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transported into time, 'the day of the Lord', or to the future heavenly
sphere, he writes, 'I became in spirit'.
The four references made by John find an echo and an explanation in the
statements to a like effect by Ezekiel:
'The spirit lifted me up, and brought me unto the east gate of the
Lord's house' (Ezek. 11:1).
'Afterwards the spirit took me up, and brought me in a vision by the
spirit of God into Chaldea, to them of the captivity. So the vision
that I had seen went up from me' (Ezek. 11:24).
'The hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of
the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of
bones' (Ezek. 37:1).
In Ezekiel 40:2 we have a close parallel to Revelation 21:10:
'In the visions of God brought He me into the land of Israel, and set
me upon a very high mountain, by which was as the frame of a city on
the south' (Ezek. 40:2).
The man with the measuring reed (verse 3), and the command to declare
what he saw (verse 4), also find their parallels in the Revelation. This and
the seven succeeding chapters are punctuated by the words, 'then, and, or
afterwards, he brought me'. Ezekiel 43:5 records similar words. Ezekiel was
not merely taken in vision from one locality to another, but was taken into
the yet future even as was John.
In Ezekiel 8:1 -3 the parallel with the first of Revelation is most
pronounced:
'And it came to pass in the sixth year, in the sixth month, in the
fifth day of the month, as I sat in mine house, and the elders of Judah
sat before me, that the hand of the Lord God fell there upon me. Then
I beheld, and lo a likeness as the appearance of fire: from the
appearance of his loins even downward, fire; and from his loins even
upward, as the appearance of brightness, as the colour of amber. And
he put forth the form of an hand, and took me by a lock of mine head;
and the spirit lifted me up between the earth and the heaven, and
brought me in the visions of God to Jerusalem'.
The description of the wondrous being who appeared to Ezekiel is very
similar to the description of the Lord Who appeared to John (Rev. 1). The
vision is a prelude to a revelation of dark apostasy and the retiring glory
of God. It is so also in the book of the Revelation.
There is no mystery about the meaning of John when he tells us that he
'came to be in the day of the Lord in spirit'. It cannot possibly mean that
he felt in a specially spiritual frame of mind on a Sunday -- such a
suggestion is too trivial to require refuting. There are a great number of
believers who, if they were asked for their Scriptural warrant for calling
the first day of the week 'the Lord's day', would immediately point to
Revelation 1:10 as their authority. Further, many of those who use this
title of the Lord's day abstain from using the word Sun -day because of its
pagan connection (though to be consistent they should follow the Society of