Living and Dying in Ezekiel

From 1/2/24 – God Be With You

Ezekiel’s portrayal of God uses the terms ‘live’ and ‘die’ to describe what will happen to a righteous man and a wicked man respectively. He also explains in at least two sections of Ezekiel and previously throughout the prophets two additional rules of his divine code:

1. Each individual will bear their own iniquity alone, and not that of others.
2. He who turns from wickedness to righteousness will not die, but live. And vice-versa.

There is a problem in this text that is unaddressed (or, at least the solution is implied rather than explicated) which is the problem of when divine justice is doled out. When does the wicked die? When is the righteous saved from death?

Early Christian doctrine has a simple answer: you live or die at the end of your life, in the form of eternal damnation or eternal life. Further on the caveat includes faith in Jesus Christ, and even later that faith alone is the requirement for heaven: nothing certain can be said about the wicked man and his justice. Hitler awaits us all beyond the pearly gates.

But the early theology of the Old Testament treats death as final, and argues as though God has no stake in the conditions of one who is dead. These portrayals of God hold life in high esteem, when he says that he ‘receives nothing from a corpse’, and that he takes no pleasure in the deaths of the wicked. This early envisioning of God would sooner see the wicked turn than to smite them. Blood stains the land for-ever, and God does not clarify if he means the blood of the wicked or the righteous – he means all blood stains the land.

So if ‘dying’ does not mean literal, mundane and tangible punishment then all that remains is a literary interpretation: to die is to have a functioning body, but to be devoid of God. A wicked man, to others and to himself, might as well be dead.

This understanding of God’s presence as a personification of general righteousness, happiness, altruism, and participation in community lends itself to another phrase that is common in Ezekiel and daily speech, even though it has experienced many alterations since the days of the prophets. “God be with you”.

In Ezekiel 34:30, after describing the return of the Garden of Eden that the new kingdom will bring, God says:

Thus shall they know that I the Lord GOD am with them, and that they, even the house of Israel, are my people, saith the Lord GOD.

Is this taken to mean that in the future kingdom faith will not be necessary? That no-one will be able to deny the presence of God? Only a certain Christian perspective (one which includes salvation, faith and redemption) would be concerned with a world where faith isn’t required and God rules out in the open. Here, the implication might be that everyone who didn’t have faith has been taken away and the “game of faith” is over, such that remaining hidden is no longer required of God. But if with the meaning of life and death above, this idea of a world that is undeniably with God can be described instead as a “world that is truly alive” or “a world where none may die”.

We are all mortal in the undying world, and being transient doesn’t mean having to die. It also doesn’t necessarily require the introduction of heaven and salvation to consolidate what we mean when we say ‘thou shalt live’. A world that lives, a world that is righteous, can be described as being unquestionably with God if all are happy, all are healthy, all are safe. It is the blessing that we intend when we say “God be with you”, shortened over thousands of years to “Goodbye”.