Wild Visions

Well, good morning. My name's James Sutton. I am the associate pastor. The bulletin says Jeff Bradford is preaching the same sermon that he preached last week. That's a mistake. It's me. Sorry. Not Jeff.

Prophets Gone Wild Series

We are back in the "Prophets Gone Wild" series, which is our B-side sermon series. Jeff has an A-side sermon series and I'm the B-side sermon series. "Prophets Gone Wild" is meant to be an indication that we do really wild things with the prophets that we shouldn't do. We do bad things with the prophets, and a lot of us Christians do. So I want to look at that. But there's also some really wildly good things that the prophets hold for us. It's a double meaning. We're looking at what we shouldn't do with the prophets and what we should do, which many of us don't know.

We've done two sermons already. "The Wild Call" looked at Isaiah 6—Isaiah's call where he was ushered into the throne room with the coal on his lips. We learned that prophets are not fortune tellers. They're covenant lawyers sent to represent God on covenantal terms to his people. God sends attorneys who predict the future the same way attorneys might predict the future. If you don't pay your rent, you will be evicted. That's a future statement, a prediction. God sends these covenant attorneys to engage his people on the terms of the covenant.

We also saw in Isaiah that the prophetic call is ultimately a call for the prophet to worship. Often in the Old Testament, the prophets were not heeded. It seems it wasn't a goal for them to be listened to or for the nation of Israel to turn. Yet God still sent them out of his faithfulness because he wanted to engage the prophets themselves, their hearts.

A couple weeks ago, we looked at "The Wildlife"—how the prophetic call is a call to embody the message that God gives us, not just to speak it. We looked at Ezekiel who spent more than a year laying on various different sides in front of people to embody the message that he was given. We learned that our message is different. It's a more full and complete message in light of Christ and his work, and we're going to look at that a little bit more today too.

Wild Visions

Today our text is also in Ezekiel. We're going back to Ezekiel chapter 1, and we're going to look at visions. Today's sermon title is "Wild Visions." You can't talk about prophecy without talking about the visions that prophets receive. One of the things we talk about is that we are prophets. So a question Christians often ask is: Where are my visions? I'm supposed to be dreaming dreams and having visions. Joel says it, and Peter says it in Acts 2. So where are my visions?

I think it will be helpful for us to look at Ezekiel 1, which is arguably at least a top three most exotic, wild vision in the Bible. We're going to read Ezekiel 1—or selections of it together. I've patched together selections. This isn't the entire chapter, but it's enough to where we get it. I'd encourage you to look at the whole chapter in your Bibles if you'd like to see all of it, but this gives you the good stuff.

Let's read Ezekiel chapter 1 together:

In the thirteenth year, in the fourth month, on the fifth day of the month, while I was among the exiles by the Chebar Canal, the heavens were opened and I saw visions of God. On the fifth day of the month, it was the fifth year of King Jehoiachin's exile. The word of the Lord came directly to the priest Ezekiel, son of Buzi in the land of the Chaldeans by the Chebar Canal. The Lord's hand was on him there. I looked and there was a whirlwind coming from the north, a huge cloud with fire flashing back and forth and brilliant light all around it. In the center of the fire, there was a gleam like amber. The likeness of four living creatures came from it and this was their appearance. They looked something like a human but each of them had four faces and four wings. — Ezekiel 1

Their faces looked something like the face of a human and each of the four had the face of a lion on the right and a face of an ox on the left and the face of an eagle. Each creature went straight ahead. Wherever the spirit wanted to go, they went without turning as they moved. When I looked at the living creatures, there was one wheel on the ground beside each of the four faced creatures. The appearance of the wheels and their craftsmanship was like the gleam of Beryl and all four had the same likeness. Their appearance and craftsmanship was like a wheel within a wheel and when they moved, they went in any of the four directions without turning as they moved. Their four rims were tall and awe inspiring, completely covered with eyes. Wherever the spirit wanted to go, the creatures went in the direction the spirit was moving. The wheels rose alongside them for the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels. Over the heads of the living creatures, the likeness of an expanse was spread out. It gleamed like awe inspiring crystal, something like a throne with the appearance of lapses loosely was above the expanse over their heads. On the throne, high above was someone who looked like a human. From what seemed to be his waist up, I saw a gleam like amber with what looked like fire enclosing it all around. From what seemed to be his waist down, I also saw what looked like fire. There was a brilliant light all around him. The appearance of the bright light was all like that of a rainbow in a cloud on a rainy day. This was the appearance of the likeness of the Lord's glory and when I saw it, I fell face down and heard a voice speaking.

