Bible Commentaries

Ezekiel 1:24

I. Consider the subject of Christian experience. Can the soul when lifted stay above in that serene element into which it is ascended? Plainly enough, it is possible only as we keep good the faith, or when it ebbs, renew it. And precisely here is the difficulty: that the disciple has gravitations in him still, that pull him all the while downwards, and settle him on his feet before he knows it. And then, as soon as he begins to stand, his wings are folded, even as the flying creatures fold their wings instinctively when they settle on their feet, having for the time no use for them. The moment he begins to rest on mortal supports, and find his hope in mortal good, he ceases in the same degree to live by faith. All unsteadiness, wavering, collapse in Christian living, is caused somehow, in one way or another—for the ways are numberless—by dropping out of the simple first faith, and beginning to rest on supports from below.

II. A great many persons who mean to be, and think they really are, disciples, miss ever going above a service on foot, by not conceiving at all the more ethereal range of experience, into which true faith would lift them. (1) They undertake, for example, to become reformers and philanthropists, and really believe that they are more superlatively, genuinely Christian in it than others who have more to say of experiences. Their element is agitation, seldom any way of appeal that bears a look of Christian peace or repose. (2) Ritualism is another foot-passenger that, having no sufficient conception of faith, has, of course, no better conception of the higher ranges of life prospected by it. (3) There is a class of men outside of the Church, or sometimes in it, who undertake to be religious or Christian, and really suppose they are, because of a certain patronage they give to the Church and the Word.

III. True religion, according to the Christian idea, makes an immensely wide chasm by the faith at which it begins, or in which it is born. It is not any mere playing out of nature on its own level, but it is the lifting up of the man above himself in a transformation that makes him new to himself.

H. Bushnell, Sermons on Living Subjects, p. 55.

References: Ezekiel 1:4.—Bishop Lightfoot, Old Testament Outlines, p. 250. Ezekiel 1:28.—W. M. Statham, Christian World Pulpit, vol. viii., p. 152; J. P. Gledstone, Ibid., vol. xvii., p. 403.