[kisstheson]

Dear ones,

We have been discussing some of the OT books which WL rushed through and covered in only a very brief way during his Life Study trainings on the OT books. Some of you might not be aware that a “Life Study of Ezekiel” training was never even held. As he was moving through the OT books in an ever-increasing pace, WL stated his feeling that he had covered the book of Ezekiel in sufficient detail during his famous “Ezekiel Conference” held during the summer of 1971. When it came to time to actually compile the OT Life Studies in hard-bound “Green Book” format right around the time WL went to be with the Lord, some serious consideration had to be given to the question of the Life Study of Ezekiel. The editors at LSM realized that the messages spoken during the 1971 conference were rich in details from those chapters which were the focus of the conference, but as a whole these messages were not adequate to be a “Life Study” on their own. Consequently, some of WL’s speaking on the book of Ezekiel from Taiwan in the 1950’s was included to help “beef up” the content.

Even with this extra content, however, the Life Study of Ezekiel still skims over a huge portion of the book of Ezekiel. The Life Study starts out with twelve messages covering Ezekiel chapter one. There are then three messages covering Ezekiel chapters 2 – 32, three messages covering the “recovery” chapters (chapters 33 – 39), and nine messages covering Ezekiel "millennial visions" in chapters 40 – 48.

As one can imagine, a whole LOT of rich detail in the book of Ezekiel never gets any mention in the Life Study. Ezekiel chapters 38 and 39 are covered in a very brief way in only two paragraphs on the last page of message eighteen. Ezekiel chapters 2 – 32 are covered in only three messages, which means that each of these three messages covers, on average, 10 1/3 chapters from the Bible! That leaves room for only a very brief synopsis of these thirty-one chapters of Ezekiel. According to my unofficial survey, this is the briefest treatment of any portion of the OT in all of the Life Studies.

If one wants a true exposition of all of the book of Ezekiel, covering each and every chapter in some detail, the one that has edified me the most is dear brother Arno C. Gaebelein’s book The Prophet Ezekiel: An Analytical Exposition. Brother Gaebelein (1861 – 1945) was very-well known in his lifetime as one of the strongest proponents of millennialism and dispensationalism. He had a lot of influence on both Cyrus Scofield (well known for the The Scofield Study Bible) and Lewis Sperry Chafer (founder and first president of Dallas Theological Seminary).