Ezekiel 43:12 This is the law of the house; On the top of the mountain the whole limit thereof round about shall be most holy. Behold… Separation is the root idea of holiness in the Old Testament, and Ezekiel insists that the separation between the holy and the profane shall be more sharp and emphatic. All the profane things are to be put farther away. Indeed, the object of the whole system of ritual that is brought forward in the concluding chapters of this book — the aim was to put all profane things outside the sphere of Jehovah's worship. As you know, this was ceremonial, ritualistic. But the deep significance of the arrangement cannot escape you — you know that all this has been fulfilled in its largest signification in Christ and in His Gospel. Christ has come, the Lord of righteousness, to bring many sons unto glory, and He will never rest until He has brought multitudes to the splendid perfection of His own spirit and example. 1. In the first place, Christianity insists upon holiness of character — most holy — the man is to be that. Christianity commences with the spirit of the man, the will, the mind, the conscience, the disposition, with the very essence of the personality. Jesus Christ begins with "Marvel not that I said unto you, Ye must be born again." The first conception of holiness in character is that a man gets a clean heart, and that there is renewed within him a right spirit. Christ said, being clean within, profoundly spiritual, and righteous in mind, you go outside and work that out in all the complex relationships and multiplied responsibilities of practical and daily life. That is another splendid phase of Christian ethics. It gives us executive force and skill to carry out splendid ideas and noble patterns. I was reading the other day of a critic who had just returned from the Continent criticising one of the Spanish cathedrals. He said it was the embodiment of splendid ideas, but the ideas were everywhere poorly carried out. There was blundering in the fine lines, and the rich ornamentation was tawdry and vulgar. When I read that, it struck me that the race had failed in morals in a similar fashion. The ancients had splendid conceptions and ideas. When Jesus Christ came into the world there was the majestic morality of Sinai. When He came into the world there was the exact and masterly jurisprudence of the Roman, but everywhere great ideas were carried out poorly, fine lines were blunderingly touched, and noble maxims were reduced to triviality and vulgarity in practical life. What did Jesus Christ do? He gave the race eternal and invincible energy, by which, in practice, they could bring to pass the purest and loftiest ideals. "What the law could not do" — the law of the Jew, the law of the Roman — "what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God, sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh, that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit." And so we in Christ are first cleansed, exalted, made to catch the loveliness of our Lord, and then He sends us forth with a strange, indwelling Spirit, by which we accomplish the virtues that we see lamentably impossible to the natural man. And, mind, you are all to be holy, most holy. The conception of Ezekiel is that this is not for a few, but for all. "This is the law of the house, that the whole limit thereof shall be most holy." 2. And then we come to the other point, "the extended range, the whole limit thereof round about shall be most holy." There had been, as Ezekiel says, only a wall in Solomon's temple between God and profane things, but in the new temple there was to be a larger area. Profane things were to be pushed farther back and farther back still, until they went over the brink of the world. From every quarter of the universe they should be driven. There is no fulfilment of this conception except for the whole planet, everyone in it, and of every law and every nature. "The whole limit thereof round about shall be most holy." What does the religion of Jesus Christ say? Make everything in God's great world to be true, just, beautiful — commerce, art, science, government, fashion, amusements, gold, friendships. Let the natural world stand, lout bring into it great ideas, and take care that you make these ideas prevail, until science, commerce, literature, and entertainments, wealth, and government, all become as fine gold, like unto transparent glass. Don't narrow us. Let the horizon of sanctity be as wide as the horizon of nature. Let ethics grow, and civilisation grow. That is the great conception of this work. You know that a good many men object to morality; they say it is so dull, that there is no growth in morality. If you get natural science, there is growth and development; but if you come to the Ten Commandments, the only thing is going on repeating them from one generation to another; you never get any further. You might just as well object to the multiplication table. I tell you in some ways there is no advance in morality; it is quite correct. It is not by an enlarged decalogue that there is to be an expansion of ethics. I tell you another thing. There is going to be no discovery of any new principle of ethics. Addington Symonds says the future of the world depends on the method of morals. He goes on to say, this world would be put on centuries if we could discover in the field of morals some new principle like the law of gravitation discovered by Newton, and so, if there should be any ethical Newton, to discover a new principle, it would put the world on by generations. Brethren, the life of God in Jesus Christ is the constraining law in morals, as the law of gravitation is the master law in the field of nature, and there is nothing more in our opinion to be discovered. So in the principle "the love of Christ constraineth us," and after that there is no new law to be discovered in the range of ethics. Where is the improvement to take place in the limit round about us? Where is it? In making the extraordinary sanctity of the few the sanctity of the mass, in bringing noble ideals to bear on the lowliest things, in making personal morality to be public morality. The time is coming when a man will put his soul into a convict's sackcloth because he cherished a sullied imagination. The time is coming when there will be no more wife beating, when a man will put himself upon the treadmill for a month for having given her an ugly look. The time is coming when a capitalist, a lady, would rather put on the cast-off garments of a leper than put on a purple that was stained by a workman's tear or blood. The time is coming when a man would rather pick his master's pocket than waste his time. There shall be such a spirit of magnanimity and charity, that a man will stand in the church porch and do penance for having in a moment of meanness given a three penny bit at the collection. "Oh," you may say, "that is a touch of the grotesque." I give you that, that you may remember it. Just as during the last fifty years the best thing of all is that the conscience of the race has grown, in the next fifty years the conscience of the race will continue to grow, and there shall be a code of morals, character, and etiquette more superb and delicate than any that we know today. Now, I say that is exactly the direction in which you have to work. Take your Christian conscience and perfect it by fellowship with the Great Ideal, and when you have done that take it into the world with you. Don't let any of the bad things continue. They must all go; all the bad things, however cunningly disguised, you must detest them. Precious in many ways as they seem to be to society, you must damn them. There must be no pleading for anything that is base and vile. It must go though appreciated by every age. Drop it into Gehenna. Mean that all common things shall be lifted up, that common things shall be transfigured. In visiting an art gallery the other day, I noticed that some of the greatest pictures had not a splendid thing in them. The ordinary artist, when he wants to be effective, paints a breadth of golden harvest, or he gets a kingfisher in, or he imagines some iridescent bird or other, some bird of paradise, or he paints a tree in blossom, or the captivating rainbow. But if you notice, some of the greatest painters that ever lived never touched these things. I noticed one of the pictures there. It was a railway object into it but the black earth, the cutting, a ploughed field. They got no brown earth, the red earth, but they touched it with that supreme touch that you can see the blossom in the dust, and the rainbow shine out of the cloud, and the picture without a brilliant thing in it was altogether bathed in imagination, poetry, and beauty. you want to give everything in your life the transfiguring touch of righteousness. Then you don't want a few great things to make it admirable and spectacular. (W. L. Watkinson.) Parallel Verses KJV: This is the law of the house; Upon the top of the mountain the whole limit thereof round about shall be most holy. Behold, this is the law of the house. |
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