"THE GOD OF GLORY LEAVES HIS TEMPLE."

Singing: (Psalms and Hymns are from the "Book of Praise" Anglo Genevan Psalter)
Psalm 99:1,3
Psalm 139:13
Hymn 8:13,14
Psalm 75:1,2,3,4,5,6
Hymn 55:4,5

Beloved Congregation of the Lord Jesus Christ!

The verse I have chosen as text for this morning describes disturbing action. With the eye of our mind we see it happening: God moving out, God leaving. It raises a difficult question: if God could leave His temple of long ago, can God leave His temples today? You recall what Paul wrote of the saints –that’s you and I- that we are temples of the Holy Spirit (I Cor 3:16f; 6:19; II Cor 6:16). Could God do to us today what He did in our text: move out of His temple?!

We find the question too terrible to contemplate. We know ourselves to be children of God, and tell each other that we are safe in His hands. We remind each other too that God is faithful, and never forsakes His own. But how does that square with the possibilities suggested in our text?? Is it really so that our Father in Jesus Christ could one day move out on us?!

As it turns out, beloved, the Lord God can move out. And sometimes He does. But His moving out is not willy-nilly; there are conditions that prompt Him to depart. As each one of us is responsible to be a fitting temple for holy God, we need to understand and accept the conditions under which God is pleased to dwell within us.

I summarize the sermon with this theme:

The action described in our text this morning is the climax of all that’s written in chap 10. the chapter is part of the second vision God showed to Ezekiel, spanning chaps 8-11. You recall: Ezekiel was sitting in his house in Babylon when the Lord God transported him in visions of God to Jerusalem (8:1ff), to the temple. The purpose of this vision was so that Ezekiel’s fellow exiles might be the more taken with the reality of God’s greatness, and repent of the sins they had learned from their teachers in Jerusalem before their exile – so that in turn God’s promise to Abraham might be fulfilled and Israel still be a blessing for the nations.

The vision spanning chaps 8-11 had begun with the Lord God showing Ezekiel (8:4) the same vision he’d seen in chap 1, ie, that awesome vision of God Himself aboard His chariot-of-cherubim. This time, though, God was not in Babylon but in the temple itself, in God’s chosen dwelling place on earth (cf Ps 132:13ff). Directly after seeing the glory of the Lord in the temple, Ezekiel was also given a tour of the temple – a tour that exposed the sins of Jerusalem (chap 8). In the temple of holy God Ezekiel saw the statue of Asherah (8:5), the secret room where prayers were offered to abominations (8:7ff), the women doing the Tammuz wail (8:14), and the elders with their backs to the temple worshipping the sun (8:16).

God’s response to this evil was laid out in chap 9. God called for six executioners with battle axes in their hands (vs 1f). The one dressed in linen had to put a mark on all in the city who sighed and cried at the abominations committed in the temple (9:4), and then the other five had to go and kill the remainder, whether old or young (9:6) – judgment. Chap 9 concluded with the return of "the man clothed with linen," and his report that he’d finished placing a mark on all the godly (vs 11). The other five executioners remain busy carrying out God’s punishment on the city.

What, then, is the situation at the beginning of today’s chapter? It’s this: the temple is full of the dead. And the streets of the Jerusalem are being filled with the bodies of the dead – old men and young, maidens and little children and women. Death: already in Paradise God had said that if man would sin they would die; "the wages of sin is death" (Rom 6:23). Well, sin has abounded in the city to such a degree that the wages of sin had to be paid out. So death abounded in the very place where God was pleased to put His name, where God was pleased to dwell among His people.

