A Diamond for a Forehead
Introduction: The Crisis of Cowardice
We live in an age where the Christian ministry is being fundamentally redefined, not by the Word of God, but by the spirit of the age. The modern pastor is encouraged to be many things: a sensitive therapist, a savvy CEO, a relational guru, a winsome communicator. He is taught to poll the audience, to discover their felt needs, to find out what it is they want to hear, and then to craft a message that will scratch them where they itch. The cardinal sin of the modern pulpit is to be offensive. The chief virtue is to be affirming. The goal is not faithfulness, but marketability. We have exchanged the prophetic office for a public relations department.
Into this gelatinous mess, the commission of Ezekiel comes like a bucket of ice water to the face. God is commissioning a prophet, a messenger, a man to speak His words. And the central concern of the commission is not how to make the message palatable, but how to make the messenger durable. God is not sending Ezekiel to a focus group to test his material. He is sending him to a rebellious house, a people with hard foreheads and stiff hearts. And because the audience is hard, the messenger must be made harder.
This passage is a divine corrective to our modern ministerial malfeasance. It is God's job description for a herald, and it bears no resemblance to what is being taught in most of our seminaries. This is not a marketing seminar; this is a wartime briefing. God tells his man what the mission is, what the opposition will be like, what equipment will be issued, and what constitutes success. And what constitutes success, as we shall see, has nothing whatever to do with whether the audience applauds or not. This is God's cure for clerical cowardice.
The Text
Then He said to me, “Son of man, go now, come to the house of Israel, and you shall speak with My words to them. For you are not being sent to a people of unintelligible lips or a difficult tongue, but to the house of Israel, nor to many peoples of unintelligible lips or a difficult tongue, whose words you cannot understand. But I have sent you to them who should listen to you; yet the house of Israel will not be willing to listen to you, since they are not willing to listen to Me. Surely the whole house of Israel is stubborn with a strong forehead and stiff heart. Behold, I have made your face as strong as their faces and your forehead as strong as their foreheads. Like diamond stronger than flint I have made your forehead. Do not be afraid of them or be dismayed before them, though they are a rebellious house.” Moreover, He said to me, “Son of man, take into your heart all My words which I will speak to you and listen with your ears. And go now, come to the exiles, to the sons of your people, and you shall speak to them and say to them, whether they listen or whether they refuse, ‘Thus says Lord Yahweh.’ ”
(Ezekiel 3:4-11 LSB)
The Problem is Moral, Not Technical (vv. 4-6)
God begins by clarifying the nature of the task. He removes a common excuse before it can even be offered.
"Then He said to me, 'Son of man, go now, come to the house of Israel, and you shall speak with My words to them. For you are not being sent to a people of unintelligible lips or a difficult tongue, but to the house of Israel, nor to many peoples of unintelligible lips or a difficult tongue, whose words you cannot understand. But I have sent you to them who should listen to you;'" (Ezekiel 3:4-6 LSB)
The first command is simple and direct: "speak with My words to them." The prophet is a herald, not an author. He is a messenger, not a philosopher. His authority derives entirely from the fact that the words are not his own. This is the foundation of all true ministry. If a man gets up to speak his own thoughts, his own opinions, his own therapeutic advice, he is a charlatan. The only power is in the Word of God. The first qualification for a messenger is that he delivers the mail as written.
But then God anticipates the excuse. Ezekiel might be tempted to think that if the people reject the message, it must be a communication problem. Perhaps the language is too difficult. Perhaps the concepts are too foreign. Our modern church is obsessed with this excuse. We are constantly told that we need to "translate" the gospel into the language of the culture, to make it more accessible, to remove the offensive bits. God demolishes this. He says the problem is not that they are a foreign people with a difficult tongue. Ezekiel is being sent to his own kin, the house of Israel. They will understand every single word he says.
The problem is never, at its root, intellectual. It is not a failure of comprehension. The unbeliever's problem is not that he cannot understand the gospel; it is that he hates it. As Paul says in Romans 1, men suppress the truth in unrighteousness. They hold it down. They know God, but they refuse to honor Him. The issue is rebellion, not confusion. This is foundational. If you get this wrong, your entire approach to ministry will be wrong. You will spend all your time trying to solve a communication problem that doesn't exist, while ignoring the moral rebellion that does.
The True Point of Rejection (v. 7)
God then gives Ezekiel the unvarnished, brutal truth about the reception he can expect.
"yet the house of Israel will not be willing to listen to you, since they are not willing to listen to Me. Surely the whole house of Israel is stubborn with a strong forehead and stiff heart." (Ezekiel 3:7 LSB)
This verse should be inscribed on the wall of every pastor's study. It is one of the most liberating verses in all of Scripture for a faithful minister. God tells Ezekiel plainly that the people will not listen to him. And then He gives the reason, and the reason is everything. They will not listen to you because they will not listen to Me. The rejection is not personal. It is theological. They are not rejecting Ezekiel the man; they are rejecting the God who sent him.
