When the Bad News is Good News: Ezekiel 33:21-22
Introduction: The Necessity of a Hard Word
We live in an age that is allergic to bad news. Our entire culture is a frantic, and frankly pathetic, attempt to construct a padded room where no sharp realities can intrude. We want consequence free sin. We want judgment free rebellion. We want a God who is a celestial therapist, endlessly affirming our choices, no matter how demented. We want to be told that everything is fine, that we are fine, that our trajectory is fine, even as we are hurtling toward a cliff at a thousand miles an hour.
But the God of the Bible is not a therapist; He is a physician. And a good physician does not lie to his patient. He does not look at a gangrenous leg and say, "You know, that's just your truth. Let's affirm that leg." No, he tells the patient the hard truth: that leg has to come off, or you will die. The bad news is the necessary prelude to the good news. The diagnosis must precede the cure. Judgment must come before restoration.
For years, the prophet Ezekiel had been delivering this kind of hard news to the exiles in Babylon. He was God's watchman, and his message was relentless: Jerusalem, the holy city, the city of David, the city of the Temple, is going to fall. It will be struck down because of your covenant infidelity, your high-handed idolatry, your rank injustice. And for years, the people refused to believe it. They were in denial, clinging to a false hope, a sentimental theology that assumed God would never judge His own people so severely. They thought their status as the chosen people was a get-out-of-jail-free card.
But God's covenant has blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience. And when God's people decide they want to be just like the pagan nations, God will oblige them by giving them the same judgments He gives to the pagan nations. In our passage today, the hard news finally arrives. The word Ezekiel had been preaching, the word everyone had been dismissing, is vindicated in the most terrible way. And in this moment of catastrophic loss, something remarkable happens. The prophet, who had been silenced in certain ways, is finally given his full voice back. This is because the bad news, once it is accepted, clears the ground for the good news of a genuine restoration.
The Text
Now it happened in the twelfth year of our exile, on the fifth of the tenth month, that those who escaped from Jerusalem came to me, saying, “The city has been struck down.” Now the hand of Yahweh had been upon me in the evening, before those who escaped came. And He opened my mouth at the time they came to me in the morning; so my mouth was opened, and I was no longer mute.
(Ezekiel 33:21-22 LSB)
The Awful News Arrives (v. 21)
We begin with the arrival of the messenger.
"Now it happened in the twelfth year of our exile, on the fifth of the tenth month, that those who escaped from Jerusalem came to me, saying, 'The city has been struck down.'" (Ezekiel 33:21)
Notice the precision of the date. Biblical history is not "once upon a time" mythology. It is rooted in real space and real time. This is a specific day, about a year and a half after the final siege of Jerusalem began. It would have taken a fugitive several months to make the arduous journey from the ruins of Judah to the exile communities in Babylon. And his message is brutally simple: "The city has been struck down."
This was the end of their world. It was the collapse of their entire theological and national identity. The Temple was gone. The Davidic monarchy was gone. The land was lost. Everything they had trusted in, apart from God Himself, was now a pile of rubble. This was a national trauma on a scale we can scarcely imagine. It was their 9/11, their civil war, and their cultural revolution all rolled into one catastrophic event.
But for Ezekiel, this news was not a surprise. It was a vindication. For over seven years, God had been speaking this word through him, and the people had treated him like a lunatic, a killjoy, a traitor. They preferred the syrupy lies of the false prophets who promised "peace, peace," when there was no peace. But God's Word is not subject to our preferences. Reality is what it is because God is who He is. And when our delusions collide with God's reality, it is not reality that shatters.
This is a permanent lesson for the church. We are not called to be popular; we are called to be faithful. We are not called to tell people what they want to hear; we are called to tell them what God has said. And in an age of compromise, an age that wants to redefine marriage, gender, and the very nature of sin and salvation, the church must be the watchman on the wall. We must declare that there is a coming judgment, that sin has consequences, and that the city of man, with all its proud towers of rebellion, will be struck down. And when it is, the world will not be surprised that the church was right; it will be surprised that the church believed it all along.
The Sovereign Preparation (v. 22a)
Before the messenger arrives with the news, God is already at work preparing his prophet.
