God Wants to Live with His Church
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Intro
Intro
My Wife Laura and I got married almost 10 years ago!
Although separate, once joined in the covenant of marriage we came together as one and have lived in peace, harmony and joy ever since!
Now we all know that marriage isn’t all smooth sailing, Laura and I have plenty of past and present problems, and all of our marriages represented here (past, present and future)have their problems, but we all know what and ideal marriage is when we see it right? The husband and wife live together in love, enjoying one another and living self-sacrificially for the sake of building the other up. We know what the ideal is, whether we are married, or not.
Now what if I said, “well I’m married to Laura, but I’m going to live in a different house by choice”? You might start to think, “something is not right here....”
Then I might say: “oh yeah, I’m married to Laura, but I’m not really going to relate to her. She can do her thing, and I’ll do mine.” Then you would start to think, “something genuinely unhealthy is going there...”
Next I say: “Well, I’m married to Laura but’m going to chase other women on the side. No big deal, she’ll still be my number 1 relationship, but I can’t be tied down you know...”
You could very rightly beat me over the head for that kind of talk! It’s outrageous! Not least because this kind of attitude actually undermines the whole basis for a marriage!
The idea that someone, who has entered into a relationship of love and joy, would then separate themselves from the other, live as if they were actually independent, take the other for granted, want the benefits without the restrictions of relationship and even pursue other replacement relationships on the side is utterly ridiculous!
It is actually in opposition the hole point of the relationship. To live that way is to reject the other person, even if you have a certificate and a ring on your finger to say that you are connected.
In that kind of situation, we could rightly say that someone has broken their covenant, broken their promises, and that the other party is entitled to be freed from that relationship. Depending on the circumstances, they would be under no obligation to stay and keep pouring out their love to someone who has rejected them.
Well, that’s how it was with God and Israel. He said “I love you Israel, I’m going to rescue you out of Egypt, we’re going to have a big marriage ceremony at Mt Saini where I’ll lay down the basis of our relationship, who’s obligated to do what, how we relate to one another etc, then we will exchange vows, I’ll move in and then I’ll build you a beautiful house in the land of Canaan and we can travel up together and live happily every after.”
God Wants to Live with His people.
God Wants to Live with His people.
Today, we’re in the Book of Ezekiel, where the prophet Ezekiel deals heavily with this idea: that God and his people are meant to live together. Yet, in Ezekiel’s day God’s people are living in a foreign country and God has apparently disappeared.
So, Why does this old story of Israel’s problems matter to us? Well, because their problems are the same problems that we have today as the people of God, The Church. God teaches and instructs us today through the example of Israel.
What happened to them serves as an example for us, and it reveals the character of God to us.
Join me as we fly over the book of Ezekiel and look at four key points that will help us answer the question “What will it take for God to live with his Church?”
1. Our Temple Lost
1. Our Temple Lost
The book of Ezekiel uses the Temple as the way to tell the story about God and Israel.
Ezekiel was from a family of Priests, and if everything went according to plan Ezekiel would have gone into the family business as a priest when he turned 30. But instead of entering into his trained profession at the Temple in Jerusalem, Ezekiel is 1000 or so kilometers away in Babylon, exiled from his homeland.
They are displaced, they are dispossessed, they are driven out.
So here is Ezekiel, the priest with no temple to serve in, and God comes and commissions Ezekiel to speak to the exiled people of Israel to explain why they had been exiled from the land, and what God planned to do about it.
So this book is essentially a record of the messages that God gave to the people, but it’s not just a haphazard mishmash of prophetic ravings, it is an ordered account of oracles. When you read the book as a whole you can see a definitive story arc that ties all the pieces together. The primary theme that is used is that of God and Israel living together as shown in the Temple.
The temple is the place that God’s people met with him. It was the permanent version of the Tabernacle tent structure that God’s presence would dwell in while the people of Israel traveled. The temple is the place where God would live in the middle of the people of Israel and they would worship him, rejoice and meet with him. And God promised to bless Israel and care for them and provide for them.
There was one issue though. God is good. God is perfect. God is utterly holy.
But the people of Israel were not Good, Perfect and utterly Holy.
So we have a perfect pure God who desires to live with his imperfect impure people.
Then God says “what we’ll do I we will create a sacred space. A holy area that is free from sin and corruption and everything evil and abominable. it will sere as a buffer zone between you and me.”
