If the prophets like Jeremiah and Ezekiel are marked by rituals and charades that symbolize what God is doing or about to do with His people, this applies back in time and biblical history to some extent to those rituals and charades that God instituted among His people. When He instructs Moses to instruct the people to perform the ritual of Passover and keep the Feast of Unleavened Bread, they are acting out what God is about to do. They are acting like prophets.
The blood of the Passover lamb will ward off the Destroyer, but it also symbolizes and pictures death, the death of a “son”, the spotless lamb. There will be blood either way; there will be death. And where there is no blood on the doorways, there will be “blood” and great crying inside the houses. Likewise, the leaven is to be removed from the houses of Israel, and the soul who eats any leaven during the feast will be “cut off” from among his people. And in the tenth plague, God will cut off the firstborn from the land of Egypt. The leaven is the strength of the bread, the strength of a people, and the firstborn sons of Egypt are the hope of a new generation, the strength of Egyptian culture.
So Israel as nation enacts the tenth plague before/as it happens like a Jeremiah, like an Ezekiel acting out what the Lord is about to do.
Israel as a nation is a prophet.
Jason Farley says
whoa. I nevert thought about that. The book of leviticus has a bunch of this stuff that is completly obvious as soon as you think about this, and makes "That ye may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom, and sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel" (Luk 22:30) fit with the marriage supper of the lamb in Rev. 19 being the devouring of kings fit with the escaton being brought into the present through the Lord's Supper.
Jason Farley says
Add to that also God preparing a table for David in the midst of his enemies. Man oh man.