Prophecy You Could See

Ezekiel 4 shows a prophet who preached with actions. God told him to portray Jerusalem on a tile, build tiny forts and camps around it, and set an iron pan between himself and the city. Then he was to set his face toward it. God explained the purpose: This shall be a sign to the house of Israel. The captives in Babylon could watch the message even if they would not listen to it.

The sign went on for months. Ezekiel lay on his left side three hundred ninety days for Israel and on his right side forty days for Judah, each day for a year. During that time he ate mixed-grain bread by weight, twenty shekels a day, and drank a measured amount of water. God said this pictured Jerusalem, where people would eat bread by weight and with fearfulness.

God first told Ezekiel to bake the bread over human waste, a sign of the unclean bread Israel would eat among the nations. Ezekiel protested that from his youth he had never eaten what was unclean, and God allowed cow's dung instead. God listened to his servant's honest concern, yet the warning stayed the same: the staff of bread in Jerusalem would be broken. In the New Testament, Jesus also taught with pictures people could see; Matthew 13:34 says, Jesus spoke all these things in parables to the multitudes.