Ezekiel is a book of pictures portraying the spiritual things. In the last chapter we saw four things: the wind, the cloud, the fire, and the electrum. These four items are pictures portraying what God is to us. In our experience, God is like a blowing wind and like a cloud—brooding, hovering, and overshadowing us. He is also like fire, shining upon us and enlightening us. By burning us, He sanctifies us. This kind of burning is the real sanctification. We do not need to "take time to be holy"; we need to be burned. If we mean business with the Lord in desiring to be sanctified, we must be willing to be burned. "Our God is a consuming fire" (Heb. 12:29). He is a jealous, sanctifying God. Furthermore, God is to us like glowing, shining electrum. Electrum signifies the compounded God. Today the God Who is in us has more than simply the divine nature. The gold of the divine nature has been compounded with the silver of the redeeming Lamb. For the Jews, God is typified merely by gold, but for us Christians, God is gold mixed with silver. He is electrum.
Now we come to Ezekiel 1:5: "Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance; they had the likeness of a man." Pay particular attention to the first word in this verse, "also." Not only does electrum come out of the fire, something more also comes out. The wind brings in the cloud; the cloud enfolds the fire; and the fire produces the electrum plus something more. "Also" refers to the four living creatures. When we experience God as the blowing wind, the overshadowing cloud, the burning fire, and the glowing electrum, we become the four living creatures. We were dead, but we have become living creatures. We not only have God as the electrum, but we ourselves also become living.
The Lord Jesus said that the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God and shall live (John 5:25). Paul said that we were dead, but that God has made us alive (Eph. 2:5). The more we have the cycle of the wind, the cloud, the fire, and the electrum, the more we will become living. Every time we are blown by God and overshadowed by God, burned and consumed by God, we are enlivened. If you are not so alive in the meetings, it proves that you are short of the experience of this cycle. The more we have the experience of this cycle, the more we will be living.
Today's Christianity always likes to have a quiet service. If you would like to have a quiet service, you had better go to a cemetery. That is the quietest place because everybody is dead and buried. But we must be noisy. Only those who are living can make noise. Even if you offered a million dollars to the dead ones and asked them to be noisy, they could not do it. We must be living. We must be noisy because we have experienced God as the wind and the fire with the blowing and the consuming. How can we be quiet? We cannot be quiet because we are the real living creatures. The word "living" in Hebrew has the same root as the word "life" in Genesis 2, where it refers to the tree of life. How can we, the creatures, become living creatures? By experiencing God as the tree of life, we will have something living within us. A living element, a living factor, will be in us. This living thing within us will continually make us living.
The picture in this verse portrays us not only as being living creatures, but also as being four in number. Why does it not say five or six or ten living creatures? It is very significant. Many verses in the Bible show us that the number four signifies man as the creature. Revelation 5:9 is particularly clear. It says that the Lord has redeemed us from four sources: from every kindred, every tongue, every people, and every nation. Furthermore, Revelation 21 shows us that the New Jerusalem has four sides—the north, the east, the west, and the south—and that each of the four sides has three gates. This means that from every direction on the earth we can enter this city. The number four symbolizes that we are the people redeemed from many kindreds, tongues, peoples, and nations. In the eyes of God, we are the four living creatures.