"Now the hand of Yahweh had been upon me in the evening, before those who escaped came." (Ezekiel 33:22a)
This phrase, "the hand of Yahweh," signifies the powerful, personal, and sometimes overwhelming presence of God upon His servant. God does not react to world events; He orchestrates them. He is always ahead of the news cycle. The messenger is still trudging along the road, days away, but God is already in Babylon, in the evening, preparing Ezekiel for the morning's encounter.
This is a profound comfort. God is never caught off guard. There are no emergencies in heaven. The fall of Jerusalem was not a tragic accident that God had to scramble to fix. It was a severe and necessary part of His sovereign, covenantal plan. He was judging His people for their sin in order to purify them for a future restoration. As Joseph said to his brothers, "You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good" (Genesis 50:20). The same is true here. Nebuchadnezzar meant it for imperial conquest, but God meant it for covenantal discipline.
For us, this means that no matter what "bad news" arrives at our door, the hand of Yahweh was there the evening before. He is already working in the midst of our trials, our losses, and our griefs, preparing us, strengthening us, and fitting us for the next stage of His purpose. He is sovereign over the diagnosis, and He is sovereign over the cure.
The Prophet's Mouth Opened (v. 22b)
The climax of this small scene is the divine restoration of Ezekiel's speech.
"And He opened my mouth at the time they came to me in the morning; so my mouth was opened, and I was no longer mute." (Ezekiel 33:22b)
This refers back to an earlier moment in Ezekiel's ministry. Back in chapter 24, on the very day the siege of Jerusalem began, God had told Ezekiel, "you shall be mute... so you will be a sign to them" (Ezekiel 24:27). This wasn't a total muteness, but a restriction. He was only to speak the specific words of judgment God gave him. He was not free to engage in ordinary conversation or offer words of comfort. His silence was a sermon. It was a living parable of the dreadful reality that there was nothing left to say to a people bent on destruction. The time for debate was over. The time for argument was over. All that remained was the grim finality of judgment.
But now, the judgment has fallen. The hard word has been fulfilled. And at the exact moment the fugitive arrives, God opens Ezekiel's mouth. Why now? Because the entire basis for the conversation has changed. As long as the people were living in denial, there was nothing to talk about. But now that their false hopes have been pulverized, now that they are sitting in the ashes of their rebellion, they are finally ready to listen. The deafness has been cured by disaster.
The opening of Ezekiel's mouth signals a pivotal shift in the book. The first 32 chapters were overwhelmingly focused on judgment. But from this point forward, the message turns to hope. Now that the bad news has done its work, the prophet is freed to speak of restoration, of new life, of the valley of dry bones, of the new temple, and of the good shepherd who will come to gather His scattered flock.
The Gospel in the Rubble
This pattern of judgment and restoration, of silence and speech, is a pattern that finds its ultimate fulfillment in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Like the inhabitants of Jerusalem, all of humanity is in a state of rebellion. We have broken God's covenant. We have built our own idolatrous temples in the city of man. And the word of God comes to us, like it came through Ezekiel, declaring that our city is doomed. "The wages of sin is death" (Romans 6:23). Judgment is coming. This is the hard word, the bad news of the law, and our modern world wants to pretend it isn't true.
And for a time, God was, in a manner of speaking, silent. For four hundred years between the Old and New Testaments, there was no prophetic word from the Lord. It was a silence of judgment, as the world waited under the sentence of condemnation.
But then, at the right time, God broke the silence. He opened His mouth and spoke His final Word into the world, the Lord Jesus Christ (Hebrews 1:1-2). But for that Word to bring life, He first had to endure the ultimate judgment. On the cross, Jesus became the city of Jerusalem. He took the full force of God's covenant curse upon Himself. The city was "struck down" in Him. He was forsaken, silenced in the muteness of death.
But on the third day, God's hand was upon Him in the tomb. And in the morning, the stone was rolled away, and God opened His mouth again in the resurrection. And because Christ was struck down for us, the message is no longer one of condemnation, but of glorious hope. Because the bad news was fully realized at the cross, the good news can now be freely proclaimed to all nations.
God's word to us now is not the restricted word of Ezekiel, but the unhindered gospel of grace. He has opened our mouths, just as he opened Ezekiel's. We are no longer mute. We are commissioned to go into the rubble of a fallen world, to find people sitting in the ashes of their sin and failure, and to tell them that because the city of God's own Son was struck down, a new and better city, the New Jerusalem, has come. And its gates are open to all who will repent and believe.