Ezekiel 43:12

God calls Ezekiel “Son of man”, the name he uses for the prophet all through the book. It reminds Ezekiel that he is a man, and that the message he carries comes from the God who speaks to him.

God calls the house “the place of my throne, and the place of the soles of my feet”. A throne is where a king sits to rule, and the place where his feet rest is the place he has settled in and owns. God speaks of himself in human terms so that his people can grasp that this house is the seat of his kingship, where his rule is carried out and his glory rests. Isaiah uses the same pair of pictures for the whole world, with heaven as God’s throne and the earth as his footstool (Isaiah 66:1). The God who rules over all things chooses a place among his people to be the seat of that rule.

“Where I will dwell in the midst of the children of Israel for ever” is the heart of the passage, and God says it again in verse 9. There the verb is shâkan, to settle down, stay or dwell, the word for God’s dwelling among Israel in the tabernacle and the temple. “For ever” is ʻôwlâm. This is the promise God gave through Moses, that he would set his dwelling among Israel and walk among them as their God (Leviticus 26:11–12). The same promise runs to the end of the Bible, where God’s tabernacle is with men, he dwells with them, and sorrow is gone (Revelation 21:3–4).

The words land with great weight after what Ezekiel has seen. Because of Israel’s idolatry the glory had left the temple, and Jerusalem and its temple were destroyed by the Babylonians (2 Kings 25). Ezekiel received this vision as an exile in Babylon. The whole vision of the new temple fills Ezekiel 40–48, and Ezekiel 43 is where the glory returns to it. Into that loss God says that he has come back to stay.

God says that the house of Israel “shall … no more defile” his holy name, and verse 8 tells how they had defiled it before. The verb is ṭâmêʼ, to be or become unclean, to make something unclean, or to pronounce it unclean. The same verb covers uncleanness that comes through disease or contact and uncleanness that comes through unlawful acts. Here it is God’s own name that has been made unclean. His name, shêm, stands for who he is and for his reputation, and it is qôdesh, holy, set apart. By bringing idolatry right up to his house, Israel made the holy God look like one more of the gods of the nations. The law had warned against profaning the name of God (Leviticus 19:12), and it had called Israel to be holy because the LORD their God is holy (Leviticus 19:2).

God names “they, nor their kings” together. The people as a whole had sinned, and the kings who should have led them in faithfulness had led them into it.

Verse 9 turns the charge into a call: “Now let them put away their whoredom, and the carcases of their kings, far from me, and I will dwell in the midst of them for ever.” The command and the promise belong together. God’s holy presence and his people’s holiness go side by side, and what defiles has to go “far from me” before he settles among them. The promise itself is the same one he made in verse 7, said again so that the people hear what is waiting for them on the other side of their repentance.

This is the hope of the whole Bible. Paul tells the church that it is the temple of the living God and gives it this very promise, that God will dwell in his people and be their God (2 Corinthians 6:16).

In verse 10 God gives Ezekiel his task: “shew the house to the house of Israel”. “Shew” is nâgad, to declare or make known. The word bayith means a house, and also a household, a family or a dynasty. The first house is the temple of the vision, the second is the whole people, and God means the house where he will live to change the people who belong to him. Ezekiel has spent chapters 40 to 42 being shown every part of it, and now he is to pass it on.

Verse 12 sums up everything that comes before and everything that follows in the rest of the vision. “This is the law of the house” opens the verse, and “Behold, this is the law of the house” closes it, so that the law stands framed and unmistakable. The law is tôwrâh, God’s instruction, and the house is bayith, the whole temple and everything that goes on in it.

The law itself is this: “Upon the top of the mountain the whole limit thereof round about shall be most holy.” Mountains are where Israel met God. The law was given at Sinai (Exodus 19), Zion is the mountain of God’s city (Psalm 48), and Elijah met the LORD’s answer by fire on Carmel. A house on the top of the mountain stands high, set apart and seen by all.

“Most holy” is the Hebrew qodesh qodashim, holiness of holiness, built from qôdesh. The phrase speaks of the highest degree of holiness, and God now applies it to the “whole limit thereof round about”, the entire area of the house out to its outer border. The altar of the tabernacle was most holy, so that whatever touched it was holy (Exodus 29:37), and the priests were charged to put a difference between holy and unholy (Leviticus 10:10). In Ezekiel’s temple the holiness reaches every part. It is the right house for the God whom the seraphim praise as holy, holy, holy (Isaiah 6:3).

Ezekiel was shown this house in a vision, and the people who came back from exile built nothing like it. Believers differ on whether a temple of these measurements will yet be built in the age to come, or whether the vision is wholly fulfilled in Christ and his church. On either reading, the New Testament shows where God’s promise to dwell among his people comes to rest.

Jesus called his own body the temple: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19–21). In him dwells all the fulness of the Godhead bodily (Colossians 2:9), and John writes, “No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him” (John 1:18). He is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29). He was wounded for our transgressions (Isaiah 53:5), and God made him to be sin for us so that we might be made the righteousness of God in him (2 Corinthians 5:21). His own blood, far better than the blood of bulls and goats, cleanses us to serve the living God (Hebrews 9:11–14). He has broken down the wall that sin had raised (Ephesians 2:14), and he is the way, the truth and the life, through whom we come to the Father (John 14:6). So the “goings out” and “comings in” of Ezekiel’s house find their meaning in him.

Through Christ, God’s people become his dwelling. The church is a holy temple, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets with Christ Jesus himself as the chief corner stone, a habitation of God through the Spirit (Ephesians 2:19–22). Believers are living stones built into a spiritual house (1 Peter 2:5), and each believer’s body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, bought with a price (1 Corinthians 6:19–20). Paul warns that God’s temple is holy and that God will destroy whoever defiles it (1 Corinthians 3:16–17). That is the law of the house for us. God writes his law on the hearts of his people (Jeremiah 31:33), the righteousness of the law is fulfilled in those who walk after the Spirit (Romans 8:4), and we fulfil the law of Christ by bearing one another’s burdens (Galatians 6:2). The shame Ezekiel’s hearers were to feel meets its answer in the gospel, for if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive them and to cleanse us (1 John 1:9). We present our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God (Romans 12:1), and we follow holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord (Hebrews 12:14).

The vision reaches its end in the New Jerusalem, where God dwells with his people for ever. There John saw no temple, for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple (Revelation 21:22).

These verses show us a God who wants to live among his people and keeps saying so: “I will dwell in the midst of the children of Israel for ever.” He is also holy, and he speaks plainly about what had defiled his name and driven his glory away. Both are true of him at once, and the passage lets neither one fall.

What he gives his people here is a way home. He names their sin so that they can put it away. He shows them the house so that shame can lead them back to him, and he writes his laws in their sight so that they can keep them. When the glory returns, it returns to stay. In Christ that same promise has come to us, and the God who dwells among his people has made us his house.