Ezekiel is a priest in exile, sitting by the Chebar canal in Babylon around 593 BC. He is five years into deportation, far from the temple, among people who assume their God has been defeated and left behind in Jerusalem. Then the heavens open. The vision he records is a frontal assault on that assumption: the throne of the LORD is mobile, wheeled, fiery, and it has come to Babylon. Ezekiel writes for a community that thinks geography has the last word over theology. Chapter one tells them otherwise.

From the writers we read together

Michael S. Heiser

biblical scholar, author of The Unseen Realm

Heiser argued that the Old Testament repeatedly distinguishes between the LORD who cannot be seen and the LORD who can — a visible Yahweh who appears in human form to Abraham, wrestles Jacob, leads Israel as the Angel, and now sits on the throne above the wheels in Ezekiel. The figure is not a metaphor for God; the text insists he is the glory of the LORD. Heiser's point is that this is not a New Testament invention retrofitted onto the Hebrew Bible. The two-powers reading was already there, and Ezekiel saw it.

If Heiser is right, then Ezekiel 1:26 is one of the hinges of biblical theology. The man-shaped glory on the sapphire throne is the same one who, six centuries later, would stand in a synagogue in Nazareth and read from this prophet's scroll. Exile did not separate Ezekiel from his God because his God was never bound to a building. He came to Babylon on wheels of fire. He still comes — into hospital rooms, into prisons, into the parts of your life that feel furthest from any temple.