Next (and this is most important), these different cherubim were not independent of each other, each going his own way, and doing his own will.  Not so.  Ezekiel had found in them a divine and wonderful order, by which the services of angels as well as of men are constituted.  Orderly and harmoniously they worked together.  Out of the same fiery globe, from the same throne of God, they came forth all alike.  They turned not when they went; whithersoever the Spirit was to go, they went, and ran and returned like a flash of lightning.  Nay, in one place he speaks as if all the four creatures were but one creature:  ’This is the living creature which I saw by the river of Chebar.’

And so it is, we may be sure, in the world of God, whether in the earthly or in the heavenly world.  All things work together, praising God and doing His will.  Angels and the heavenly host; sun and moon; stars and light; fire and hail; snow and vapour; wind and storm:  all fulfil His word.  ’He hath made them fast for ever and ever:  He hath given them a law which shall not be broken.’  For before all things, under all things, and through all things, is a divine unity and order; all things working towards one end, because all things spring from one beginning, which is the bosom of God the Father.

And so with the wheels; the wheels of fortune and victory, and the fate of nations and of kings.  ‘They were so high,’ Ezekiel said, ‘that they were dreadful.’  But he saw no human genius sitting, one in each wheel of fortune, each protecting his favourite king and nation.  These, too, did not go their own way and of their own will.  They were parts of God’s divine and wonderful order, and obeyed the same laws as the cherubim.  ’And when the living creatures went, the wheels went with them; for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels.’  Everywhere was the same divine unity and order; the same providence, the same laws of God, presided over the natural world and over the fortunes of nations and of kings.  Victory and prosperity was not given arbitrarily by separate genii, each genius protecting his favourite king, each genius striving against the other on behalf of his favourite.  Fortune came from the providence of One Being; of Him of whom it is written, ’God standeth in the congregation of princes:  He is the judge among gods.’  And again, ’The Lord is King, be the people never so impatient:  He sitteth between the cherubim, be the earth never so unquiet.’

And is this all?  God forbid.  This is more than the Chaldaeans saw, who worshipped angels and not God—­the creature instead of the Creator.  But where the Chaldaean vision ended, Ezekiel’s only began.  His prophecy rises far above the imaginations of the heathen.

He hears the sound of the wings of the cherubim, like the tramp of an army, like the noise of great waters, like the roll of thunder, the voice of Almighty God:  but above their wings he sees a firmament, which the heathen cannot see, clear as the flashing crystal, and on that firmament a sapphire throne, and round that throne a rainbow, the type of forgiveness and faithfulness, and on that throne A Man.