Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 169 · June 18
Stand Upon Thy Feet
“And he said unto me, Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak unto thee.”
Ezekiel was trained for a building he would never work in. When the word of the LORD comes to him he is a priest, the son of Buzi, in the land of the Chaldeans by the river Chebar, in the fifth year of king Jehoiachin’s captivity. The temple is still standing, hundreds of miles west.
The vision that opens the book ends with him on the ground. And when I saw it, I fell upon my face, and I heard a voice of one that spake. Then the voice: Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak unto thee.
He cannot. Read the next line and see who does it: And the spirit entered into me when he spake unto me, and set me upon my feet. The command and the strength arrive in one sentence, and the second half is the part he had no hand in.
It goes like this every time somebody in Scripture goes down in front of God. Daniel is in a deep sleep on my face, and my face toward the ground, and a hand touches him and sets him on his knees before he is told to stand upright. John on Patmos falls at his feet as dead, and the first movement is not his: he laid his right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not. Paul hears an order with a reason attached: rise, and stand upon thy feet: for I have appeared unto thee for this purpose. Joshua, face down after Ai, gets it blunt: Get thee up; wherefore liest thou thus upon thy face?
Son of man is what he is called more than ninety times in this book, and it means mortal. He is stood up and named a creature in one breath, and the errand is a rebellious nation that hath rebelled against me.
He goes back to that riverbank later and falls on his face again, and the spirit sets him on his feet a second time. The ground by the Chebar is where a priest with no temple learned that getting up was never going to be his part to supply.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 169 is No Weapon Shall Prosper (Isaiah 54:17).