1“You also, son of man, take a tile, and lay it before yourself, and portray on it a city, even Jerusalem. 2Lay siege against it, build forts against it, and cast up a mound against it. Also set camps against it and plant battering rams against it all around. 3Take for yourself an iron pan and set it for a wall of iron between you and the city. Then set your face toward it. It will be besieged, and you shall lay siege against it. This shall be a sign to the house of Israel.
4“Moreover lie on your left side, and lay the iniquity of the house of Israel on it. According to the number of the days that you shall lie on it, you shall bear their iniquity. 5For I have appointed the years of their iniquity to be to you a number of days, even three hundred ninety days. So you shall bear the iniquity of the house of Israel.
6“Again, when you have accomplished these, you shall lie on your right side, and shall bear the iniquity of the house of Judah. I have appointed forty days, each day for a year, to you. 7You shall set your face toward the siege of Jerusalem, with your arm uncovered; and you shall prophesy against it. 8Behold, I put ropes on you, and you shall not turn yourself from one side to the other, until you have accomplished the days of your siege.
9“Take for yourself also wheat, barley, beans, lentils, millet, and spelt, and put them in one vessel. Make bread of it. According to the number of the days that you will lie on your side, even three hundred ninety days, you shall eat of it. 10Your food which you shall eat shall be by weight, twenty shekels a day. From time to time you shall eat it. 11You shall drink water by measure, the sixth part of a hin. From time to time you shall drink. 12You shall eat it as barley cakes, and you shall bake it in their sight with dung that comes out of man.” 13Yahweh said, “Even thus will the children of Israel eat their bread unclean, among the nations where I will drive them.”
14Then I said, “Ah Lord Yahweh! Behold, my soul has not been polluted; for from my youth up even until now I have not eaten of that which dies of itself, or is torn of animals. No abominable meat has come into my mouth!”
15Then he said to me, “Behold, I have given you cow’s dung for man’s dung, and you shall prepare your bread on it.”
16Moreover he said to me, “Son of man, behold, I will break the staff of bread in Jerusalem. They will eat bread by weight, and with fearfulness. They will drink water by measure, and in dismay; 17that they may lack bread and water, be dismayed one with another, and pine away in their iniquity.
Ezekiel would need to remember the vision of heaven when he faced his first task. Of all the things that God has asked his people to do from Noah and the ark to Jeremiah burying his underwear, poor Ezekiel definitely got the short straw. Ezekiel was to become a symbol for the people so that they could recognise themselves in sin.
He was to lie on his left side for 390 days and then lie on his right for 40 days. The left side was a symbol of the weight of the 390 years of Israel’s sins and the right side represented the weight he bore for the 40 years of Judah’s sins. This made Ezekiel quite the spectacle and as the people watched him he was to prophecy about the destruction of Jerusalem. The symbolism did not end there it only got worse, God told him to gather the ingredients together to make small cakes of bread for everyday and cook them over a fire fuelled by dung. This was to serve as a symbol of the starvation and squalor that would come in the siege of Jerusalem. As you can imagine a long discussion took place between Ezekiel and God regarding the fuel element of the symbol. The idea of being a symbol of sin for the people makes us uncomfortable and it certainly was unpleasant for Ezekiel.
Yet God himself became not only a symbol of our sin, but he actually bore it for us in reality. Jesus Christ, God with us, carried guilt on our behalf, took the punishment of our sin and suffered even onto death. Ezekiel was asked to symbolise the weight and consequences of sin. What Jesus did was actually bear our sin and the consequences in our place. When we read the OT we read it in the light of Jesus, seeing that everything points to him. Even in the days of exile God’s plan was still for eternal salvation.