Then he proceeded to give instructions about it. So, we’ll fence it off and separate it from everyday common usage and keep it only for God. Then create a structure (tabernacle, then temple) where God’s presence can dwell (most holy place) with a buffer to sin and impurity and we’ll create a safe space where God’s appointed people can approach and meet God called the Holy Place. Then outside we’ll have an altar where God’s people can come and meet him, worship and eat a meal with him (but not too close).” That’s all laid out in the books of Exodus, Leviticus and others.
Now all of this elaborate set-up with sacred space and a temple was not because sin and impurity could impact or contaminate God, but, because the sinful people would not be able to withstand God’s holy presence. In fact a few times when people were sinning right near God’s presence, fire came out and destroyed the people (see Nadab & Abihu).
So the temple provided a place where God’s presence could reside, where God and his people could live in blessing and protection. God Wants to Live with His People.
Problem was, the system never really worked. From earliest days with the Tabernacle there were problems, all of which could be traced back to the underlying problem that God’s presence was in the midst of an impure people. God even threatened to Moses once:
Go up to the land flowing with milk and honey. But I will not go with you, because you are a stiff-necked people and I might destroy you on the way.”
SO fast forward a couple hundred years to the time of Ezekiel, and things aren’t much better. Despite his threats, God had gone up with the people into the promised land, and they had built the temple and God dwelt there in Canaan with them but things didn’t improve. They remained rebellious, “stiff-necked” as it were. And God said as much when commissioned Ezekiel to be a prophet. He said:
He said: “Son of man, I am sending you to the Israelites, to a rebellious nation that has rebelled against me; they and their ancestors have been in revolt against me to this very day.
Israel’s sin against God was an ongoing problem. God had held up his side of the covenant promises, but Israel was obsessed with other gods:
On that day I swore to them that I would bring them out of Egypt into a land I had searched out for them, a land flowing with milk and honey, the most beautiful of all lands. And I said to them, “Each of you, get rid of the vile images you have set your eyes on, and do not defile yourselves with the idols of Egypt. I am the Lord your God.” “ ‘But they rebelled against me and would not listen to me; they did not get rid of the vile images they had set their eyes on, nor did they forsake the idols of Egypt. So I said I would pour out my wrath on them and spend my anger against them in Egypt.
God even describes Israel as an unfaithful wife, whom he nurtured and clothed and blessed only to have her cheat on him with anyone who came along. They would get into bed with foreign gods and nations whenever it felt right to them.
Eventually, God said enough is enough. He wouldn’t put up with it anymore, so he left. Ezekiel describes what happens:
He answered me, “The sin of the people of Israel and Judah is exceedingly great; the land is full of bloodshed and the city is full of injustice. They say, ‘The Lord has forsaken the land; the Lord does not see.’ So I will not look on them with pity or spare them, but I will bring down on their own heads what they have done.”
Then the glory of the Lord departed from over the threshold of the temple and stopped above the cherubim. While I watched, the cherubim spread their wings and rose from the ground, and as they went, the wheels went with them. They stopped at the entrance of the east gate of the Lord’s house, and the glory of the God of Israel was above them.
So, God had had enough. He had held back, but he would hold back no more. His glory departed from the temple where he had dwelt with his people, and he put the city to the sword. He had lived with their insolence, their rebellion and their abominations long enough.
The people were destroyed, the temple was torn down.
God left.
God had given them chance after chance after chance and they kept breaking their promises and living as if God wasn’t their God. God was well within his rights to destroy them. And he did, though thankfully, he preserved a remnant: exiles who would one day return.
Like a rose bush he cut them right back to the barest twigs, so they could burst forth in bloom, but only after winter passed.
Friends it may be hard to envisage this story because it is not a common experience for us to think about temples and God’s presence and God killing large numbers of people. But I want you to know that the God of Ezekiel is the God we worship now.
He is a jealous God. He is a righteous God. He is a just God. He will not put up with sin. And yet he desires to live with us, his people. As long as sin is in our lives we will not be able to share the fullness of a loving relationship with our heavenly father.
He is loving and kind, pouring out his blessings on people, being merciful and slow to anger. But he will not hold back his wrath forever. For those who want to live as though God doesn’t matter, he will be patient, but eventually he will treat them as they treat him: worthless.
We are all inflicted with sin and impurity, but God has plans that will sort out the problem of sin once and for all. His plan for a new temple where God and people can meet will be better and grander than what had gone before. It will be better in every way.
God has promised that he will make a way, not only for the people of Israel, but for people of every nation to be able to live with him, to be purified by him, to be cleansed and washed to they will never have any shame before God again.
Let’s go with Ezekiel, to see some visions that show us how God will fix the ongoing issues that prevent God and his people to living together.