Lord Jesus, we need you to come and meet with us again. Show us what you would show us from this magnificent vision. Lord, help us to see it as we should in the light of you and your work and your resurrection and help us to be encouraged by it and transformed. And Lord, help us to know what to do as prophets in this modern age and how we should use visions like this one. I pray this in your son's name. Amen.

Three Ways Christians Mishandle Vision

There's three points for this morning. There are three primary ways we go wild in a bad way with this kind of vision. And then I'm going to talk about how we should go wild with these kinds of visions and then encouragement from visions. So what we do wrong, what we do, what we need to do, and how we should be encouraged.

First of all, three ways Christians mishandle vision. And this list is by no means comprehensive. There's all kinds of crazy things that people do with prophecy but one of the things that I see a lot of Christians do is that they tend to act as though God continues to speak covenantally through dreams and visions.

Now we're Presbyterians. We hold to this thing called the Westminster Confession of Faith as our doctrinal standards. One of the things that it says is that God does not continue to speak post the book of Revelation. Now that doesn't mean necessarily that God can't invade your dreams and reveal certain things to you and that doesn't mean that God couldn't in some way speak through a vision. I'm not in any way suggesting that can't happen because I'm not in the business of standing up here and telling God what his business is. He can do any of that. In fact, I know Christians that would say that he has.

But here's what Westminster is saying and I think it faithfully represents scripture in terms of what scripture teaches. God doesn't have any new covenantal business to communicate to us post the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the revelation given to John. The Holy Spirit has come. Jesus has completed our side of the covenant. He has completed God's side of the covenant. He has secured it for us, and that message is the covenantal message that we have as prophets today. There's nothing new, nothing greater, nothing more profound and exciting that nobody has ever heard of. The gospel as it is clearly proclaimed in the New Testament is the message. That is the vision. Moreover, that is what these Old Testament visions were ultimately about, and I'm going to show you that.

But here's what we like to do. We love to take things like this, and we love to look for ways in which it's really about something much smaller than the eternal salvation of all humanity being offered through Christ's resurrection on the cross. Here's an example. I have a friend who read this passage. He had a really pressing decision between whether he should take a job here in Raleigh or move to Kentucky to take a job. He turned on the television and the show Wheel of Fortune was on. It made him think of this passage because of the wheels within the wheels. He decided that this was the way that God was going to decide this because there happened to be two contestants.

One from Raleigh, North Carolina and one from Kentucky. And he decided whoever won Wheel of Fortune would dictate where he should go to work. I'm pleased to say, because I like this guy, that the Raleigh person won and he stayed. He's still here in Raleigh. We had a conversation though afterwards and he said, "Don't you think that's amazing how God gave me that direction?" I said, "Yeah, maybe. I mean, I'm certainly glad for the outcome. But I think that's not what God was getting at with Ezekiel—that we should be looking for wheels to dictate our future. I think there was something much bigger and much more profound, and that is the gospel." We talked about it some more and he said, "Oh, okay. I see that. Yeah." But we do that, right? We like to do things like that.

Here's another way that we can do it. Sometimes we'll look at Old Testament visions and because they're confusing, we try to picture them. In fact, humans have tried to picture this passage artistically over the ages. It's one of the passages of scripture that's captured artists over the ages. I think I've got a couple of examples. Here's the artist Raphael in the fifteen hundreds—his depiction is very classical. William Blake did this drawing of it. It's a little more foreboding and intense. And then a guy named Tim, a digital artist, did this back in 2018. This is my favorite one. I mean, can you imagine those bad boys rolling at you? Amazing.

But what came into your mind as we were reading the passage—what comes into my mind is actually greater than all of that. My mind is overwhelmed. In fact, I did an experiment where I actually uploaded this passage to an AI model and asked it to paint a picture. I'm not going to show it to you because it was nuts. It looked nothing like the passage. It was clear that the AI model just got completely overwhelmed. And that's what we do—but oftentimes we come at this and because it's so mysterious, we think it must have meaning. Let's dig in. But a lot of times when we dig in, we dig in with kind of our presupposed questions or our presupposed answers. That's called eisegesis in the theological realm—where we come to scripture and we read into it what we want.

There's a gentleman who read this passage who was an astronomer of sorts, really into life from other planets. He read this passage and he wrote a book about UFOs and how Ezekiel was seeing some of the earliest UFOs to visit the planet Earth. There's a number of skeptical psychologists who have written on this and talked about how this is really an example of mental health problems in the Jewish community. You have a tendency where your mind goes. Some people go really deep on this.