But what do you think, beloved: can God and death live together? More precisely: can God live where sin has triumphed to such a point that the wages of sin lie all over the floor – those dead bodies?! In God’s revelation to Israel He made so very clear that the answer was No. Adam and Eve in Paradise ate of the forbidden tree, sinned, and instantly they died spiritually. Result? God promptly sent them out of the Garden, out of His presence. So too in His instruction to Israel at Mt Sinai. The Lord commanded that anyone who touched a corpse had to go outside the camp (Num 5:2; cf Lev 21:1). Similarly, a leper –and God used leprosy as a symbol that death was in your body- had to go out of the camp (Lev 13f; Num 5:2). Those contaminated by death had to go out of the camp because that’s where God dwelt among His people. He is God of the living and not of the dead (Mt 22:32), and so will not live where death abounds.

Ezekiel 9 has described a city where the wages of sin has been paid out in full in temple and city alike; the place is filled with the dead (vs 7). So God must leave – because He’s God! That’s the context of chap 10, and that context explains the cause for God’s action as described in our text. He leaves because He refuses to be where death abounds!

This cause for God’s departure, brothers and sisters, is critical information for us as we seek an answer to our earlier question about whether God would move out on us today. The point is not whether sin exists in our lives; it certainly does, as it did every day in Jerusalem too since God was pleased to make His home among people in that city. But always the sacrifices of the altar had proclaimed how reconciliation was possible between God and men –through the blood of Jesus Christ- and so proclaimed how God and men could live together. But God made plain to Ezekiel that God’s people permitted sin to dominate – and therefore the gospel of the altar was buried under the stench of death. That’s the point: where sin is allowed to abound, to triumph, to dominate, there God leaves.

And make no mistake: sin can triumph in one’s life even one when still goes to church, yes, even when one still hears the preaching of the gospel. Where a covenant child permits sin to abound in his heart, to triumph in one’s life, God most certainly leaves that person. The church recognizes this departure by using the Form for Excommunication in relation to that sinner.

That brings us to our second point:

Our text tells us that God left. But the chapter makes clear that the Lord did not move out suddenly, in a desperate rush to get away. Rather, God had work to do before He left. That’s drawn out in detail in chap 10.

"The glory of the Lord," says our text, "departed from the threshold of the temple." In 8:4 Ezekiel had told us that when he first came to the temple of Jerusalem, he saw "the glory of the God of Israel … there, like the vision that I saw in the plain." We recall the vision: the four living creatures with wings and eyes and faces and wheels, with fire and amber and burnished bronze, and above eye level a firmament in the color of an awesome crystal, and above the firmament a throne, and high above the throne "a likeness with the appearance of a man high above it" (1:26). That is: here was one entity, together – cherubim, a ceiling above them, a throne above the ceiling, and God on the throne. But in chap 9 God had left His vehicle. 9:3: "now the glory of the God of Israel had gone up from the cherub, where it had been, to the threshold of the temple." The reason for His doing that was, you recall, those 25 men worshipping the sun, with their backs to the temple (8:16); though they rejected that temple the Lord claimed the temple, showed by standing in the door that this temple was His. Meanwhile, though, His divine chariot was left standing near the north gate of the inner court (9:3f).

God in His glory had been speaking to Ezekiel from the threshold. But what grabs the prophet’s attention in 10:1 is that chariot standing yonder. Particularly, what grabs his attentions is "something like a sapphire stone, having the appearance of the likeness of a throne" in the firmament above the heads of the cherubim (10:1). But see: the likeness-of-a-throne is empty. That is: Ezekiel is confronted with the fact that the Passenger of this divine chariot is not in His chariot; despite all the death in the temple compound, this divine Passenger in all His majesty and splendor is still standing by the threshold of the temple. But that can’t stay that way, for this God cannot live where death abounds. That raises the pressing question: why does the holy Passenger not go to His vehicle and be gone??

The answer is given in vs 2. The Passenger doesn’t leave the threshold of the temple to climb aboard His vehicle until He has first given an instruction. The executioner-in-linen –he’d just come back from completing his task of marking the godly- had just returned with his report (9:11), and now God-from-His-temple tells this man to go to God’s vehicle and "fill your hands with coals of fire from among the cherubim." In other words, congregation, God delays His departure; something has to happen before He leaves Ground Zero.