2. Our Temple Rebuilt
2. Our Temple Rebuilt
After many chapters, proving time and again that Israel deserved the punishment that God gave them, the Book of Ezekiel lays out a magnificent picture of the future.
Yes, things have not gone well for God’s people,
yes, he has reduced them to almost nothing,
but, he has a plan in store for them and a future that will far exceed the past.
In chapter 40 God starts showing Ezekiel a series of visions focused around a future temple. These series of visions forms the climax of the book and shows Israel while they’re in exile that their present circumstances are not the end of the people of God.
For us, we probably don’t appreciate the magnificence of these chapters because things like building measurements just seem so boring to us. But, it creates a picture of a precise and measured temple that is perfectly proportioned and prepared exactly how God wanted it. Let’s get a taste of this right now in chapter 40:
I saw a wall completely surrounding the temple area. The length of the measuring rod in the man’s hand was six long cubits, each of which was a cubit and a handbreadth. He measured the wall; it was one measuring rod thick and one rod high. Then he went to the east gate. He climbed its steps and measured the threshold of the gate; it was one rod deep. The alcoves for the guards were one rod long and one rod wide, and the projecting walls between the alcoves were five cubits thick. And the threshold of the gate next to the portico facing the temple was one rod deep.
Ezekiel is taken around with his vision guide and measures all the different parts of the temple. Everything about the temple is precise, it’s just right.
Nothing is out of place.
It’s square.
It’s devoted as a holy space.
You imagine for a moment that you want to build a new house. I know not everyone is excited by the idea, but if you’re invested in building a new house, your dream house, you will know it back to front. Just ask Adam about the preparations he made to build their house.
You’ll find a good layout plan, make sure the living areas relate well to the bedrooms. That the orientation allows the winter sun will warm the house, but it can keep cool in summer. You gotta make sure the layout allows for entertaining guests. If you’re building your dream house you will be all over the precise details of room sizes, ceiling heights and color palette and type of windows.
It’s a similar story here. The dream house where God’s people can meet God and live with him are being laid out.
Ezekiel is shown a new temple that is bigger and grander than any temple that came before or since. He is reassured that God will create a space where God and man can live face to face in grand perfection!
God is not content to leave his people to languish in exile. Just as God will not put up with Sin forever, he will also not put up with being separated from his chosen people. He will bring them to himself. In fact Jesus says the same thing:
“Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me. My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.
3. Our Temple Filled
3. Our Temple Filled
Having painted a picture of this grand perfect temple Ezekiel is taken to see the return of the Glory of God. Remember earlier? God had left the temple because he couldn’t stand the evil and sin anymore and he did away with the old temple.
Now, in this vision of the future Ezekiel see’s a return of God’s glory to a grand temple. Lets look at that grand entrance:
Then the man brought me to the gate facing east, and I saw the glory of the God of Israel coming from the east. His voice was like the roar of rushing waters, and the land was radiant with his glory. 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 Kebar River, and I fell facedown. The glory of the Lord entered the temple through the gate facing east. Then the Spirit lifted me up and brought me into the inner court, and the glory of the Lord filled the temple.
With overwhelming sight and sounds God triumphantly returns to the temple! This is an epic event that heralds in a new age of God’s people being able to meet with God.
God’s back. His presence had gone out to the east, and has returned through the Eastgate, and now he will dwell there in a temple that will never be defiled again.
It’s a glorious future hope that Israel can look forward to. It will be the undoing of their shameful past.
God’s return fulfills God’s promises that he would never truly forsake his people.
Remember however, the visions of Ezekiel, like most prophetic visions, are not trying to lay out a specific literal picture of the future, but rather they paint a picture of what is to come. And in this case when Jesus comes he changes our perceptions of how God and people will meet face to face.
It’s not that there’s no Ezekiel temple, it’s that what Ezekiel is describing is an allusion something even grander and greater than an epic building where God lives.
He is describing the coming of God’s presence, God’s spirit, the Holy Spirit to dwell with his purified people.
God will prepare his people and purify them, sending his Spirit into them so that he can live with them, and they with him in joyful peace and purity. Ezekiel has already alluded to this in several earlier chapters, such as 36:
I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. Then you will live in the land I gave your ancestors; you will be my people, and I will be your God.
Then he goes on in chapter 37:
I will make a covenant of peace with them; it will be an everlasting covenant. I will establish them and increase their numbers, and I will put my sanctuary among them forever. My dwelling place will be with them; I will be their God, and they will be my people.