The Significance of Numbers

For example, if you look at the text, it tells us explicitly that Ezekiel is 30 years old. Remember that number 30. That's not a random number, by the way.

Numbers 4:3 says that priests begin their service at age 30.

So here he is a priest in exile in Babylon with no temple. This is an important year for him. He's thinking about loss. "I've trained my whole life to be a priest and now there's no temple." But remember the number 30—he sees four wheels, four creatures that have four faces and four wings. So if you multiply that out, four by four by four, it equals 64, which happens to be sometimes in Jewish literature the complete dominion of God or representation of the complete dominion of God. So 64—remember that. Thirty and sixty-four are numbers. And God gives Ezekiel this vision which is 28 verses. Amazing. Pure revelation. So remember that number, 28.

So if you take the numbers thirty, sixty-four, 28, you calculate Ezekiel's age, you multiply that times the number 64—which represents God's dominion—and then you add the number 28, you get 1948, which is the year that Israel became a nation. But there's more. If once again you add 28 verses to that number, you get 1976, which was the year I was born.

You can do that. That's not good, usually. And the reason people do that is there are significance to these numbers, and there's significance to them that is important, and we need to look at that. But this kind of mathematical equation of "let me figure out a way to make this add up to the thing that I really want information about" is lessening the vision from what it actually is.

There's a third thing that we like to do with visions like this that I think is probably more common among our crowd: we look at it and we go, "Well, this was for the Jewish community, not for us. We don't understand it."

It's too old and too weird. Maybe Ezekiel understood it, but we'll never understand it. It has nothing to do with us. And in doing so, I think that we actually dismiss the very visions that Joel is talking about.

You have visions that have been given to you encased in scripture that are about the most profound thing that you could ever have a vision about—about our Lord God and his relationship with his people. Now you might have a dream and God may disclose something to you about your life in that dream, or he may even highlight some of scripture in that dream. But it will always come back to these visions, these substantial visions about what God is trying to communicate when he was trying to communicate with his people about his relationship with them.

And that is why almost always you see these visions in the Bible, and immediately after receiving them, the prophets do what? They fall flat on their face and start worshiping because they've received something that is a gift, something that is incredible, something that is powerful and is absolutely terrible. We often just look past these and ignore them and say we don't get visions anymore. Yeah, we do. We get them in the pages of scripture all the time, and they're profound and they're for us.

Luke reminds us in a passage after Jesus is resurrected. He's walking with some of his disciples and he's talking with them, but they don't realize he's Jesus. They just don't see him. They're receiving a vision of the resurrected Christ in the moment, but they don't get it. But as they're walking with him, he starts talking with them about the Old Testament, and he starts opening to them how all of it is really about Jesus. And they go, "Wow, this guy's amazing, whoever he is." And then he's whisked away and they go, "That was Jesus. We knew it because of how he opened the scriptures to us."

You see, actually what Joel was talking about is prophecy becomes more meaningful, more powerful, more complete in our hands because we have the resurrected Christ and his Spirit living within us. These prophecies are ours and they're powerful and they're meant to be used both to encourage and challenge and to direct us.

All Scripture is God-breathed and useful for teaching. — 2 Timothy 3:16

So now it falls to me to move to how we should think about vision. And so now I have to take this passage we just read and prove that it can do all of that. So here we go. Let's start by thinking about the context.

Understanding Ezekiel's Vision

I mentioned that Ezekiel was thirty, he's a priest. He's sitting down by the river reflecting on all of the loss. Remember, Ezekiel was part of the first wave of exiles. There are still people in Jerusalem. In chapter four, the passage we looked at a couple weeks ago, he's going to prophesy the destruction of the temple. But that hasn't happened yet. He's just there away from the temple thinking, "What does my life even mean or matter?" God has either forsaken us or he's been defeated by the Babylonian god. That's how ancient Near Eastern people tended to think. If you got captured and your people got conquered in war, it was their god actually battling your god, and their god won.

Now of course, God had sent prophets for years telling his people, "Hey, I'm gonna let the Babylonians do this because I'm actually sovereign over them. They don't realize it, but I'm actually their God too. So this isn't going to be an indicative of my weakness. It's going to be an indicative of your sin and the judgment that I'm bringing on you for it."