We have to come back to these coals in our third point. For this second point we need to notice what Ezekiel notices next. While that man-in-linen approaches God’s vehicle to collect those coals, Ezekiel notices a cloud. This cloud is an extension of the "glory of the Lord;" such is the brightness of God’s presence that it radiates around, generates a brightness all around (cf 4b). The purpose of the cloud is to draw attention to the majesty of God’s presence, the splendor of His glory. I’m reminded of the frilled-neck lizard of Australia’s outback (or to a lesser extent a fighting rooster); to attract attention to its presence, to its power, it throws out its frill or its feathers – and any onlooker recognizes that there’s danger here. Such is the purpose of the radiance around the glory of the Lord; such is His glory that death and the sin that produced this death must be consumed.

We need to notice that Ezekiel calls this cloud "the cloud" – though it’s the first time he mentions this cloud in his prophecy. That’s because Israel of Ezekiel’s day knew of this cloud; Moses had written about it in Ex 40 when God first moved into the completed tabernacle, and I Kings 8 mentions it too when God moved into the newly constructed temple. While that executioner-in-linen went to collect those coals, the glorious holiness of God was underlined for Ezekiel by this cloud filling the inner court around the temple (3b), filling even the temple itself (4ba). That serves to highlight the more that death and God cannot coexist; something dramatic has to happen.

Meanwhile, this delay evokes an impatience in the living creatures of God’s chariot. Vs 5: "the sound of the wings of the cherubim was heard even in the outer court." That is: while the executioner-in-linen is fetching the coals, and the radiance of God’s holiness shines in the temple and in the courtyard, the cherubim carrying the throne of the glory of the God of Israel begin to work their wings. But why would these cherubim work their wings? From vs 16 we learn that the cherubim use their wings to move God’s throne. That is: these wings form the motor, as it were, of God’s chariot. Well now, in vs 5 Ezekiel hears these wings, and the point is –if I may say it this way- the point is that the angels are revving their engine. Why? Well, when your passenger is standing yonder why do you rev your engine? Here’s an impatience on the part of the cherubim; they want to get away! They know that their God cannot be where death abounds, and so they would hasten to carry their divine Passenger away.

That same impatience is portrayed in vs 7. The Lord of glory had told the man-in-linen to go in amongst the cherubim to collect a handful of coals. But –vs 7- a cherub grabs some coals for him and hands them to this executioner; there’s an impatience with the cherub, things have to move along.

Then yes, while the man-in-linen is fetching the coals Ezekiel has a chance to observe these cherubim, and in vss 9-17 Ezekiel records what he sees. If you compare these verses with what Ezekiel had written in chap 1, you find that there is greater clarity here, greater precision; Ezekiel is not as stunned this time by what he sees as he was in chap 1. His conclusion is: this vehicle is precisely what he saw in chap 1, this is beyond doubt the vehicle that transported the God of Israel to Babylon. This is the vehicle whose engine is revving there in the courtyard, that’s calling for the God of glory to climb aboard….

And see: finally the God of glory did so! Vs 18: "the glory of the Lord departed from the threshold of the temple and stood over the cherubim." In all His radiant majesty, with brightness and fire all around Him, the Lord God of Israel moved away from the door of His house and climbed aboard His chariot-of-angels. He’d delayed His departure till the executioner-in-linen had filled his hands with coals. Now that the executioner has two hands full of coals, the God of glory is free to leave His temple. While He stood over the cherubim, these cherubim –vs 19- "lifted their wings and mounted up from the earth," carrying the God of glory away from His house….

This second point of the sermon asked attention for the delay in God’s leaving. The God of glory did not move out instantly because there first was a job to do: the executioner had to fetch coals from God’s vehicle before God’s vehicle could carry away the God of glory. That leaves the question why? Why did that man need his hands full of coals before God would leave the threshold of His temple? That brings us to our last point:

Those coals of fire. It’s surprising where this executioner had to get those coals from. The point is that the main altar in front of the temple –in front of where God was standing!- was to be burning; there should be coals available there (cf Is 6:6). That main altar was to proclaim the gospel of forgiveness. The sinner was to confess his sins over the head of a sheep, and then the sheep was to be sacrificed, burnt – and that’s to say that the sins of the sinner were completely gone and he himself reconciled to God. Gospel.

