‘Nevertheless if you warn the righteous man, that the righteous sin not, and he does not sin, he will surely live because he took warning. And you have delivered your life.'
Note the contrast here with Ezekiel 3:19. It is assumed that the righteous man will hear and take warning. The suggestion seems to be that God would give him an opportunity of repentance through the ministry of Ezekiel. If he heeded it he would be spared.
The importance of this passage cannot be overemphasised. Each individual is shown to have individual responsibility. The one will not suffer for the sinfulness of the group. It also brings out that, in the place where they were, they still came within the covenant. They were still responsible to God. Furthermore it demonstrated that away from Jerusalem, and away from the possibility of offering sacrifice at the central shrine in Jerusalem, forgiveness was still possible. Both the righteous who sin, and the wicked who have lived sinfully, could still be spared through repentance and return to the covenant, even though sacrifices for sin were not available.
On the other hand it also warned that God was there. He saw their ways and their behaviour, and He would require it at their hands. Transportation had not removed them from their responsibility to God. They were still His people and He was still their Overlord.
And it finally emphasised that He had set over them a watchman. This was for them an act of mercy. He had not left them just to struggle on as they could. If they failed it would not be because God had failed to give them an opportunity for repentance, as long as the watchman was faithful. And for Ezekiel the stress was on the importance of his faithfulness. It is a solemn task to be pastor to a people.
It is impossible to overemphasise the significance of these words to Ezekiel with reference to the cult. It is noteworthy that in appointing a priest over His people God did not set up a rival cultus. The priest was not to carry out certain cultic responsibilities. No sacrifices were instituted. No altar was built. The concentration was on response to God, morality and behaviour. It was on the moral requirements of the Torah (instruction, law, found in the Books of Moses), and his responsibility to watch over them and maintain them as Israel's covenant with Yahweh. They would no doubt meet for prayer and the reading of the Scriptures, and to listen to exhortation, (which would eventually lead on to the founding of the synagogues) but the emphasis was on manner of life before God and their duty to obey Him, and it applied to each individually as well as to the group as a whole.