It is often the intention of a writer to motivate the reader to put himself or herself into the narrative. At the end of the day Christ himself and faithful men like Moses and Paul are limited role models for far too many people who say they have become disciples.

Vision #1

As for the form of their faces, each had the face of a man; all four had the face of a lion on the right and the face of a bull on the left, and all four had the face of an eagle.

Ezekiel 1:10

Even though the older brother in the Lost Son parable is obedient and not lost nobody wants to walk in his shoes.

The entities in Ezekiel’s visions (or John’s, Ezekiel 1:10ff, 10:13ff) present a motion imperative. They move straight ahead, they rise above the earth. Their motions and appearance are the basic challenge. What to make of the second vision of the “wheels” takes the challenge into new territory.

The cherub replaces the bull

The next time Ezekiel sees the wheels one of faces is new.

And each one had four faces. The first face was the face of a cherub, the second face was the face of a man, the third the face of a lion, and the fourth the face of an eagle.

Ezekiel 10:14

There is only our likeness to angels (officers of the heavenly court) after the end of the age, but in this age angels are superior to humans in their nature and association with God’s palaces and inferior to humans as servants tasked with assisting humans. We recognize the human as failure prone and totally ours, but the king of the jungle, the bull and the eagle shut us out.  If face is a way of speaking about appearance and function these creatures are the most representative of the extent of diversity and integration and we are a long way from wanting to emulate these straight-walking and amazingly mobile beings.