The vision I saw was like the vision I had seen when He came to destroy the city and like the visions I had seen by the River Kebar. I fell facedown, Sermons
I. THIS WAS A RESTORED GLORY. 1. The prophet had seen the glory of the Lord depart from the temple by the way of the east, towards the Mount of Olives. In consequence of the sin of the people and the defilement of the sacred building, the holy Presence had been removed. The idolatry by which the temple and the city had been profaned had caused the withdrawal of the Divine favor. Man was constituted to be the temple of the Eternal; by his sin he alienated and repelled "the Divine Inhabitant." 2. The purification of the temple was the occasion of the return of the lost favor and glory. The presence of the Most High is represented as returning by the way by which it had departed. When man's nature is cleansed, when the way is made open for the restoration of relations long suspended, then the glory of God is once again displayed, and his favor once again enjoyed. II. THIS WAS AN IMPRESSIVE GLORY. 1. As described in itself it is characterized by majesty. The figurative language employed is drawn from those sources by which the senses are chiefly impressed. When we read that the voice was as the sound of many waters, and that the earth shone with the splendor, we are assured that the spiritual majesty which such figures are employed to set forth was nothing ordinary. 2. And this assurance is deepened as we are led to recognize the manner in which the manifestation affected the prophet himself: he "fell upon his face," overcome with the grandeur of the spectacle. It is not every nature that is so affected by great spiritual realities. Yet there is nothing in the world so deserving of reverence, so truly fitted to call out emotions of awe, as the spiritual presence of the Eternal in his Church. It is only because men are so carnal, so insensible to true grandeur, that they can know of the Divine nearness and yet remain unmoved. III. THIS WAS A DIFFUSED GLORY. In simple and sublime language the prophet relates what followed the marvelous return of Deity: "The glory of the Lord filled the house." How wonderfully does the Statement express the universal pervasion of the Church by the Divine presence and splendor! How fitted is such a representation to remove our misconceptions and our prejudices! There is no member of Christ's Church however lowly, there is no work in Christ's Church however unobtrusive, there is no section of Christ's Church however lacking in learning, wealth, refinement, or power, which is not full of the glory of the Lord - of that glory which is spiritual, which is apprehended by human minds when quickened and enlightened by the Spirit of God. IV. THIS WAS A PERMANENT GLORY. The glory of the temple at Jerusalem passed away. In the appointed time the building perished, and not one stone was left upon another. But the temple which Ezekiel saw in his vision was a spiritual, and therefore an abiding, temple, whose walls shall never be taken down, whose ministrations and offerings shall never cease, and which shall ever echo with ten thousand voices uttering the high praises of our redeeming God. - T.
These are the measures of the altar after the cubits. There is nothing held to be insignificant in the Book of God that pertains to the Divine altar or the holy house. Everything is of consequence; perhaps it would be more than paradoxical to say that everything is of supreme consequence. "These are the measures of the altar after the cubits." That is to say, if you look upon the thing geometrically, here it is, so long, so broad, so high, thus, and thus, and no other way. Such is the Divine specification; the altar is measurable, it is a question of cubits; make the cubits right, and you make the geometric altar right. Beyond that, the measuring man can do nothing. But when you have given the cubits you have given nothing. The altar, as a mechanical structure, is measurable; as a spiritual symbol, it is without measure. There are persons who imagine that if they have read the book called the Bible through, they have read God's revelation completely. It is the same sophism. There are men who think if they have told you how far it is from Dan to Beersheba they have been preaching. They have not begun to preach in the name and spirit of Christ. All this is mere secular instruction. There are what are called ecclesiastical antiquarians. They occupy a respectable position in society. They are often pensive-looking men; they are men of most studious habits. If you wanted to know the meaning of any ecclesiastical term, they would find it for you; they can go back century after century, and tell you the measure of every part, and the colour of every robe, and the significance of every line; and they can press matters down to the centuries of corruption, when all these original meanings were lost or perverted; then they can proceed to the centuries of restoration, and tell you all concerning the reconstruction of matters that had been overthrown, perverted, or neglected. All this they can do without ever praying. A man may build a