Ezekiel 34:1-10

CHAPTER 34.

THE PROMISE OF THE TRUE SHEPHERD, AFTER THE FALSE SHEPHERDS HAVE BEEN PUNISHED AND REMOVED.

IN the preceding chapter the prophet has announced the first condition of an improved state of things, in reiterating the call to a hearty submission on the part of the people to the demands of God's righteousness. So long as this was postponed, nothing could be looked for of good. But that position being laid down as the first preliminary to a better future, the way now opened itself for the promise of another the appointment of a good shepherd, one who should be emphatically the good shepherd, to rule over and feed them, in the room of the false ones, who had but sought their own interests and oppressed and ruined the flock. The chapter falls naturally into two parts; in the first of which the misrule of the false shepherds is described, with the fatal results to which it had led; and in the second, the gracious interposition of God, to undo the evils that had arisen from the presidency under which the people had been placed, and set over them one whose benign and careful superintendence would ensure the best and most lasting good.

Ezekiel 34:1. And the word of Jehovah came to me, saying,

Ezekiel 34:2. Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel, prophesy and say to them, the shepherds, Thus saith the Lord Jehovah, Woe to the shepherds of Israel, who feed themselves! should not the shepherds feed the flocks?

Ezekiel 34:3. Ye eat the fat, and clothe yourselves with the wool; that which is fed ye kill; the flock ye do not feed.

Ezekiel 34:4. The weak ye have not strengthened, and the sick ye have not healed, (The two epithets here, נּחְלוֹת and חוֹלַה, can only have their distinctive import determined by the verbs respectively connected with them strengthening being used with the first, the evil affection referred to must have been feebleness or impotence, the effect of sickness; and healing being the other verb, sickness itself must have been the disorder there to be remedied. That נַּחְלוֹת should have been put in the plural, probably arose from a desire to prevent its being mistaken for נָחְלָה, the inheritance.) and that which is broken ye have not bound up, and the driven away ye have not brought back, and the lost ye have not sought; but with force ye rule over them, and with cruelty. (In this charge of ruling with force and with cruelty, בְּפָרֶךְ, there is a reference to Leviticus 25:43, where this word is used in the instruction given to the judges, as to the way they were not to rule over the people. They had done the very thing which Moses in the law had charged them not to do.)

Ezekiel 34:5. And they are scattered from their being no shepherd (that is, none worth the name), and they are food to every beast of the field; and they are scattered.

Ezekiel 34:6. My flock wander upon all the mountains, and upon every hill, and upon the whole face of the earth my flock is scattered, and none inquires and makes search. (Our translators have missed the precise import of the two verbs here, and indeed have rather transposed them: דָּרַשׁ signifying to be concerned about anything, and make inquiry after it in a general way; somewhat like the Latin petere; while בָּקַשׁ means more definitely to make search for, nearly corresponding to quærere. There was no inquisition and no search made for the lost portion of the flock.)

Ezekiel 34:7. Therefore, ye shepherds, hear the word of Jehovah:

Ezekiel 34:8. As I live, saith the Lord Jehovah, truly because my flock is become a prey, and my flock is for food to all the beasts of the field, on account of there being no shepherd, and the shepherds have not sought after my flock, and the shepherds feed themselves, and the flock they do not feed;

Ezekiel 34:9. Therefore, ye shepherds, hear the word of Jehovah;

Ezekiel 34:10. Thus saith the Lord Jehovah, Behold, I am against the shepherds, and I require my flock at their hand, and I cause them to cease from feeding the flock; and the shepherds do not any more feed themselves; and I deliver my flock from their mouth, and they shall not be any more for food to them.

This passage evidently points, both as to its subject and the language it employs, to a quite similar and earlier prophecy of Jeremiah (chap. Jeremiah 23:1-6), where in like manner the false shepherds are denounced and judged, that the way might be opened up for the appearance of the Lord's true shepherd. In both prophecies alike, what is meant by the shepherds is manifestly not priests or prophets, but kings and rulers the supreme head of the commonwealth, in the first instance, though not without respect also to the subordinate rulers of the kingdom. This admits of no reasonable doubt, even from what is said of the false shepherds themselves violent, selfish, and oppressive dealing toward the flock being the crimes charged against them. They were rulers who acted towards their subjects with senseless rigour and cruelty. And it is rendered perfectly certain by the promise in the second part of the prophecy, where the special counteractive to the past evil is declared to be the raising up of David as the shepherd that was henceforth to feed them. Such also is the usual meaning of shepherd in the Old Testament Scripture. It has plainly this meaning in the 23d chapter of Jeremiah. And in an earlier chapter of that prophet, the shepherds are distinguished alike from priests and prophets, leaving no other class of persons to be embraced in the designation but rulers: “The priests said not, Where is the Lord? And they that handle the law knew me not; and the shepherds transgressed against me, and the prophets prophesied by Baal” (Jeremiah 2:8). This mode of representation originated in the case of David, and had respect partly to the natural employment from which he was taken, and partly also to the essentially pastoral character, when rightly understood, of the higher employment to which he was called. Thus we find the leaders of the people, who came to David at Hebron to invite him to assume the undivided sovereignty of the kingdom, knew perfectly how to connect the lower with the higher in his history: “Also in time past, when Saul was king over us, thou wast he who leddest out and broughtest in Israel; and the Lord said to thee, Thou shalt feed my people Israel, and thou shall be a captain over Israel” (2 Samuel 5:2). And still more expressly is the double reference brought into notice in Psalms 78:70-71: “And he chose David his servant, and took him from the sheep-folds, from following the ewes great with young: he brought him to feed Jacob his people, and Israel his inheritance.”

