The Message of Ezekiel, by Christopher J. H. Wright

So I was called to New York on business. And I like to read on the plane. I just can’t make myself watch movies in an airplane for some reason. And it’s just too uncomfortable to sleep.

It was short notice, and so I picked up what would surely be the most unreadable book I’ve recently received — a commentary on Ezekiel.

Worse than that, the commentary is 368 pages long and doesn’t include the text of Ezekiel. I found myself wandering the newsstands at the airport looking for something more readable. After all, this was supposed to be a reference book — not a book to be read cover to cover like a novel.

But nothing in the newsstand appealed me. Maybe that’s because I don’t find much appealing in the news. Maybe.

And so, I sat in the plane reading The Message of Ezekiel: A New Heart and a New Spirit by Christopher J. H. Wright. And I loved it. Every word. It was like … reading a novel.

Indeed, Wright may be the most readable author among commentators I’ve ever read. He has this incredible gift to take a very challenging text and to explain its depths and difficulties in brilliant prose. I was just blown away. He made Ezekiel understandable, meaningful, and powerful — and enjoyable to read about. Wow …

In my own writing, I find myself constantly referring back to Ezekiel, but I’ve never had the chance to study the book on a standalone basis — and what a wild and crazy book it is. It’s an overlooked treasure — but it takes a rarely gifted writer like Wright to bring out the genius of Ezekiel in all its glory.

Speaking of Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones, Wright writes,

Television pictures of the aftermath of war are the nearest we can get to the horror of what confronted Ezekiel in his vision. Unearthed mass graves, bodies in gas chambers and concentration camps, piles of skulls and skeletons, severed limbs after street explosions, bloated corpses after earthquakes or tidal waves — all modern images which fill us with revulsion and shudder of witnessing human death on a mass scale. None of these, of course, is quite what Ezekiel saw, but the impact of a whole vast plain covered in unburied human bones must have been equally appalling. As a priest, he was not allowed to touch a human corpse. Yet here the hand of God actually takes him for a walk, to and fro, through the grisly scene, until he can see for himself two things about these bones. First, that there were a great many of them. Later, we learn that there were enough to constitute a vast army (10), so this really is the remains of a catastrophic battle in which thousands of people have died. Second, that they were very dry — people long dead. Scavenging animals and birds have done their job and sun had baked and bleached them. Not only is there no trace of life; there is no trace of the recognizable individuals they once were on this earth. Just dry bones in a valley.

(Emphasis in original).

Want to know what happens next? Wright is a story teller commenting on a book of stories. And he’s brilliant.

Buy the book — and unlike most commentaries we buy, read it cover to cover.