cathedral and never pray. Remember, in dealing with the altar we are not dealing with a merely geometrical figure. The altar has its finite side, yet it has also its infinite aspect. What does the altar do? The altar looks towards the Unknown. If we might personify the altar, we should think of it as having eyes that wander through eternity. The altar would be saying in its silence, There is another home; this is but a stepping stone to something higher, this is but the dawn of the coming day, this is but the seed time — the golden harvest is not yet: I look beyond all these white sapphires that make the midnight rich with their jewellery, and I see beyond, and still beyond, God's measured sanctuary. It ought to be a grand thing to have amongst us an altar that talks thus. We want some sublimating influences. The tabernacle of God is with men upon the earth. Our houses are sanctified by the presence of the holy place. The walls of the sanctuary give security to the city; not its banks and festive chambers, but its sanctuaries are the glory of the town. We do not know what the sanctuary is doing in any city. It may be the humblest place viewed architecturally and geometrically, but seen in its spiritual significance and relationship it may be the poor little despised church or conventicle that is keeping the city out of hell. Do not, therefore, despise anything that has spiritual significance in it. We cannot tell how far its influence reaches. Little noise it makes; the kingdom of heaven cometh not with observation: when the morning dawns there is no crash of wheels upon the hills; the dawn is glorified silence. What is true of the public sanctuary is true of the home sanctuary: it is your family altar which keeps your house together. It may not be a formal altar, but the spirit of prayer that is in your house makes your bread sweet, and keeps all the windows towards the south, though geometrically they may stand square north. It is the Spirit of God, the altar, the Divine genius that makes the house warm in January and glorious in June. See what other words occur in connection with the term altar. You never find that word alone. Some men could not read this description of the altar. They are too sensitive; there are men so super-refined that they could not read this description of God's altar. Thou shalt "sprinkle blood thereon," etc. Beware of that insensate sensitiveness which cannot pronounce the word "blood" in its religious and spiritual signification. Do not imagine yourselves refined and sensitive because you can talk about the example of Christ but not about the blood of Christ. You can debase any word; you can pronounce the word "music" so as to take all melody and all harmony and rhythm out of it; you can pronounce the word "gospel" so that it shall be but a common word of two syllables; you can shrink from anything: but you can so pronounce music and blood and Cross and Christ as to give those who hear you to feel that you have caught some inner and upper meaning which had hitherto escaped your own attention. Then how do we stand in this matter? You are Bible readers, are you students of revelation? You can quote all the dimensions of the altar, have you ever entered into its spirit? We are called to spirituality, not to carnality; to profoundest wisdom, not mere literal information; to an altar not made with hands, and not merely and exclusively to the altar built even upon the terms of a Divine specification. Holy Spirit, baptise us as with fire! Spirit of the altar, teach us how to suffer, how to pray!(J. Parker, D. D.) I. And he mocked me with this reply: "A cubit is a cubit, and a hand breadth." Ah! that undefined hand breadth; that plus quantity that is in everything. "And from the bottom upon the ground even to the lower settle shall be two cubits, and the breadth one cubit, and from the lesser settle even to the greater settle shall be four cubits and the breadth one cubit. So the altar shall be four cubits; and from the altar and upward shall be four horns. And the altar shall be twelve cubits long, twelve broad, square in the four squares thereof." Do you understand that? No man ever understood the altar. Remember that and be calm. The altar is not to be understood. There are some places at which we can only pray, and wonder, and weep, and wait. It is the man with the foot rule in the church that I dread! He tells me, forsooth, how long I preached. Can any man preach with that person in the audience? The use of the measureable is to point to the immeasurable. The measureable is algebraic, symbolic, indicative. The foot rule means the sky, the sky, God. At first we are greatly taken by bulk, by magnitude, and we talk of the great mountains and the great seas. It fits our age well, we shall outgrow it. Great mountains! Why, a child, give him time, can climb to the top of any one of them, and wave a banner there. No height at least can keep a child back; there may be ruggedness of way, but of that we are not speaking, but of mere height, mere greatness. How great you used to think those houses down in your village — you did! I did! We passed the great house, ivy-covered, with