“Ezekiel’s experience is worth reflection not as a historical curiosity, but to better understand how we can become prophetic witnesses.”
Rewind to the fall of 1993. Fresh out of high school, I’m taking a class at Eastern Pentecostal Bible College entitled, “Personal Life and Evangelism.” The syllabus required us to share our faith with someone in the city. I still remember the awkwardness and fear of that moment. My hands were clammy while my mind raced, trying to figure out the easiest way to check this assignment off my to-do list while keeping my conscience intact. Talking to strangers isn’t exactly my thing. I’ve always felt awkward with small talk and now I had to strike up a conversation with a random stranger to talk about Jesus.
Ezekiel had more than his fair share of awkward moments.1 At the beginning of the book that bears his name, he was living in Babylon with his fellow exiles who had been deported from Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar. This traumatized group lived amidst profound theological deconstruction. Was Marduk, chief god of the Babylonians, more powerful than YHWH? If not, then why did YHWH allow His city to be breached? Some of the exiles held out hope that their condition was just a temporary setback. God was going to do something great—His temple would never fall. Priest-turned-prophet Ezekiel knew better. In the Spirit, he saw God’s presence leave Jerusalem. He saw visions of God’s temple in the sky above Babylon. It was all over, and he knew it. All that was left was for Ezekiel to tell his people the truth.
In Ezekiel 3:1-11, God gives the prophet his marching orders, rooted in two commands: eat and speak. “O mortal, eat what is offered to you; eat this scroll, and go, speak to the house of Israel” (Ezekiel 3:1, NRSV). Receive God’s message and share it: Prophecy 101. Despite decades of priestly training that would have included memorizing and meditating on Scripture, Ezekiel needed more. He first had to receive the prophetic word of God for his own community before he could share it. We Pentecostals, of all people, should lean into this. The Day of Pentecost, our “core theological symbol,”2 describes a release of charismatic empowerment for prophetic witness. What Ezekiel experienced alone among his people, Jesus fulfilled and poured out on all believers, creating His prophetic community.3 As part of that people, we are empowered to receive God’s word today—not only as mediated through the pages of Scripture but also as made alive by the Spirit for our own circumstances.
The way that Ezekiel receives God’s message is worth a closer look. In Pentecostal Prophets, I argue that people today receive the prophetic word much like the Old Testament prophets. Ezekiel’s experience is worth reflection not as a historical curiosity, but to better understand how we can become prophetic witnesses. And it all begins with a meal. Ezekiel was told to eat the scroll that contained God’s prophetic message. Daniel I. Block translates the bold language: “Your stomach gorge; And your intestines fill with this scroll.”4 Clearly, this is no casual glance or moment of pause in an otherwise busy day. Rather, like my 20-year-old students at an all-you-can-eat buffet, Ezekiel was commanded to “gorge” on God’s message until it was deeply internalized.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because Ezekiel was not the only prophet asked to eat a scroll. Jeremiah and John of Patmos received the same divine command (Jeremiah 15:16; Revelation 10:9-10). All three prophets describe the taste of the message: it is a “joy” and “delight” records Jeremiah, “sweet as honey” write Ezekiel and John. But this wasn’t the only sensation. Jeremiah would go on to describe God’s message as a painful “burning fire.” The angel warns John that like the proverbial spoonful of sugar, the sweet taste belies the “bitter” effect it would have on his stomach. Why the contrast? Is God’s prophetic message sweet or bitter? Well … yes. For a prophet, there is nothing sweeter than hearing a message from God and living out your calling. However, the content of the message may be bitter—truth is often uncomfortable. Medieval rabbi Joseph Kimchi went so far as to suggest that Ezekiel was instructed explicitly to take the message deep down into his stomach lest he vomit it out!5
Ezekiel did what he was told. He devoured the message. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Ezekiel spent more time reading whatever Scripture was available to him at the time. No, he communed with God. He connected with the passionate heart of his Creator. He received God’s prophetic inspiration through his ears, mouth, stomach, intestines and heart. This event was so significant for Ezekiel, “so real that the power of the divine word will propel the prophet for more than half a decade as he delivers his relentless messages of judgment to a hardened audience.”6
That’s the sort of power I needed back in Bible college. I remember walking the streets of downtown Peterborough, looking for a potential conversation partner. All I had to do was tell someone about Jesus! How hard could that be? In the end, I found a person sitting against the block walls of a bank, asking for spare change. I sat down next to him and tried to chat. In the end, I think I gave him some spare change and mumbled a “Jesus loves you.” Mission (sadly not) accomplished. I had no idea what God wanted to say to him. I hadn’t gorged on God’s prophetic word—I was nothing like Ezekiel. Instead of listening to God, I was working to complete a school assignment.
