‘And the glory of the God of Israel had gone up from the cherub, on which it was, to the threshold of the house. And he called to the man clothed in linen, who had the writer's kit hanging at his side. And Yahweh said to him, “Go through the midst of the city, through the midst of Jerusalem, and set a mark (‘a taw', in ancient Hebrew an X) on the foreheads of the men who sigh and who cry for all the abominations that are done in the midst of it.” '
The movement of ‘the glory of God' is also very significant. Being ‘on the cherub' referred to the Ark of the Covenant of Yahweh on which was the throne of Yahweh overseen by cherubim. In the past the glory of God had regularly covered the Ark and the Tabernacle (Exodus 40:34-35), and in vision Ezekiel had seen this as transportable as we have seen earlier, with the living creatures bearing it. But the latter have not yet been identified as cherubim. But now He leaves His throne in the sanctuary and moves to the threshold of the temple. He is at this point deliberately rejecting the temple and all it means. He is about to depart.
The use of the singular ‘cherub' to indicate the cherubim is paralleled in Ezekiel 10:2; Eze 10:4; 2 Samuel 22:11; Psalms 18:10.
But God never forgets His own. Within the city there were still those who were faithful to Him and whose hearts were broken at what was going on. They sighed and cried at what they saw around them. True faith and true righteousness are always revealed by men's attitude to sin and disobedience to God. He had determined to put His protecting mark on them. None would harm those who were faithful to Him. His mark would be on their foreheads. Compare Revelation 7:3; Revelation 9:4; Revelation 14:1. In the later words of Jesus, ‘the hairs of their head were all numbered'. Ezekiel and his listeners would think in terms of preservation of life. With our greater revelation we recognise that the meaning was their eternal preservation. They were untouchable.
The mark on their foreheads was an X (the ancient form of the letter taw). Compare Job 31:35 where it represented a signature. It was sometimes used by the scribes at Qumran to indicate points of importance in their scrolls such as Messianic passages. We may well see in it a remarkable precursor to the sign of the cross. These men were ‘signed' by God, marked as belonging to Him. They were engraved on the palms of His hands (Isaiah 49:16). In all His wrath against sin He was faithful to His covenant with those who still trusted Him, with the righteous.