a kind of suppressed but not wholly unconscious awe. Then you came to Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, London, and went back, and you said, "Where is that great house?" Ay, where? "That is it!" "No." "It is!" "No, no!" "Certainly that is the house!" "I thought, it was so large and had so many windows in it, and that it reared itself among all the other houses, very important and almost majestic." That is it — come down. Why? Because of the greater sights you have seen, the greater houses that have passed before your vision. And thus all life goes down in that sense and yet up in another. The man who has communed with God fears no opponent. Goliath looked so huge when I saw him from the human standpoint, but after five minutes with God I sought him and he could not be found. So you tabernacle with God, live and move and have your being in God, walk in the heavenlies, then when you come down to earth, with its battle and stress and cross and pain and need, you will understand what the Apostle meant when he said, "If you look at affliction from one point it seems intolerable, often beyond words and imagination, but if you look at it from another point you will say, 'Our light affliction is but for a moment.'" How so? Why, we look not at the things that are seen; not at the cubits, but at the altar; not at time, but at eternity; not at the present, but at the future. It is heaven that must one day explain the earth. (J. Parker, D. D.) (J. Parker, D. D.) Let us look at this law of altar cubits a little while, for it admits of divers and useful illustrations. Take the alphabet, your English alphabet. There are some six-and-twenty letters in it. That is the measure of the alphabet after the cubits. Now pronounce the alphabet. You cannot! You have got all the letters in one huge mouthful, and cannot pronounce them. And most of the letters are themselves dumb, waiting for the vowels to touch them to music and into life. But suppose a man should say that was the English language — there you have the English literature, there you have the Paradise Lost and the Principia and Hamlet and all the poetry that has ever been written, and all the philosophy that has ever been reamed or published, you have it all in so far as the whole is expressed in the English language. In a sense, yes; in another sense, no. And yet without the alphabet where should we be? Who could move? Who could express themselves in the English tongue? Are you content with the alphabet? Yes; when it comes to the higher things you are. You smile at the notion of being contented with the alphabet when I refer to letters, to literature, to poetry, and to philosophy, but how many are there who have been in the Church forty years and are in the cradle still — in the alphabet still — and who, when they go to church, want to hear the alphabet pronounced. I wait! But unless you say A, B, and right down to Y, Z, there are some measurers, not sent from heaven, who say you have not preached the Gospel. The Gospel is a sky, a wind, a pathos, a spirit, as well as an alphabet. It has its writings, it can hand them to you, but ask for its inspiration, it breathes through all the centuries and makes a man live according to its kind.(J. Parker, D. D.) Manton says: "The satisfaction must carry proportion with the merit of the offence. A debt of a thousand pounds is not discharged by two or three brass farthings. Creatures are finite, their acts of obedience are already due to God, and their sufferings for one another, if they had been allowed, would have been of limited influence." Jesus alone, as the Son of God, could present a substitution sufficient to meet the case of men condemned for their iniquities. The majesty of His nature, His freedom from personal obligation to the law, and the intensity of His griefs, all give to His atonement a virtue which elsewhere can never be discovered.( C. H. Spurgeon.) God is a great measurer. God has a reed, a line, a pole. God makes His cities four-square, and He will not see the law of the square violated. It is His method! God is a great geometer. All your little Euclids are cut out of the Deity! It is said that He stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and that He spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in. It is reported of Him that He meteth out the heavens with a span. He weighs the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance. And no man can steal one atom of dust, and no little pebble can flee away! It is all measured! The bounds of our habitation are fixed! There are bounds that cannot be measured. What is your house? Tell me about it; I like to hear about houses. Well? "It is large." How large? "Three rooms on the ground floor." There may be certain minds who have no peace with less than four rooms on the ground floor. One is enough for me — but I am not everybody. Well, then, upstairs? "Rooms so many." Lofty? "Very." What are your proportions? "Thirty feet by twenty-five feet." And the garden? "Two hundred feet by one hundred and thirty-two feet." Is that all? I do not want to hear these things! I do not want an auctioneer to speak to