Ezekiel 1:4-28
This is probably the oddest story in the bible. Maybe. When a character in the bible sees something he doesn’t understand, he uses his known language at the time to describe it. He cannot use words like ‘rocket ship’, ‘space ship’, ‘time travel’, ‘automobile’, ‘car’ or even ‘shotgun’ and the like because they haven’t been invented yet. In the same way, if an alien landed in your front yard you’d have a hard time describing it and how it got there if it were using technology and appearance you’d never seen before. At the same time, we tend to think that humans of the 580 BC era were ‘simple folk’, walking around in the desert in their moo-moos. They tended to worship the angels as God when they appeared because they didn’t understand the difference between the two. We’d be the same way. When you encounter something you don’t understand you fear it until you trust it. That’s how sheep go.
Ezekiel has seen a wheel before, but probably not a sprocket and gears, so if that was what he was seeing here, he could have just called it all ‘wheels’. At any rate, Ezekiel is seeing both what seem to be spiritual beings AND mechanical parts, which is odd because you wouldn’t think that the spirit needed to show Ezekiel mechanics of the future, nor would a spirit need them to move about.
A very curious passage of the bible indeed. Let me know what you think of it below.