This reality completely reframes our understanding of ministerial success. In our pragmatic age, success is measured by numbers. Bums on seats, dollars in the plate, hands in the air. If people are leaving your church, you must be doing something wrong. If they are offended, you must be too harsh. But God says the opposite. He says, "They will not be willing to listen." Their rejection is a given. Why? Because they are stubborn, literally "hard of forehead and stiff of heart." They are in active rebellion against their Maker.
Therefore, faithfulness is the only metric of success. The minister's job is not to get results. His job is to deliver the message. God is sovereign over the results. This frees the preacher from the tyranny of public opinion. He is no longer a performer trying to please a crowd, but an ambassador delivering a message from a King. Whether the recipients of the message receive it or reject it is their business, and God's. The messenger's only business is to be faithful.
The Divine Fortification (vv. 8-9)
Because God is sending His man into a hard place, He provides him with divine hardware for the task.
"Behold, I have made your face as strong as their faces and your forehead as strong as their foreheads. Like diamond stronger than flint I have made your forehead. Do not be afraid of them or be dismayed before them, though they are a rebellious house." (Ezekiel 3:8-9 LSB)
This is glorious. God does not just command Ezekiel to be tough; He makes him tough. The opposition has a strong forehead of rebellion, so God gives His prophet a stronger forehead of faithfulness. The Hebrew word for diamond here is shamir, which refers to a stone of exceptional hardness, used for engraving other rocks. God is saying, "Their rebellious obstinacy is like flint. I am going to make your faithful resolve like a diamond. You will be harder than they are."
This is a supernatural gift. This is the grace of God for the man on the front lines. Courage is not something we muster up on our own. It is something God works in us. When we are called to a difficult task, we are not called to do it in our own strength. God provides the spiritual armor, the spiritual resolve, the diamond forehead. This is why the command, "Do not be afraid of them," is not a bare exhortation. It is a command based on a promise. Do not be afraid, because I have equipped you. Do not be dismayed by their hard faces, because I have made your face harder.
This is the antithesis of the modern therapeutic approach to ministry, which would tell Ezekiel to practice self-care and avoid confrontational situations that might cause him anxiety. God's approach is to forge his servant into a weapon of war, fit for the battle he is entering.
The Simple Commission (vv. 10-11)
Finally, God summarizes the entire mission in two simple commands.
"Moreover, He said to me, 'Son of man, take into your heart all My words which I will speak to you and listen with your ears. And go now, come to the exiles, to the sons of your people, and you shall speak to them and say to them, whether they listen or whether they refuse, ‘Thus says Lord Yahweh.’ '" (Ezekiel 3:10-11 LSB)
The first part of the commission is internal. "Take into your heart all My words." The messenger must first be a receiver. He cannot proclaim a word that has not first gripped him. He must be saturated in the Scriptures. The Word of God must dwell in him richly before it can come out of him powerfully. A man who is not mastered by the Word has no business trying to preach it.
The second part is external. "And go now... and you shall speak to them." After internalizing the message, he must externalize it. He must go and speak. And what is the substance of his message? Not his own ideas, not a clever speech, but simply, "Thus says Lord Yahweh." He is to be a voice, a conduit for the divine declaration.
And here, God repeats the most liberating phrase in the whole commission: "whether they listen or whether they refuse." God puts the outcome entirely outside the prophet's responsibility. The prophet's job is to go, to speak, and to declare what God has said. That is it. That is the whole job. Success is faithful proclamation. The results are in God's hands. This is the charter for every faithful ministry. We are called to plant and to water, but it is God who gives the increase. Our task is obedience, not outcomes.
Conclusion: Hard Foreheads for a Hard Age
This commission to Ezekiel is a commission for the church in every age, and especially in our own. We have been sent to a rebellious house. Our culture has a forehead of flint, set hard against the claims of Jesus Christ. They are not confused; they are defiant. They will not listen to us because they will not listen to the God who sent us.
What then shall we do? Shall we retreat? Shall we compromise? Shall we try to invent a new, friendlier gospel that they might find more appealing? God forbid. We are to do what Ezekiel was told to do. First, we are to take God's Word into our own hearts until we are full of it. We must believe it, cherish it, and be mastered by it. We cannot confront a hard age with a soft faith.
And second, we are to trust God to equip us for the confrontation. He has promised to give us a face as strong as their faces, a forehead of diamond harder than their flint. He does not call us to cowardice, but to courage, a courage that He Himself provides by His grace. We are to stand before this rebellious house, unafraid and undismayed, and we are to open our mouths and declare, with all simplicity and authority, "Thus says the Lord Yahweh."
We do this whether they listen or whether they refuse, knowing that our labor in the Lord is not in vain. And we do this with a rugged, postmillennial optimism. For this faithful, hard-headed proclamation of the gospel is the very instrument that Christ is using to subdue His enemies. He is building His church, and the gates of Hell, with all their flinty foreheads, will not prevail against it. This is how the kingdom advances. Not through slick marketing, but through the diamond-hard truth of God, proclaimed by diamond-hard men whom God Himself has fortified.