James Nisbet's Church Pulpit Commentary
Ezekiel 3:7
EZEKIEL’S MINISTRY AND OURS
‘The house of Israel will not hearken unto thee.’
‘Seeing we have this ministry … we faint not.’
I. What is the nature of the Christian ministry?—Thank God, it is a very blessed one. It is the ministry of the New Testament, a ministry not of condemnation and death, but of restoration and life. Our commission is not to proclaim wrath and destruction, but to tell of refuge and of pardon. We have indeed to point out the danger, that the refuge may be sought—to show the demands of justice, that pardon may be accepted. But our message is not one of gloom and severity, but of gladness and love. We have not the ‘roll’ given to Ezekiel, full of ‘lamentations, and mourning, and woe’ (Ezekiel 2:10). Our errand is rather that of the angel in Longfellow’s poem—
‘Then with a smile that filled the house with light,
“My errand is not death, but life,” he said.’
II. And it is ‘the ministration of the Spirit’ (2 Corinthians 3:3; 2 Corinthians 3:8; 2 Corinthians 3:17).—When Ezekiel went forth to deliver his message to the children of Israel, he knew that they would not hearken to him (Ezekiel 3:7). He might say, in the words of Isaiah, ‘I have laboured in vain, I have spent my strength for nought’ (Isaiah 49:4). For we read of no hearts touched, no consciences awakened, no lives changed by his preaching. But when, in his vision of the latter days, he prophesied to the ‘dry bones,’ they came together, and when he ‘prophesied to the wind,’ the heavenly breath came upon the dry bones, and flesh covered them, and they lived. That is the picture of the ‘ministration of the Spirit.’
Truly it is a glorious ministry, full of wealth and beauty, full of honour and blessing—one that angels might well desire, and yet committed to us, poor, frail, feeble creatures. Does it seem too great, too high, too glorious to be ours? Think—was not the Divine mercy great and wonderful and glorious? Yet it descended to us, raised us ‘out of the dust,’ and ‘out of the dunghill’ (Psalms 113:7), to make us ‘heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.’ As surely as this portion—that of a ransomed child of God—is ours, so is ‘ this ministry’ ours.