The Book Of Ezekiel

Alexander Maclaren’s The Book Of Ezekiel is a collection of five expository sermons on Ezekiel 8:12, 12:27, 36:25–38, 37:1–14, and 47:1. It is not a verse-by-verse commentary on the whole prophecy. Instead, Maclaren selects five visions and promises and develops their spiritual force for the conscience, the life of God’s people, and the believer’s response to God. The sequence moves from hidden idolatry and the postponement of God’s warning to cleansing, inward renewal, the life-giving work of the Spirit, Israel’s restoration, and blessing flowing from God’s presence.

“Chambers of Imagery,” from Ezekiel 8:12, begins with Ezekiel’s vision of concealed idolatry connected with the Jerusalem temple. Maclaren turns the image toward the hidden interior life. Memory, imagination, desire, ambition, appetite, and private loyalties can become a secret shrine even while outward religion remains respectable. The sermon asks readers what occupies the inner chambers of the heart, insists that God sees what is concealed from other people, and brings the exposing light of God into relation with cleansing, forgiveness, repentance, and Christ.

Ezekiel 12:27 addresses a different way of resisting revelation. Ezekiel’s hearers neutralize the prophetic warning by assuming that its fulfillment lies far in the future. Maclaren treats this as a pattern of postponing the claims of God. Future judgment, eternity, and the consequences of present choices are not remote subjects with no bearing on present life. His application presses the reader to respond now rather than use delay as an excuse for neglecting the gospel or the moral force of God’s word.

The sermon on Ezekiel 36:25–38 develops God’s promise to cleanse and restore His people. Maclaren begins with Israel’s restoration but draws out the spiritual principles of the passage: divine forgiveness, cleansing from defilement, a new heart, a new spirit, the gift of God’s Spirit, obedience, communion with God, and a holy people produced by divine action. External repair is insufficient without inward renewal. The passage therefore becomes a major source for the book’s teaching on spiritual transformation and the Holy Spirit.

Ezekiel 37:1–14 receives equally substantial treatment. Maclaren recognizes the valley of dry bones first as a picture of Israel’s national restoration and then applies it to spiritual death and the necessity of the Spirit’s life-giving work. The bones can be gathered and organized, but structure alone cannot create life; breath must come from God. Importantly, Maclaren does not use the vision as a direct proof of bodily resurrection. His emphasis is on national restoration and spiritual quickening—how what is dead and powerless becomes living through God’s Spirit.

The final sermon, on Ezekiel 47:1, follows the river flowing from the temple. Because the stream proceeds from the place of God’s dwelling, Maclaren treats it as a picture of spiritual blessing that has its source in God and grows as it goes. The deepening water, its life-giving effect, and its movement into barren places become pictures of grace, salvation, spiritual growth, and divine life spreading outward. The river gathers the collection’s movement toward restoration: God not only exposes corruption and promises cleansing but becomes the source of life that makes barren places fruitful.

The volume addresses readers studying Ezekiel as well as readers asking what God sees in the hidden life, why people postpone responding to spiritual truth, what the promise of a new heart and Spirit means, how Ezekiel 37 relates to Israel and spiritual life, why organization cannot substitute for the Spirit, and what the river from the temple represents. Its strength lies in close preaching from these five texts and in connecting Ezekiel’s prophetic images with repentance, cleansing, present obedience, the Holy Spirit, restoration, and life from God.