But I don't know what Ezekiel was thinking in the moment. But then all of a sudden God shows up. And like with Isaiah, he shows up with incredible splendor and majesty and power. And here's the bottom line of what this vision is about. The wheels within wheels and the different cherubim—here you go. God shows up in a chariot, a war machine that's mobile. And on top of it is a temple, functionally heaven. A throne guarded by cherubim, and it can go in any direction it wants.

The vision is meant to explain to Ezekiel, "You think I'm in the temple and you think that's the only place I can go. But guess what? I got a war machine, baby, and I'm right here in Babylon and I'm ready to make some noise." I mean, that's kind of what this scene would have envisioned to Ezekiel.

Recently we had an RUF intern who had to fly somewhere. She works at Wilmington and we needed an extra car, and she needed somebody to watch her car. So she said, "Why don't you drop my car off, you take me to the airport, you keep kind of watching my car while I'm gone. You can drive it if you want." And I said, "Thank you. I have a sixteen-year-old who keeps stealing my car. I have to ride a bike to work. So this will be a week where I have a car. Awesome."

But, you know, being the playful lover of video that I am, I used artificial intelligence to make a video.

I took some pictures of her car and I made a little short film about how I took it to a mechanic in Wake Forest and we pimped her ride. We put spinning wheels on it. We painted it UNCW colors. It had a fold out UNCW tailgate. It had leather seats. It had a cappuccino maker in the back. On and on and on this video went. We pimped her ride, and I sent this to her and she immediately knew it was a joke. I do silly things like this, and I think half of the people I do this for are like, why? But I hope she was encouraged.

But that's God showing up in a pimped ride. There's one verse that we skipped actually where it talks about the wheels within the wheels having spinning rims. Literally said that. And they all have eyeballs like a Tesla. They're looking everywhere. He can't get into an accident with this thing. And he's guarded on all sides by these cherubim, these mighty angels that are meant to guard the holy of holies. That's temple imagery, the Garden of Eden, or heaven. Ain't nobody getting through those guys. And they have these fearsome faces that are looking in all directions. They don't miss anything either.

And the wheels within wheels—that's their spheres. We don't even have cars that really do this well. They can just go this way, this way. It doesn't have to do a three point turn. God can go anywhere he wants.

This powerful vision, this incredible vision is meant to reveal two things about God. One, he's mobile. Ezekiel, you're not alone in your exile. I'm here. I can be anywhere like that. I got a pimped chariot. You wouldn't believe it. And secondly, he's ready for war. He can defeat all of the enemies that Ezekiel is facing. These enemies are working for him, in fact, not against him because they fear him so much. He's that powerful. He's that big. That's what this vision is really about.

Ezekiel's vision had a purpose for him. It was meant to show him the greatness and glory of his God and his intimate presence. And it wasn't just for him, it was for his people. It was covenantal. This was a message for the people of God, which means brothers and sisters, partakers of the new covenant, it's meant for us in an even greater way.

Jesus as the Ultimate Fulfillment

If you consider Ezekiel's vision in light of who Jesus Christ is, does Jesus Christ reveal to us the mobility of God? Yes. More intimately than this vision even. He didn't just show up in a war chariot, he came as one of us. He came that intimately. He came in a cradle, not a chariot.

You might say, well, how does that work? He didn't really come to fight. He came to die. But I would submit to you, he did come to fight. He invaded enemy territory, a territory that belonged to Satan, the powers and principalities of this earth. He invaded what was taken from God in order to take it back. He did battle with Satan.

Matthew 4

That was spiritual warfare. That was the most powerful other so-called God going toe to toe with the Lord Jesus Christ and losing. And he died on a cross. Yes. And that appeared to be a defeat, yet he rose from the dead victorious. He defeated death. He took on the punishment for sin. He defeated Satan. He took on our three great enemies and sent them running, limping back.

This vision finds its ultimate fulfillment in Christ Jesus. Do you see how all of the Old Testament visions really pointed to him and ultimately find their fulfillment in him?

Now many of you are saying, yeah, that's great. I know that. I believe that. I can see that—although maybe you're stretching. Maybe you feel like I'm stretching in some ways. But here's the thing: isn't this so much better than looking at this passage and going, what kind of clothes should I wear tomorrow? How do I figure out what is supposed to happen for the next month? This is comfort, encouragement, message, power, vision that is meant to encourage you down to your very soul. And that in and of itself will affect all of those decisions. But you have freedom in what you wear and which job you pick and what's going to happen in the next month.

But wherever you go in the next month, the Lord God in his Holy Spirit, which he has put in you, brothers and sisters in Christ, goes with you. Isn't that encouraging? Even if you make a bad choice, even if you wind up in Babylon, the terrible Babylon, God goes with you.

