Ezekiel 3:14

14. I went in bitterness, in the heat of my spirit The taste that was at first sweet (Ezekiel 3:3) is now bitter. (Compare Revelation 10:9-10; Matthew 26:41.) The bitterness is an angry bitterness (Judges 18:25; 2 Samuel 17:8), and the heat of spirit is the hotness of wrath. (See notes Ezekiel 2:8; Ezekiel 3:10-11.) Almost all expositors believe this to have been fury against the sins which he was about to condemn (compare Jeremiah 6:11); but his spirit toward his countrymen in other passages, taken in connection with all the circumstances of his call and his refusal to speak until again and again God had appeared to him and warned him not to rebel, declaring that if he did not warn the people their blood would be upon his own head (Ezekiel 3:20), added to the repeated statement that he only succeeded finally in doing as he was commanded because the hand of the Lord was heavy upon him, leads us to the conclusion that this bitterness and heat of spirit was caused by the prophet’s unwillingness to enter upon the work to which God called him. (Compare Jonah 1:3; Jonah 4:1.) The utter inadequacy of the usual explanation is illustrated in the Expositor’s Bible, where this “bitterness” and “heat” is declared to be due to the “mental prostration” produced by the vision, or, as Bertholet more bluntly puts it, “it was a psychological reaction from his cataleptic state.”(!) Rather see our notes Ezekiel 2:8; Ezekiel 3:10-11; Ezekiel 3:15-21; Ezekiel 16:44.