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Encounters with God is a sermon series about the theophanies or divine appearances and how they reveal the stunning character of God and his heart for a world that is lost without him. Ezekiel had an awesome encounter with God as an exile in a foreign land. Ezekiel was transformed from priest to prophet, delivering a message of the power of God and God's word to a people in exile. Recorded on Dec 26, 2021, on Ezekiel 1-3, by Pastor David Parks. Sermon Transcript All year, we’re talking about The Greatness of God. And today, we’re continuing a sermon series called Encounters with God. After this week, we only have two more weeks in this series before we start a new series called The Making of Heaven and Earth from Genesis 1-3. But in the Bible, when God appears to someone it’s known as a theophany or divine appearing. And these encounters are wild stories; God never seems to act how we would expect. But these encounters, including our encounter today between God and the prophet Ezekiel, reveal the stunning character of God, and his heart to save a world that is lost without him. If you have a Bible/app, please open to Ezekiel 1:1. We’ll unpack this as we go. v. 1. Ezekiel 1:1-3 (NIV), “In my thirtieth year, in the fourth month on the fifth day, while I was among the exiles by the Kebar River, the heavens were opened and I saw visions of God. On the fifth of the month—it was the fifth year of the exile of King Jehoiachin—the word of the Lord came to Ezekiel the priest, the son of Buzi, by the Kebar River in the land of the Babylonians. There the hand of the Lord was on him.” Let’s pause here. So this is the brief introduction to the book of Ezekiel; the rest of the book is written in the first person. According to the events listed here, we know that Ezekiel’s encounter with God happened on July 31, 593 BC, and if we understand the opening line as referring to his age at the time, Ezekiel was 30 years old when God called him to be a prophet. This took place about 30 years after Jeremiah’s encounter with God that we looked at last week. It was also about 5 years after Ezekiel, who was a priest from Jerusalem in Judah, had been carried into exile after the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians. [map slide] Here, Ezekiel found himself over 800 miles from home; in the middle of modern Iraq. As an exile, he was a man without a country, a priest without a temple. Daniel was another prophet in Babylon with Ezekiel at this time. As I said last week, it’s hard to overstate just how heartbreakingly traumatic the exile was for the people of Israel. The northern kingdom of Israel had fallen several generations earlier to the Assyrian Empire. Now the southern kingdom of Judah had fallen to the Babylonian Empire. And roughly 90% of the people had either been killed or carried off to a foreign land as a conquered people. It was in this terrible circumstance, it was during these dark days, it was during this calamity that Ezekiel had his theophany, his encounter with God, by the Kebar River in Babylon. v. 4. Ezekiel 1:4-28 (NIV), “I looked, and I saw a windstorm coming out of the north—an immense cloud with flashing lightning and surrounded by brilliant light. The center of the fire looked like glowing metal, and in the fire was what looked like four living creatures. In appearance their form was human, but each of them had four faces and four wings. Their legs were straight; their feet were like those of a calf and gleamed like burnished bronze. Under their wings on their four sides they had human hands. All four of them had faces and wings, and the wings of one touched the wings of another. Each one went straight ahead; they did not turn as they moved. Their faces looked like this: Each of the four had the face of a human being, and on the right side each had the face of a lion, and on the left the face of an ox; each also had the face of an eagle. Such were their faces. They each had two wings spreading out upward,