And more than that, I want to move to my last point. What does this mean for us? How should we think about this? How does this direct us? You know, Jesus, after he rose, he spent some time with his disciples, and he had things to say to them. And actually, before he died, he asked his disciples, "Who do people say I am?" And Peter got it right. Remember that? Peter, the good student, ever eager—he got it right.

He said, "You're the Christ." And Jesus responds, "Good job, Peter. You're the rock. I'm gonna build my church on you and the gates of hell will not stand."

You know, I've always read that passage. I remember several years ago there was a conference here and there was a speaker talking about this passage—specifically Matthew 16. And he was saying, "Isn't it curious that we often think about that passage as though Jesus is saying, 'Hey, we're gonna build the church on your testimony of the gospel, and then none of hell's attacks will work.' Right? Like, we're this fortress and hell is all around us attacking us and we're gonna just defend."

That's how I always have read that passage. But he called us out on that and he says, "Gates don't attack fortresses. So when he says the gates of hell will not stand against you, he's saying we're storming those bad boys. He's talking about a mobile fortress. He's talking about the chariot going into the places of hell, into the Babylons, and taking ground for the kingdom of God."

And then after Jesus dies and rises, right, there's the Great Commission in Matthew 28 where he says:

All authority in heaven and earth has been given unto me. Go therefore, preach the gospel to all nations. — Matthew 28:18-19

That moment also has a very famous part where that's often overlooked—where the disciples worshiped him. They did exactly what Ezekiel does. They worshiped him. But you know what Jesus is saying in that moment? "All authority in heaven and earth has been given unto me. Go therefore, preach the gospel." He's saying, "Dad has given me the keys to the war chariot. Do you wanna go for a ride?" Essentially, he's saying we can go wherever we want. Gates of hell ain't gonna stand up to the war chariot. It's got cherubim and spinning rims with eyes, right? He's literally saying that nothing is going to stop the goodness of God, and you're now a part of that message.

The new covenant—the one that we have been given, the message that we have—not the old covenant message. That covenant has been fulfilled in Christ, and now we have the new one: the gospel. So the visions we have and our calling as prophets is to go and preach the gospel. Not to go and tell people their business about what they should wear. Not to say, "I've received a word from the Lord. I don't know who this is for, but we need to wear nicer clothes to church or whatever." That pales in comparison to the message that we've actually been given and the power that we have been entrusted with—the Holy Spirit—to actually go to the very ends of the earth, to storm the gates of hell, and to preach the gospel. To go into places that are dark and hurting and damaged and shine the light of hope. That's what this vision is about. You can't stop God. He goes everywhere.

A Challenge to the Church

So brothers and sisters, here's my challenge to you. Number one, this should make you fall down in worship a little bit. Isn't it amazing what we've been given? Isn't it amazing the extent to which God has gone to be with us? I'd love for you to spend some time just imagining the war chariot of God. Spend some time in this vision. Draw a picture. See if you can compete with these guys or AI. But allow that to minister to your heart.

Where are the areas of sin where you think God can't go in your life? I bet you've got some. The war chariot can go there. Who are your friends that you've given up on? The war chariot can go there. What are the places of this world or the types of people that you have no hope for? The war chariot can go there. It goes there with you.

You are the herald, the prophet of God. You have been given the Holy Spirit. The power and authority is Christ Jesus, but he sends you as his ministers, as his prophets. That's what visions are like. Can you catch a vision for how God could work in and through you with that power and with that message?

It's my prayer that this series would cause us to spend some time thinking about that and make us more bold in doing that—taking that message of hope to a world that desperately needs it. In the name of the Father and the Spirit and the Son. Amen.

Let's pray. Oh Lord God, you are so powerful, so majestic. This is one of so many passages that talk about your glory. And even the way that it talks about your glory is so respectful. It talks about it seeming like a manifestation of your glory. It's not even a complete picture. Lord, you are so powerful, so beautiful, so majestic.

Lord, we so rarely spend time thinking about that, soaking in it, and yet through Jesus Christ we have access to seeing that glory more fully than even Ezekiel saw it. Lord, would you enthrall our hearts with your glory? Would you meet us in the places where we need to apply the reality of how glorious you are the most? And would you transform us?

Would you help us to move past thinking about prophecy as just information and to start thinking about it as radical formation? And would you use it to change us?

Lord, we long to worship you. We long to see you work. Work through us. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.