Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Ezekiel · About this commentary
The Wheels and the Likeness on the Throne
Ezekiel 1:15-28
15 Now as I saw the living creatures, behold, there was one wheel on the earth beside the living creatures, for each of the four faces of it. · WEB
The vision builds a throne on wheels and then guards every word of its description, because what is finally seen is a likeness rather than a sight.
The wheels are the strangest engineering in Scripture and the strangest detail is the simplest. Each is a wheel within a wheel, set at right angles, so the whole assembly rolls in any of four directions without being steered. The rims are high and dreadful and full of eyes all around. And the wheels are not driven. The spirit of the living creature was in the wheels, so that when the creatures rose, the wheels rose with them. Sight and motion are joined in one mechanism, and the mechanism goes wherever the spirit goes.
Above the creatures is an expanse like awesome crystal, and above that a throne like sapphire, and on the throne a likeness as the appearance of a man. What the whole assembly amounts to is a throne that travels. That is the vision's argument, delivered in the first chapter, to people who believed God's throne was a room in a building they could no longer reach. A God on wheels is not a diminished God. He is a God who was never confined to the address his people had given him.
The language guarding the top of the vision repays attention. Not a man, but the likeness of a throne, and on it a likeness as the appearance of a man. Not fire but as it were glowing metal. Not glory but the appearance of the likeness of Yahweh's glory. Three or four removes are inserted between the seer and what is seen. The hedging is not vagueness. It is a priest being exact about the limits of what he can report, in a book that is elsewhere precise to the cubit.
The last comparison is the one that changes the color of everything before it. The brightness around the throne is as the appearance of the rainbow that is in the cloud in the day of rain. The rainbow entered Scripture as a sign of a covenant given after a judgment. It was hung in the cloud so that a cloud would never again mean the end of everything Genesis 9:13. It is set here around a throne on its way to judge Jerusalem. And the man's response is the only one available: When I saw it, I fell on my face.
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