September 12 - Ezekiel 40-42: On a High Mountain

Ezekiel was standing in the midst of Jerusalem's destruction, 25 years in exile. He was shown what restoration would look like, what "the return of the glory of Yahweh to Jerusalem" (Asbury) would look like:

I'll make them secure and place my holy place of worship at the center of their lives forever.  I'll live right there with them.  I'll be their God!  They'll be my people!  The nations will realize that I, God, make Israel holy when my holy place of worship is established at the center of their lives forever.  (37:27-28)                                            

God touched me and brought me here.  He brought me in divine vision to the land of Israel and set me down on a high mountain..... He stood at the entrance holding a linen cord and a measuring stick.... After he had finished measuring what was inside the Temple area... He measured the wall on all four sides.   Each wall was 875 ft.  The walls separated the holy from the ordinary.  (40:1-4; 42:15-20)

Sound heavenly?  God's holy place of worship at the center of our lives.  Every measurement exact, everything perfectly in place.  God right there in the midst of the beautiful restoration.  We yearn for that kind of perfection.  We ache for everything to be in its place again.  What kind of restoration do we have to look forward to, from this place of our exile?  John prophesies to us in the Book of Revelations:

Look! Look! God has moved into the neighborhood, making his home with men and women! They're his people, he's their God. He'll wipe every tear from their eyes. Death is gone for good - tears gone, crying gone, pain gone - all the first order of things gone...Look! I'm making everything new! 

One of the Seven Angels....took me away in the Spirit to an enormous high mountain and showed me Holy Jerusalem descending out of Heaven from God, resplendent in the bright glory of God....the Angel speaking with me had a gold measuring stick to measure the City, its gates and its wall.  The City was laid out in a perfect square.  (Revelations 21:3-5, 9-15)

I'm not sure why the perfect square is important to God, but it is.  And I don't know why He chose high mountains to reveal His restoring work to His prophets.  I do know that I long for Him to make all things new, I desire Him to make His home with me and to finally experience the "bright glory of God".

"For glory means good [rapport] with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgment, and welcome into the heart of things.  The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last....then our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy but the truest index of our real situation.... At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door.....but all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumor that it will not always be so.  Some day, God willing, we shall get in."  (C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory)