Fourfold

Under their wings on their four sides they had human hands. And the four had their faces and their wings thus:  their wings touched one another. Each one of them went straight forward, without turning as they went.  As for the likeness of their faces, each had a human face. The four had the face of a lion on the right side, the four had the face of an ox on the left side, and the four had the face of an eagle.  Such were their faces. And their wings were spread out above.  Each creature had two wings, each of which touched the wing of another, while two covered their bodies.– Ezekiel 1:8-11

However strange and frightening these creatures maybe, they have human hands.  This may be even more frightening to us in some ways, but there is nothing else in the universe like the hand.  Joni Eareckson Tada learned to paint holding a brush between her teeth after she became a quadriplegic, and people can play guitars with their feet, but hands built the paintbrushes and the guitar.  There is no other instrument known to us with the power and potential of the human hand. 

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If each creature had two wings outstretched which touched the wings of another, the only way I can picture that is if the four creatures formed a sort of square.  Since I started reading this passage last weekend, I have been thinking about four creatures with four faces almost as if there were four creatures composing each creature and how much like a fractal that seems.  I start to wonder about the fractal nature of things behind the local and visible, and if the whole universe would not be easier to understand if we went to Base-4 – 0,1,2,3. It gets spooking and weird and overwhelming pretty fast. 

We see four faces but it is the human face that is outward.  A lion’s face looks to the right, an ox to the left and an eagle behind.  Note that if the four creatures are standing with their wings touching, the eagle is looking inward and toward another eagle. 

As I said before we think of man as a tripartite being, but the body, soul, and spirit combine into a fourth that we might call the whole.  The ox would be the servant, the body, facing left toward the material, placidly alert with eyes set to the sides, potential prey yet powerful, easily frightened and somewhat impulsive.  The lion might be the soul which possesses destructive power of a different kind, not easily tamed, with the potential to be ennobled, but always dangerous.  Spirit might be represented by the eagle, which, as noted above, looks inward rather than outward, moving in another dimension, far-seeing, visionary with a completely different perspective than the earth-bound. 

Man can develop in any of the three directions, but he is meant to be balanced, each aspect tempering the others, each a complement of the whole.  This is a glimpse of the fourfold perfection of God Incarnate in Jesus – fully God, fully man, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.    

Spirit looks toward and relates to spirit, but the eagle and the man are on the same axis, if you want to think about it that way, so, too, with the lion and the ox -- like a cross.  Body and soul form the horizontal axis, while man receives from God via the spirit on the vertical.  It always comes back to the Cross.