Ezekiel 3:3

There should be no more difficulty in understanding the prophet eating the book than in Jeremiah eating the words of the Lord. To eat is to make the thing one's own, to incorporate it into one's being.

And now the prophet is instructed to make thoroughly his own that which he is commissioned to proclaim among them.

In Ezekiel's case we are told that when he ate the book, it was in his mouth as sweet as honey. The same was true for John, but with him it is added that as soon as he had eaten, his stomach was bitter. This difference probably disappears once you look at the exact wording used of Ezekiel. God told him to feed his belly and to fill his stomach with the scroll given to him, but he only tells us the effect of its taste in his mouth. Put the two cases together and three things stand out — eating, digesting, and the effect of digesting.

Most of us know from experience that digesting the truth we have really received is often slow work. The truth is never effective in us, or through us, until we have digested it... For that we need to be alone in the presence of God.

What was open to view was simply matter for lamentation, mourning and woe. Yet in the prophet's mouth there was the taste of honey for sweetness. This fits what we have seen throughout the vision: the judgment does not stand alone. The glory of the Lord is revealed in it, and the outcome is the carrying out of the purposes in His heart — purposes that display His heart.

Such is the double action of God's word in judgment. Looking at God and His glory, the Psalmist says, "The rules of the LORD are true, and righteous altogether. More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold; sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb." But when you look at man, the effect is sadly the opposite. His guilt and rebellion turn the sweet into bitter, the food into poison, life into death.

The Bible — and this applies more widely — is not a book of information to collect and then repeat. It is the voice of God to the soul that reads it. You have to hear it for yourself before you can rightly pass on what you have heard. So a well-known servant of the Lord once said that he never read a chapter in the Bible in order to speak from it. When someone asked him why he read it, he said it was for his own profit and building up... If Ezekiel and John are examples — and others could be added — we are not qualified to be the living channels of divine truth until we have made it our own.

He was commanded to eat the little book that was in the angel's hand — that is, to meditate on it, to make it thoroughly his own. Someone has said that meditation, in these busy days of ours, is a lost art... For it is not only that God would have John and Ezekiel eat the book; He wants you to eat it likewise.