Through the prophet Ezekiel, God spoke a lot of judgment against the sin in the leadership of His people, as well as, with the people themselves and surrounding nations.
And after He promises judgment and the cleaning of the nation of its detestable acts and worship of idols, He then begins to promise His restoration of His people. He promises them the hope of raising them up again under the leadership of One King, prophetically speaking of the reign of Christ.
And then we come to a place where God shows Ezekiel the restoration of His temple. He shows Ezekiel a great vision of the temple and its measurements and different rooms and functions.
And He explains that His glory will return to the temple!
“…the glory of the Lord filled the temple..”
Ezekiel 43:5c
“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…”
Ezekiel 43:7 a,b
As I was reading this I kept being drawn to verses found in the New Testament, verses that say that we are the temple of God. And that being God’s temple, the Spirit of God dwells within us and lives with us.
“What argument is there between the temple of God and idols? For we are the temple of the living God. As God has said: ‘I will live with them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they will be my people.’”
2 Corinthians 6:16
So God calls us out to be holy! He calls us out to avoid idol worship because He already dwells within us, His believers.
If we try and wrap our minds around being a temple for the Lord, a temple where He promises Ezekiel that His glory returns to after it is made clean, after the detestable practices and the idol worship are not defiling His holy name any longer, then we will recognize our own personal need to have our hearts cleansed.
If we allow God to clean out our temple, to clean out our hearts of different sins, then His glory will have room to fill us up.
But if we do not allow God to clean us out, then we are missing out on a promise that He gave us where He says:
“My dwelling place will be with them; I will be there God, and they will be my people.”
Ezekiel 37:27
God promises that He will dwell with us and He is! He will be with us, but we need to live a life void of placing other idols ahead of Him.
If we truly want the glory of God to manifest within us through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, we must continue to keep our temples clean. We do this by the grace of God, asking Him to clean out anything that does not honor Him.
The more parts of us that we yield to the Lord, the more He has a place within us. But if we hold anything back from Him and keep it for ourselves, telling Him that He cannot have this part of us which becomes a form of idol worship within us, then we are robbing ourselves of that promise that He has given us all the way back in the book of Ezekiel.
We need to make ourselves available for Him to live in every part of us so that His glory is able to be reflected in our own lives, and so that His presence is seen in our actions and our words.
Paul understood this as a great miracle when God chose to make His children a temple that He can dwell in and glorify Himself through. It is an honor to be considered a temple of the Lord and we must live as such and abandon things that we’ve held onto tightly, things that the Holy Spirit continues to convict us over and over again to yield to Him.
“Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own;”
1 Corinthians 6:19
Yes, we are not our own. And God, by the Holy Spirit dwelling in us, has fulfilled a promise spoken through Ezekiel. We are living out that promise as believers in Christ today, for His temple, that’s us, is filled with His glory! Let His glory dwell in you!
“My dwelling place will be with them; I will be there God, and they will be my people.”
Ezekiel 37:27