God wants to dwell with his people, but in order for that to happen he needs to get rid of what alienates us from God. He needs to excise the sin in our souls. He must cut out the cancer of rebellion, and he does that by filling us with the Holy Spirit, purifying us so that we can live the way he wants us to live, desire the things that God desires and live in the blessing that God has for his own people.
You see Jesus Christ came into the world to do away with sin. He died for sinners, in our place! He will cleanse us from all unrighteousness, but if we are to take hold of what Jesus has for us we need the work of God’s Spirit inside of us to enliven us so that we can seek God and receive the blessings he has for us.
The problem that divides God and people is our sin, so he will take away our sin and shame to that we can be joined with him.
Through this purifying work of Jesus and the Holy Spirit we are being built into a pure temple.
We are the New Temple.
God’s people is the place where his presence dwells!
Jesus said
For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.”
then Paul says to the Ephesian church:
Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.
No longer do we need dedicated mountains, and buildings and special altars and tools to meet with God, he is building his Church into the place where his presence will dwell forever!
In the future there is no temple building, and John says so in revelation
I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.
He is already indwelling us now by his Holy Spirit to purify us, to lead us away from evil and things that are offensive to God. He is growing and changing us into the perfect temple, ready for the return of God.
4. Our Permanent Temple
4. Our Permanent Temple
What happens after the glory of God arrives at the temple?
Well firstly, God says “I’m here to stay. This is permanent.” Look with me at 43:6-9
While the man was standing beside me, I heard someone speaking to me from inside the temple. He said: “Son of man, this is the place of my throne and the place for the soles of my feet. This is where I will live among the Israelites forever. The people of Israel will never again defile my holy name—neither they nor their kings—by their prostitution and the funeral offerings for their kings at their death. When they placed their threshold next to my threshold and their doorposts beside my doorposts, with only a wall between me and them, they defiled my holy name by their detestable practices. So I destroyed them in my anger. Now let them put away from me their prostitution and the funeral offerings for their kings, and I will live among them forever.
There is no way that God will allow sin back into the temple. What happened last time will not happen here. The people must get rid of anything sinful, anything immoral, anything contrary to God. This time the temple is here to stay. God will never leave his people, and they will give up their earlier ways.
Then, interestingly, Ezekiel is taken back to the gate where God’s spirit entered. The gate that God entered by, is shut.
It is no use anymore.
God has come in, and he shall never leave.
He’s here to stay.
Having purified his people and prepared a Temple where God and his people may dwell, all is well.
It’s permanent.
The relationship is reconciled. There’s no strife or division. No argument or cheating. Things are sorted. God will dwell forever with his people, and the Holy Spirit will go out, like a river, and rejuvenate the whole world, putting all creation right and making all things new. It starts off as a tiny trickle and grows into a wide full river - kind of like a Flooding Creek...
Worship between God and his people will be sorted out. And that’s mostly what the final chapters of Ezekiel covers. Now that God is back, and here to stay with his people, they will worship him properly. No more mixed and half-hearted worship. No more scattered people, they will be gathered around the holy temple city and live with the Lord.
Then the city is named in the final verse of the book, capping off the whole theme of the book. The holy temple city is usually called Jerusalem, or Mount Zion, but here it is given a new name:
“The distance all around will be 18,000 cubits. “And the name of the city from that time on will be: the Lord is there.”
The fact that God wells there with his people means that the city is now known by that name. It is called “The Lord is there”. It’s not merely blessed by God, it’s not only a place to worship, but is actually permanently the place where God is.
Interestingly a few years after this prophecy, God would God would send Jesus into the world with a similar name: Emanuel - God with us. He was with us, and after accomplishing his work on earth to reconcile us to God he has gone for a time, but when he returns it will be for good.
So we want God to dwell with us forever and never leave. We want to be the people of God’s temple who welcome his return and remain forever with him.
What now?
What now?
We are collectively and individually God’s temple.
If you are a temple of God, then live like it! (this pulpit isn’t holy ground, our hearts are!)
Put away every thing that God hates. Don’t defile this sacred space with
Division and strife
Sexual immorality - what is done in secret
Don’t be unequally yoked with unbelievers
Don’t serve false gods and idols.
Be devoted to being God’s dwelling place permanently, so that God will never leave. God has told us that some people will live a Christians for a time then turn away, seek to endure as the holy people who will never be expelled.
The take-away: We have been sanctified and indwelt by God, so we must treat ourselves as holy space.
“What will it take for God to live with his Church?”
He will cleanse us from all unrighteousness
He will bring us to himself
He will build a new temple that cannot be defiled
He will return to dwell forever with his people, something that he is already doing by indwelling us with his Spirit.