43 Then he led me to the gate, the gate facing east. 2 And behold, the glory of the God of Israel was coming from the east. And the sound of his coming was like the sound of many waters, and the earth shone with his glory. 3 And the vision I saw was just like the vision that I had seen when he came to destroy the city, and just like the vision that I had seen by the Chebar canal. And I fell on my face. 4 As the glory of the Lord entered the temple by the gate facing east, 5 the Spirit lifted me up and brought me into the inner court; and behold, the glory of the Lord filled the temple.
6 While the man was standing beside me, I heard one speaking to me out of the temple, 7 and he said to me, “Son of man, this is the place of my throne and the place of the soles of my feet, where I will dwell in the midst of the people of Israel for ever. And the house of Israel shall no more defile my holy name, neither they, nor their kings, by their whoring and by the dead bodies of their kings at their high places, 8 by setting their threshold by my threshold and their doorposts beside my doorposts, with only a wall between me and them. They have defiled my holy name by their abominations that they have committed, so I have consumed them in my anger. 9 Now let them put away their whoring and the dead bodies of their kings far from me, and I will dwell in their midst for ever.
10 “As for you, son of man, describe to the house of Israel the temple, that they may be ashamed of their iniquities; and they shall measure the plan. 11 And if they are ashamed of all that they have done, make known to them the design of the temple, its arrangement, its exits and its entrances, that is, its whole design; and make known to them as well all its statutes and its whole design and all its laws, and write it down in their sight, so that they may observe all its laws and all its statutes and carry them out. 12 This is the law of the temple: the whole territory on the top of the mountain all round shall be most holy. Behold, this is the law of the temple.
One of the things that must necessarily strike us in reading these chapters is the sheer size of the building. This is wonderfully reinforced when we read the parallel passages in Revelation. What comes over so very clearly is the idea of spaciousness, and this applies not only to the glory to come, but to the glory here and now, when God in His grace and power, envelopes His people in His mighty Spirit. Even now, in measure, when we know His grace, there is a liberation from the crampedness and the straitening of life, and men are brought out into a large open plateau in the divine mercy, and feel as if they are able to stretch themselves to their full height. Here is a comment from earlier Notes on Revelation 21:9-27, about the spaciousness of the life that awaits us. It is as if we were meant to learn that the saints in glory will enter into a fullness and completeness of experience that knows no bounds, and there will be, as someone has put it, 'room for blessings of mind and heart that human frailty, the exigencies of life, the claims of vocation, denied them here; room for capacities which found no outlet here, for such things as friendships that life would not let us begin ...'. This is very wonderful. In the glory, the inevitable limitations that fallen nature places upon the best of God's children, and the voluntary restrictions that the law of love brings upon the liberty of the believer, restrictions that are gladly accepted, at whatever cost to the crucified heart, for Christ's sake, will no longer cramp or hinder, and we shall be able to stretch to our full height in the wide-open spaces of God's fullness, and to our fullest and truest destiny. Then, and only then, will we know what it really means to live. And the wonderful thing is that, even on earth, before the consummation, something of that glory can touch our lives. This is the relevance of Ezekiel's vision.