If you’ve read A Jolly Good Time at the Cemetery, you’ll recall that my brother Doug and I attended Faith Seminary, near Philadelphia. We were there in the mid-seventies of what we called the Twentieth Century (even though every year that I can recall from that century started with the number nineteen---go figure). At the time, a NASA scientist gained some popularity in Christian circles with a book and lecture series advancing a new take on the amazing visions recounted in Ezekiel 1.
If you’re among the 99.9% of Americans who’ve never read Ezekiel (or among the rest who may have read it but have little or no recollection of it) I will hereby enlighten you. In his first chapter, Ezekiel describes a vision of living creatures appearing out of a whirlwind, each with four wings and four faces (of a man, a lion, an ox and an eagle). The creatures “sparkled like the color of burnished bronze,” and they “ran back and forth, in appearance like a flash of lightning.” Then the prophet describes what he calls “a wheel on the earth beside each living creature,” and he says, “The appearance of their workings was, as it were, a wheel in the middle of a wheel.”
Bible scholars have long supposed that Ezekiel experienced a vision of heavenly creatures similar to the Seraphim described in Isaiah 6, or the creatures the Apostle John saw around God’s throne as recorded in Revelation 4, each of whom had one of the four faces Ezekiel described. (The meaning of that business about wheels was anybody’s guess.) But the NASA scientist proposed that Ezekiel may have actually interacted with what we call (or what Hollywood calls) aliens----extraterrestrials, life forms who traveled to earth from another planet in a spacecraft (a wheel in the middle of a wheel) far more advanced than anything yet produced by man. I don’t remember the scientist’s name, but we’ll call him Zulcan.
“Isn’t Zulcan the name of your home planet, Rusty?”
I’ll deal with you later, Pretty Boy.
Our seminary president, Dr. Carl McIntire, must have been impressed with Zulcan’s book or lecture, because he arranged to have him speak at a seminary chapel. His presentation included slides of an artist's renderings of Ezekiel's visions interspersed with grainy images of UFO's captured by pilots or other earthlings. If you’re thinking that the weight of evidence that Ezekiel saw aliens who visited Earth in a spacecraft must be (of necessity) on the light side, you are thinking clearly. Furthermore, if you’re wondering what difference it makes whether Ezekiel saw angels created by God, or other life forms created by God, you’re thinking the way I was thinking in that chapel.
“At least you were thinking, Rusty. The only thing in the mind of your parishioners is usually, “When is this guy gonna stop talking?”
“Parishioners,” that’s a big word for you, Tommy, four syllables. Good boy! Who’s a good boy? Now go get a cookie.
