Ezekiel: Ichabod

Growing up Southern Baptist, there was one phrase impressed on me from childhood: the priesthood of all believers. I never knew its source or context, but I understood it to mean no one could tell me what to do. I was free to interpret Scripture as I pleased (as long as it didn’t conflict with the Baptist Faith and Message), and I needed no person to intercede between me and God. I was a free agent.

What I didn’t understand, though, was how Scripture actually defined the role of a true priest. All I knew was what my Baptist culture had reacted against. In that telling, the priest was not only obsolete but also an interloper—someone who had inserted himself into the direct relationship God originally intended for His people. After all, there was no priest in the Garden of Eden. God spoke directly to mankind.

Being my own priest and my own authority was satisfying for many years—until I began to grasp the full meaning of priesthood. It was far more than holding a self-made position of individual authority. A priest bore the sins of the community. He risked his life by entering the Holy of Holies and standing before the living God. He prayed for the people morning and evening while caring for their physical and spiritual needs. He instructed them in holiness and their covenant obligations. He both corrected and comforted. He pleaded for them when they sinned and celebrated with them when they repented. In short, he was more their sacrificial servant than an overbearing master.

If I wanted to claim the title of priest, I had to accept the full responsibility and calling—not just the freedom from authority or the removal of a human intermediary between me and God. I had a responsibility to serve others and bind myself to them.

This is why Ezekiel, himself a priest, cries out against what his fellow priests had become and the tragedy of their fall. This is why the glory departed from the Temple and the people exiled to Babylon. The corrupt shepherds had become wolves who devoured the sheep. Instead of fulfilling their role as protectors and guides, they had become predators. Instead of bearing the sins of the people, they had sinned against both God and the people:

‍“You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick or bound up the injured.

You have not brought back the strays or searched for the lost.

You have ruled them harshly and brutally.

So they were scattered because there was no shepherd,

and when they were scattered they became food for all the wild animals.

My sheep wandered over all the mountains and on every high hill.

They were scattered over the whole earth,

and no one searched or looked for them.”

God always judged the priests more harshly than kings or prophets. When Aaron’s sons offered unauthorized fire before the Lord, they were consumed by that same fire and died. Later, when the wicked sons of Eli abused their priestly roles to seduce vulnerable women and treat the Lord’s offerings with contempt, they died in battle—and their father on hearing the news fell over, broke his neck, and died. Kings were often wicked and prophets frequently false, but it was the priests who were held to the highest standard. They represented the Lord to the people. His reputation was in their hands. More than anyone else, God entrusted them to be the last vestige of holiness in the nation.

There was no single tipping point in Judah’s fall, but if there was, it was the total corruption of the priesthood. Their betrayal was an affront to the honor of God, and a sign that the whole was rotten and beyond redemption. The glory of the Lord rose from the Temple, and again the word Ichabod was declared: “The glory has departed.”

Yes, as Jonathan Edwards preached, it is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God. But perhaps even more terrible is life once God’s Spirit has departed.

C.S. Lewis wrote these words to describe the dissolution of an individual, but they capture perfectly what Ezekiel was saying from exile to his fellow priests who remained for a time in Jerusalem:

‍“The forces which had begun, perhaps years ago, to eat away his humanity had now completed their work. The intoxicated will which had been slowly poisoning the intelligence and the affections had now at last poisoned itself, and the whole psychic organism had fallen to pieces. Only a ghost was left—an everlasting unrest, a crumbling, a ruin, an odor of decay.”

We should be cautious when we declare and promote the priesthood of all believers.

It is a holy—and dangerous—calling.

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Art by AI

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