Stand On Your Feet

 

“Then He said to me, Son of man, stand on your feet that I may speak with you!” Ez. 2:1.

 

Why didn’t Yahweh speak to Ezekiel when Ezekiel was face down on the ground?

 

When Ezekiel sees the manifestation of the glory of Yahweh, he falls on his face and then hears God’s voice commanding him to stand so that God may speak with him. Could not God have spoken to Ezekiel while Ezekiel was face down on the ground?

 

While there may be other facets to this question and answer, let me share what I’ve been pondering for a few days – and that is the mystery of God’s desire for relationship with us, intimate familial relationship – a Father to His sons and daughters, an Elder Son to His brothers and sisters (O Trinitarian mystery!), birthed by the Holy Spirit.

 

Within our familial relationship, we also have the mystery of friendship; Abraham was called “the friend of God,” and Jesus says to His disciples, “I have called you friends, for all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you.”

 

We know that the Father is seeking those who will worship Him in spirit and truth (John 4:23 – 24) and we are indeed called into lives of worship. Abraham built altars of worship to Yahweh on his journeys, and the life of worship and obedience that those altars represented led into an intimate relationship with Yahweh, so intimate that Abraham was called God’s friend. While the word “friend” has lost much of its meaning in our society, to the ancients friendship was sacred, inviolate. Jesus says, “Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you…I have called you friends” (John 15:13 – 15).

 

When we consider that we have been made in the image and likeness of God, perhaps we can approach the idea that we were made for Trinitarian intimacy with God, for a koinonia which transcends our understanding and comprehensive description. As this image and likeness are restored in Jesus Christ, by Jesus Christ, and through Jesus Christ, we begin to discover the wonders of God – as Peter says, it is a joy unspeakable and full of glory. This glory is found in the words, “Stand on your feet that I may speak with you!”

 

How so?

 

Our Father, our Creator-God, desires to commune with us face to face, for He desires deep koinonia with us. How deep and strong is His desire toward us? Not only did He form and make us in His image, but after that image was shattered and marred He came, in Christ, to reconcile us back to Himself, restoring that image in us and inviting us into familial intimacy with Himself.

 

“…that they may all be one, even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us…I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected into one…so that the love with which You have loved Me may be in them, and I in them.” (John 17).

 

In a mysterious and deep holy sense, the perfect and express and glorious Image of God in Christ was sacrificed on the Cross, bearing not only our sins, but our Sin, our identity; so that His image in us might be birthed anew and that a New Creation might come forth from the earth in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ – the Last Adam and the Second Man. His “becoming sin for us” (2 Cor. 5:21) “so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him,” was completed on the Cross, for He cried, “It is finished!”

 

As glorious as the likeness of the glory of God was that Ezekiel saw, a greater glory was coming, for we read in John:

 

“And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth…No one has seen God at any time, the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has made Him known.” (John 1:14, 18).

 

Ezekiel’s call as a prophet of Yahweh was a call in the context of relationship, a call into koinonia with God, conversation with God…and conversation cannot be experienced when one person at the table is looking into a smartphone, or whose face is on the ground.

 

“Son of man, stand on your feet that I may speak with you!”

 

This is what our Father desires.

 

What does this look like in our lives, in Christ, today?