The connection between the natural and the spiritual here was certainly not accidental no more than in the case of our Lord's first disciples, who, from being fishers on the lake of Galilee, were called to be fishers of men. It was intended to be to David himself, and afterwards to his successors in office, a perpetual monitor, reminding them of the kind, watchful, and paternal character of the administration which they were called to exercise in Israel. For the earthly kingdom set up there was not to be after the pattern of the kingdoms of this world, in which everything is too often managed for the gratification of a single man's ambition, and the purposes of his own selfish aggrandizement. Samuel had foretold it would in all probability grow into this, but at the same time protested against such an abuse, as an entire frustration of the purposes for which the Lord allowed it to be established. The king in Israel was to be the deputy of Jehovah, “ruling in the fear of God,” nay, occupying the throne “in the name of the Lord his God ;” with the law of God before him as his only statute-book (Deuteronomy 17:18-19), and the promotion of a general conformity to its requirements among the people as the great object of his administration. The office of such a king must therefore have materially differed from that of the merely civil ruler of an earthly kingdom. He was the head of a theocracy which, from its very nature, was predominantly spiritual in its aim, and sought nothing in comparison of the moral and religious interests of the people. He was consequently bound to act in all things, not as the organ and representative of the popular will, but as peculiarly the servant of God; as the land over which he presided was the Lord's heritage, and the people he governed were the flock of the Lord's pasture. How much David understood this to be his high calling is manifest, not only from his last words in Samuel (2 Samuel 23:1-6), but also from the conflict he maintained through life with the sons of Belial, the efforts he made to revive the cause and regulate the worship of God, and the beautiful identification of himself, in all his sorrows and his joys, his struggles and his prospects, with the truth and the Church of God. In these respects he showed himself, above all others, to be the man after God's own heart the man who made the cause of Heaven so much his own, that he might be said to live and reign for it; and who has left in the recorded experience of his spiritual desires and earnest contendings for the truth one of the richest legacies ever bequeathed to the household of faith. Some of his successors copied after his example, but none of them came near to him as the representative of God's heart and mind, in this intense zeal for the interests of righteousness and supreme regard for the good of Zion.

Bearing this in mind, as to the end for which the Lord appointed an earthly head over Israel, we have a sufficient explanation of what seems at first sight a peculiarity in the passage before us its charging upon the kings all the evils that had befallen the heritage of the Lord. It was they who, by their selfish, cruel, and unrighteous administration, had caused the people to become a prey to the ills of life, and to be scattered abroad as the refuse of the earth. We are not to understand from the representation that the people themselves had done nothing to incur these calamities; that had been to belie a large proportion of the earlier part of the Book, and even to contradict the leading purport of the message contained in the chapter immediately preceding. The people had been smitten with the rod of chastisement, because their continued guilt and impenitence had provoked the Lord's anger against them. But the persons who should have set themselves against this waywardness of the people, who, by a vigilant oversight and a faithful discipline, should have ever checked the evil, and laboured for the establishment of truth and righteousness, those who should thus have done the part of real shepherds of the people, were the very persons who had been most influential in speeding forward the progress of iniquity. Instead of acting as the guardians and regenerators of society, they had, by their selfish indifference and shameful profligacy, fed and nourished its corruptions. So that comparing what they should have done, as exemplified in the case of David, with what they had actually done, the prophet might justly lay at their door, in the first instance, the guilt of all the disorders and desolations that had taken place. If such rulers as David had always occupied the throne of justice, such calamities as they had now to bewail would never have happened.

The judgment of such bad shepherds, therefore, must lie at the foundation of all reasonable expectation of a better future. And so the prospect which God begins here to open up of such a future, starts with the punishment of the shepherds (Ezekiel 34:7-10). Mercy to the flock imperatively required the execution of judgment upon those who had betrayed and injured them. And this being done, as it was in great part at least by the terrible things in righteousness in which God had manifested himself toward them, the way was now prepared for the gracious interposition of God to restore and rectify all: which forms the second and main part of the prophecy.