At the end of Ezekiel’s instructions, God reminds him again of the scroll-eating moment. “…all my words that I shall speak to you receive in your heart and hear with your ears; then go to the exiles, to your people, and speak to them” (Ezekiel 3:10-11, NRSV). Ah, the moment of speech. I’ve noticed a trend among Christians to emphasize how actions speak louder than words and that faithful presence should be the core of our witness. While this is true, it doesn’t free us—the Spirit-empowered community of prophets—from our responsibility to speak. As much as the introverts among us would prefer to take refuge in prayer and meditation, those words that we’ve gorged on must go somewhere lest, as Jeremiah so vividly reminds us, they cause unbearable spiritual indigestion.
Like Ezekiel, we’re called to be prophetic witnesses where we live. This means first devouring the prophetic word of God and then communicating it with Spirit-led clarity and power. I’ve talked to many people about how they hear God’s voice in these situations and the answers are diverse. Some people notice words being brought to the forefront of their mind when they read and meditate on Scripture. Others perceive a fragment of what God wants to say and only receive more when they’re obedient to communicate the little they already have. Others receive the whole message like “a revelatory splash.”7 Still others receive the prophetic word of God in dreams and visions (Joel and Peter would be proud).8 Regardless of how we hear the voice of God, Ezekiel would urge us to sit with it and take it all in before courageously communicating that message with others.
Eat then speak. These commands are for us as much as they were for Ezekiel. To isolate either of these words is to invite disaster. If all we do is eat without speaking, we become spiritually bloated, personally edified but of no use to the kingdom of God. On the other hand, if all we do is speak without first having heard from God, then we quickly end up speaking out of our own imagination and the message loses its power. These two commands go together for a reason. Like a healthy lake has both an inlet and an outlet, we are called to receive and share, eat and speak, as we practise our birthright as the community of Spirit-empowered prophets.
May we all become more like Ezekiel, that “prophet of the Spirit,” who “serves as a model to all who would stand in the Lord’s presence and all who would enter his service.”9
Stephen D. Barkley is the assistant professor of Bible and Practical Theology at Master’s College and Seminary and the author of Pentecostal Prophets. He writes at stephenbarkley.com.
This article appeared in the July/August/September 2024 issue of testimony/Enrich, a quarterly publication of The Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada. © 2024 The Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada. Photo © istockphoto.com.
- Read Ezekiel 4:9-15 for a particularly cringe-worthy example.
- Wolfgang Vondey, Pentecostal Theology: Living the Full Gospel (New York, NY: T&T Clark, 2017), 1.
- For a fuller explanation of this, see: Roger Stronstad, The Prophethood of All Believers: A Study in Luke’s Charismatic Theology (Cleveland, TN: CPT Press, 2010).
- Daniel I. Block, The Book of Ezekiel, Chapters 1–24 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), 125.
- Moshe Greenberg, Ezekiel, 1–20 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983), 68.
- Block, The Book of Ezekiel, Chapters 1–24, 125–6.
- Stephen Barkley, Pentecostal Prophets: Experience in Old Testament Perspective (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2023), 101.
- See Joel 2:28 and Acts 2:17.
- Block, The Book of Ezekiel, Chapters 1-24, 131.