near to the Sudanese, and may those still waiting in exile find comfort in your words and in your heart for restoration.
Ezekiel is no joke. It can be a difficult book to read and certainly is difficult to understand. It often gets skipped over in Bible studies and sermons, and there are quite a few reasons for that. The book is arguably the most graphic in the Bible in terms of sexual and violent content. As literature in the apocalyptic genre, it measures high on the bizarre-o-meter with symbols, prophecy, and motifs that have no tether in our modern experience.
I always forget how graphic the book is. I don’t know Hebrew, but I get the feeling our translations of “member” for penis and “issue” for semen and “bosom” for nipples and “whoring” for sex are sanitized—words the prophet meant to be raw and irritating to us we gloss over with a euphemism. So why did he use them? What was the point? Certainly sexuality has a good and holy place in the lives of believers, but if that was Ezekiel’s point we’d have another Song of Songs instead of the graphic descriptions of lust, an affair, and acts of prostitution that Ezekiel writes.
To say nothing of the graphic depictions of violence including evisceration, rape, and rivers of blood, the sexuality in Ezekiel chapters 16 and 23 goes far beyond acceptable dinner conversation. But the prophet might not have known much about table manners. He was the one, after all, who ate food cooked over a poop fire for more than a year. I find it most likely Ezekiel is avoided in polite church conversation for this reason—he spoke about and did shameful things that make our skin crawl, make us want to take a bath. The shock of his writings often provokes physical responses like sweating, blushing, racing heart, tears, or shaking. We avoid the book because it’s uncomfortable. It makes us cringe.
But that’s the point of the book. One of its themes is shame, and not just any shame, the particular shame we feel when exposed at our dirtiest, most disgusting moments of sin. It’s the quality of shame we would feel if our deepest and darkest sins were found out. Ezekiel wrote and acted with shock to wake God’s people up to their sin, to convict them, and to call them out of it.
Have you ever asked yourself why the Old Testament so often uses sex and adultery as a picture for sin and falling away from God? Why that metaphor, and why so often? What does it have to teach us? Maybe we should ask why we don’t describe our sin that way today. Why is it more common to hear “food, work, busyness, etc. is becoming an idol in my life” than “I’m cheating on God with my binge eating” or ‘I’m having an affair with my schedule”? Granted, those don’t roll off the tongue as well, but why do we describe our sin differently than God does?
We often describe things as idols in our lives without any real reference to what idolatry meant to the Israelite people, or to real idol worship today. We misinterpret and overuse the idea of idolatry, which was exchanging God for another and totally betraying him. To the Israelites, idolatry was leaving one covenant and seeking another, totally depending on another god to provide for needs God had already promised to provide. We sanitize that word, idolatry, make it metaphorical, and use it to refer to the way we let the score of the sports game control our emotions, or our overeating, or the fact that we find too much security in our bank account. We call it idolatry because we don’t have firsthand experience with idols. We don’t connect our cutesy, pre-packaged words for sin with slaughtering our children in total devotion to idols like Ezekiel talks about.
Through the Lord’s inspiration, Ezekiel knew that perverted sexual appetite was a much better analogy for our sin habits we won’t kick. I believe we leave out the topic of sex from or conversations far too much anyway, but I also think Ezekiel’s graphic depiction of nymphomania and lust-crazed infidelity is actually a better picture of what we so quaintly call idolatry. Do you worship that football game you watch on Sundays? Or would it be more accurate to say you lust over it, fantasize about it, spend all your spare moments imagining how it might play out? Do you sacrifice your children for your gluttony, or do you fantasize about that meal or dessert you want to eat, count the time until you can consume it, imagine what it will taste like, dwell on it? Is your bank account an idol, or is it the secretive little thought that comes to you in spare moments to soothe you or make you discontented? Is idol worship more your pace of sin habits, or is it lust—wild-eyed, insatiable, ever-present sinfulness, an appetite that consumes and controls you at the expense of whatever else deserves your attention more?
We all know what lust feels like, a burning thought or desire you can’t quite put away, that leaves you feeling dirty but aroused, alive. With lust, we mentally throw caution to the wind because it’s hidden, and no amount of conversation or probing lets it out unless we allow it. Are your sin habits more like that? I know mine are. So pick your poison. Idolatry, or lust? Idolatry replaces God in an act of finality and betrayal. An idolater has at least made up his mind. Someone consumed by lust though, thinks she can have the goodness she desires as well as the goodness she already has. If your sin is better described by lust, you want to fill your appetite with other things the world has to offer in secret, but still enjoy your ‘righteous fidelity’ to God. Sounds like a pretty good description of me.
