Like Isaiah and Daniel, Ezekiel saw God. In Ezekiel’s vision, God was with strange spiritual creatures that were hard for him to describe. The whole experience clearly communicates how transcendent God is.

Ezekiel 1:4-28 The prophet Ezekiel has a vision of four-winged living creatures with a fire in their midst, huge gleaming wheels, and God Himself sitting on a throne above them. He struggled mightily to describe the scene, employing the word “like” twenty-three times in this chapter.

Ezekiel 10:15-22 A little over a year later, Ezekiel was able to process the initial vision he saw. When he had a second one, he could describe it without using so many analogies. Furthermore, he realized that the living creatures were cherubim.

Cherubim were on the lid of the ark of the covenant (Ex 25:17-22), standing fifteen feet tall on either side of the ark (1 Kgs 6:23-28), sewn into the curtain separating the holy of holies (2 Chr 3:14), and on the door and walls in the temple (1 Ki 6:29-35).

Ezekiel 1:1-3 After five years in exile, Ezekiel was now thirty years old—the age he would become ordained and enter his service as a priest in the temple. God showed him a powerful vision far beyond what he would have experienced if he were serving in the temple back in Jerusalem. Ezekiel’s vision communicates that God is transcendent. He’s not like everyone else; he’s extraordinary, other, beyond what we know (Ps 113:5-6; Job 36:26; Isa 40:18-28; 55:8-9).The post Seeing God 3: Transcendence first appeared on Living Hope.