Chapter xxiii, verse 5; “Behold the days come, saith the Lord, that I will raise unto David a righteous branch, and a king shall reign and prosper and shall execute justice and judgment in the earth”—meaning, Christ shall rule and save them.
Chapter xxxi, verse 22: “How long wilt thou go about, O thou backsliding daughter? for the Lord hath created a new thing in the earth. A woman shall compass a man”—meaning, Christ is promised.
These are the only two spots whence any possible allusion can be drawn.
This man is unlike the visionary, romantic dreamer Isaiah, whose imagination and nervous exaltation kept him more or less in a state of excitability and carried him into regions of dreamland where his hopes and wishes were planted. Jeremiah writes up the historical occurrences; passes judgment on his own people and on the nations his people had to struggle with, bewailing their corruption, wickedness, wretchedness, misery. He never dreams of Christ or Christianity, nor does he in any part allude to Christ. He also, like Isaiah, wrote and acted in accordance with the times he lived in. He was a steadfast friend to his disciple Baruch. His lamentations describing the miserable state of Jerusalem, bewailing its calamities, are perfectly human, and perfectly natural for a patriot and a poet of his time.
Ezekiel was in Chaldea among the captives about 590 B.C. This man is also largely endowed with a prolific imagination; he is a visionary man. He adopts a new method of talking; when the word of the Lord comes to him, “Son of Man” is the manner in which he is addressed. Jeremiah uses the expression, “Sayeth the Lord,” or “the word to Jeremiah from the Lord saying”——Isaiah uses, “Thus saith the Lord.”
Ezekiel wrote forty-eight chapters. The following are interpreted to mean Christ:
Chapter xxxiv, verse 20: “Therefore thus saith the Lord God unto them: Behold I, even I, will judge between the fat cattle and between the lean cattle”—meaning, the kingdom of Christ.
Chapter xxxvi, verse 25: “Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you; and ye shall be clean; from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you”—meaning, the blessings of Christ’s kingdom.
Chapter xxxvii, verse 20: “And the sticks whereon thou writest shall be in thine hand before their eyes”—meaning, the promises of Christ’s kingdom.
The political methods of governing nations which had their origin in the ages of barbarism, ignorance, and brutality, left the rotten remnants to construct upon them a system of rules for the guidance of the masses, to control, subjugate, and restrain their mental faculties, the development and advancement of their understanding, and to perpetuate the suppression of their higher intellectual powers.