It is late summer in the year 592 b.c. and the heavy heat of Babylonian exile presses down upon a displaced people. Ezekiel sits in his own house with the elders of Judah gathered before him on the floor. In a sudden seizure of prophetic sight a form like fire and gleaming metal extends a hand and catches the prophet by a single lock of hair. The Spirit lifts him between earth and heaven and transports his consciousness back to the abandoned bedrock of Jerusalem. He is set down at the entrance of the inner court facing north. Here the Lord commands Ezekiel to look toward a specific altar gate to witness the first structural breach in the covenant. The idol of jealousy stands in the entryway. God then directs the prophet to an obscure hole in the temple wall and commands him to dig through the mortar. Ezekiel excavates the plaster and stone to find a hidden door leading into the dark chambers of the temple complex.
The God of Israel demands that his prophet see what happens behind closed doors when a nation faces an existential threat. Upon entering the dark room Ezekiel discovers seventy elders of the house of Israel standing before the walls. Every man holds a censer and a thick cloud of incense rises to obscure the masonry. Beneath the fragrant smoke the walls are completely covered with scraped and chiseled engravings of creeping things and detestable beasts. The leaders of the nation have retreated into the subterranean dark to worship the crawling animals of the earth. The Lord points to this frantic idolatry and notes that the elders believe they are hidden from his sight. God reveals his own absolute clarity of vision by illuminating the darkest interior architecture of human desperation. The Creator watches as the leaders abandon the covenant to carve ancient superstitions into the very foundation stones of the holy place.
The structural decay of spiritual compromise spreads outward from this secret room. The Lord leads Ezekiel to the north gate where women sit on the pavement weeping for the fertility god Tammuz. Their mourning is a tragic reaction to the geopolitical drought and agricultural decay threatening their survival. They grieve for a foreign deity of dying vegetation while ignoring the living God who sustains the rain. Further inside the inner court Ezekiel sees five and twenty men standing between the porch and the altar. They have turned their backs entirely to the temple of the Lord to face the east and bow down to the rising sun. In a time of profound national terror the people revert to the most primitive elements of the physical world for security. They worship the predictable rising of the sun and the cycles of the harvest rather than trusting the unseen architect of their salvation.
The Lord finally highlights the profound violence this idolatry inflicts upon the social fabric of the city. God declares that the inhabitants have filled the land with violence and continually provoke him to anger by putting the branch to their nose in pagan ritual. When a community abandons its central grounding truth it inevitably turns its tools of worship into weapons of destruction. We carve our most desperate fears into the walls we build for protection. The ancient stone bears the permanent marks of a people trying to secure their own fate through shadows and smoke. The heavy scent of burning incense still clings to the shattered masonry of a broken temple waiting to be swept clean.