me in my higher moods! He has his place, but there are levels to which I go where he in his professional capacity is nobody, and where he cannot speak in my native language. You can lay a line upon the house. Now lay me a line upon the home! No man can do that! But is not the house the same as the home? Ah, there you ask a question which is infinitely ridiculous, so destitute of sentiment, of poetry, of high spiritual sensitiveness and ideality! The house is one thing. The home is another! You may have a house and not a home! You may be in the Church, but not in the Sanctuary! You may have a book, and not a revelation! Why do we not distinguish between things that differ, and get the right values and proportions of them? Coleridge says: "I for one am not content to call the soil under my feet my country." Certainly not! The country is not an affair of soil. He says: "The religion, the language, the home life, these constitute all that is best in your country." That is what I am labouring to say. We want soil — something to stand upon; but it is nothing until we have crowned it with those happy associations to watch I have just referred. The life that has no home in it, no interior sanctuary, no altar, no cross, no hope — we cannot call it life. Call it the second death! What I want to show you, therefore, needs a little repetition in order to deepen and settle the best impressions. You see there is a measurable quantity, and you see there is an immeasurable quantity; and the measurable is of no use to me except it signify and indicate the immeasurable. The measurable is only a kind of ladder by which I climb to see the immeasurable. This is the spirit in which we have to do our work. This is the spirit, the influence, the spiritual immeasurable inwardness of what we are doing! A certain kind of man — I wonder who made him? — once wrote in the newspapers something about our missionaries, and he thought he had made them quite ridiculous. Many men have thought that; but "The horse and his rider wilt the Lord throw into the sea." He said the income of the Society — perhaps it was. your Society or the London Missionary Society — I do not know which — the income of the Society was so many thousands; the number of conversions reported, so many hundreds; dividing the thousands by the hundreds we find that each conversion cost the Society, say, a thousand pounds. What a man that would have been for measuring altars! How very ingenious this application of a foot rule! He thought he made us all look ridiculous because he showed us, by arithmetic and statistical processes, that each conversion cost an almost fabulous amount. That is the measure of the altar by cubits! Now, the measure of the soul! the measure of the character! the measure of the influence! There is a foot rule. Lay it on light, on gravitation. on the fragrance, on the influence, on the effluence! The poor man has come to the end of his tether. If one conversion cost the total income of your Society, it was worth it! That is the right way of looking at it!"Knowest thou the importance of a soul immortal, Behold the midnight glory, world on world, Amazing pomp: redouble this amaze. Ten thousand add and twice ten thousand more. One soul outweighs them all, and calls The astonishing magnificence of unintelligent creation poor!"Unless we work in that spirit we shall give up all our efforts and confuse all our enterprises. I have given up seeking after the results of my ministry. I have asked God in many a high hour of converse to enable me to do my work as lovingly, earnestly, and capably as I can, and I have asked Him to look after the results, and He promised me He would do so. (J. Parker, D. D.). People Ezekiel, Israelites, Levites, ZadokPlaces Chebar, Holy PlaceTopics Appearance, Appearances, Chebar, Destroy, Destruction, Face, Facedown, Fall, Fell, Kebar, River, Town, Vision, VisionsOutline 1. The returning of the glory of God into the temple7. The sin of Israel hindered God's presence 10. The prophet exhorts them to repentance and observation of the law of the house 13. The measures 18. and ordinances of the altar Dictionary of Bible Themes Ezekiel 43:1-3Library Solomon's Temple Spiritualizedor, Gospel Light Fetched out of the Temple at Jerusalem, to Let us More Easily into the Glory of New Testament Truths. 'Thou son of man, shew the house to the house of Isreal;--shew them the form of the house, and the fashion thereof, and the goings out hereof, and the comings in thereof, and all the forms thereof, and all the ordinances thereof, and all the forms thereof, and all the laws thereof.'--Ezekiel 43:10, 11 London: Printed for, and sold by George Larkin, at the Two Swans without Bishopgate, … John Bunyan—The Works of John Bunyan Volumes 1-3 How the Impatient and the Patient are to be Admonished. Ezekiel Links Ezekiel 43:3 NIVEzekiel 43:3 NLT Ezekiel 43:3 ESV Ezekiel 43:3 NASB Ezekiel 43:3 KJV Ezekiel 43:3 Bible Apps Ezekiel 43:3 Parallel Ezekiel 43:3 Biblia Paralela Ezekiel 43:3 Chinese Bible Ezekiel 43:3 French Bible Ezekiel 43:3 German Bible Ezekiel 43:3 Commentaries Bible Hub |
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