But Ezekiel doesn’t stop there, at calling out our sin and shaming us for it. He wrote to Israelites who were already in exile, already experiencing the punishment for their sin and slowly learning to reform their ways. Ezekiel gives hope and promise to answer the shame. The gospel is so beautifully present in Ezekiel, and we can see through the bars in the narrative to God’s enormous care for the lost nations of the world. God didn’t just care about Ezekiel and the Israelites. He led the prophet to call out the sin of the surrounding nations, but also to weep and lament for them. He called them to repent, just like he has called us as believers to himself. There are whole chapters in the middle of Ezekiel remembering the good qualities of the nations, and praising the unique gifts and abilities the Lord gave them in his mercy. The laments are heartbreaking because they describe the self-destructive sin of these nations and the inevitable consequences of their unrighteousness that they now must face.
After fully expounding on the shame of a lustful people who turn away from God and fill their appetites elsewhere, Ezekiel mentions the idea one more time: “describe to the house of Israel the temple, that they may be ashamed of their iniquities… and if they are ashamed of all that they have done, make known to them the designs of the temple…” What follows is a blueprint for the temple in Jerusalem in surprising detail. What is even more surprising is that this temple didn’t exist. Never has been built and most likely never will be. Ezekiel closes his book with chapters about a non-existent temple—what might have seemed a hollow promise to the exiled people, away from their homeland with no place to properly worship God.
Why would God shame his people with descriptions of a perfect temple they would never see, even after they returned from exile? This temple description would have been the reason people wept at the end of Ezra 3 when the new temple was finished. It was nothing like Ezekiel’s description. God meant for the people to be ashamed of their sin. He meant them to know fully and finally that they could never be perfect, never build a temple and carry out its practices as a perfect, pure, holy people whose hearts were fully devoted to God.
Hearing Ezekiel’s words in exile they must have experienced the sobering proof daily that they could not escape their own sin. As a consequence to their sin they were scattered among the nations. Their language, culture, faith, and even national and genetic identity as Israelites were precariously close to annihilation. As a people, they could be lost forever, blended in among other exiles in a foreign kingdom. They had fallen far short of the perfection of Ezekiel’s temple. It would have seemed unobtainable. And it would have brought them great shame.
But the theme Ezekiel had introduced in snapshots earlier in the book—the theme of a new covenant of God’s mercy and full and final restoration as a people—is an answering hope here fully developed in the context of the temple description. Apocalyptic literature like Ezekiel is meant to alert people to the cosmic realities of sin and its consequences, but also to bring hope to a people devoted to God. The temple he describes isn’t just an object of shame, it is also a symbol of hope. Ezekiel describes a prince who rules justly and leads his people in honoring God. He describes a nation at home in their land, righteous in their ways and prospering in their obedience. Ezekiel describes a new and restored Israel that gathers in its reborn capital city to worship the Lord in spirit and in truth. Perhaps the woman at the well asked Jesus about this very passage.
What Ezekiel describes as a sustaining hope to those repentant of their lustful sin is a restored nation: a pure and rescued people whose language, celebrations, and culture flourish. After fully recognizing the extent of their sin and wickedness, God tells them that one day his presence would be among them again and a perfect reality beyond their wildest imaginings would come true.
Jesus heralded this coming kingdom reality, but it is John’s description of the heavenly temple in Revelation that matches up precisely with Ezekiel’s vision. Ezekiel describes twelve gates for the twelve tribes, and John describes the same twelve also representing the twelve apostles. Both describe a river flowing from the temple, healing the land. Ezekiel promises a day when the Israelites who truly follow the Lord will be with him in his perfect city, and he winks at a coming reality the rest of the world couldn’t even begin to imagine at the time of his writing. He mentions a place for sojourners among the people of Israel, foreigners who are to be treated as natural-born citizens and given a share in the inheritance of the land and the perfect city and temple. He mentions us. We, too, are God-followers invited into the kingdom through God’s gracious mercy exhibited in Jesus. Just as Ezekiel described God’s presence coming down to earth once more and filing the temple, Jesus came down to earth and lived and walked with us in our imperfection, inviting us to share in the hope of a world restored from the ravages of sin.
This harsh prophetic book to exiled people opens with terrifying images of God roaming the earth in giant wheels. This same God spoke through a prophet to convict his present and future people of their shameful, disgusting sins, but he ends his message to the prophet and his audience with a perfect picture of a city and a temple where his presence dwells. The Lord who roamed the earth could be found even by a broken people far away from his temple, but he also showed them that he would soon choose to heal and perfect them, and live among them. The book closes not with God roaming above a broken earth, but with the new name of his perfect city to come, “The Lord is There.”
— By Miss Cellanea 