But now that God instructs the man to fetch coals, the Lord does not tell him to get coals from this altar. Why not? Surely, beloved, that’s because that altar is so defiled by the sin of the temple! The temple is filled with the corpses of the dead, and that’s because sin triumphed in this place; so even the preaching of the gospel on the altar is an offence to God. That in turn means that the reconciliation proclaimed on that altar is no longer a valid message for this people; these coals cannot function as a source of purification for the people.

The executioner-in-linen is instead to obtain coals from amongst the cherubim of God’s chariot (vs 2). This is the first time that we read of fire or coals of fire in relation to God’s vehicle, and yet the significance of this source is clear. The executioner is to fill his hands with fire from God.

Fire from God. We come across fire from God elsewhere in the Bible, and it’s very much a destructive thing. In relation to the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah we read that "the Lord rained … fire … from the Lord out of the heavens" upon the two cities (Gen 19:24). The result was the total destruction of the two evil cities; they were gone, with nothing left but ashes. When Nadab and Abihu offered unholy fire to the Lord on the day the tabernacle was first opened, "fire went out from the Lord and devoured them, and they died before the Lord" (Lev 10:2). When the people complained in the desert about their manna, "the fire of the Lord burned among them, and consumed some in the outskirts of the camp" (Num 11:1). When Korah, Dathan and Abiram challenged Moses’ God-given authority among the people, "a fire came out from the Lord and consumed" their 250 supporters (Num 16:35). That this executioner is to fetch coals of fire from God’s vehicle is to say that he’s to fill his hands with the fire of God. And that can only mean destruction, a destruction so total as only a fire can produce.

These coals, God added, had to be scattered "over the city" (vs 2). We all know well what happens when live coals of fire are scattered; this is going to start a blaze, a raging inferno, destruction. There’s the point, beloved: it’s to happen to Jerusalem as it happened to Sodom and Gomorrah! Via this executioner, God rains His fire upon the city!

Why? Not to kill the people. Remember, the five executioners with their battle axes are doing that; already the temple is filled with corpses. The fire of God consuming the city has another purpose.

Here, brothers and sisters, is the significance of the passage we read from Dt 29. In that chapter the Lord impressed upon Israel the consequences that would surely follow on those who turned away from God to serve the gods of the nations (vs 18). The plague God would give is this – and I quote: "the whole land is brimstone, salt, and burning…, like the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah …, which the Lord overthrew in His anger and His wrath." The executioner of Ezekiel 10 is to scatter his coals over the silent, dead city because God would repeat in Jerusalem the penalty He poured out on Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen 29:24) – and so fulfill His word spoken in Dt 29. As nothing could be found anymore of Sodom and Gomorrah –even to this day!- so nothing would be found of those ungodly covenant people who insisted on turning away from the Lord God. His anger would so burn against them that their name is blotted out under heaven; fire leaves nothing but a layer of ash…. The piles of corpses in Jerusalem’s temple and streets would be gone, gone…. God does not mount His chariot and leave the temple until He has organized such total destruction of His chosen dwelling place! So thoroughly would He purge the city of sin and its consequences.

This burning-of-the-dead in Ezekiel 10, brothers and sisters, foreshadows the burning-of-the-dead in hell. Those in hell are dead, spiritually dead, and the fires that destroy them burn continually – and never consume them. These spiritually dead experience in eternal form the infinite intensity of God’s holy anger; in the flames of hell is an everlasting weeping and gnashing of teeth – the fulfillment of the burning of Jerusalem.

But what, congregation, makes the flames of hell so terrible? What is it that made the fires of Jerusalem so horrible? What makes it so horrible, beloved, is the departure of God! The punishment of a God who is present is terrible, certainly. But infinitely worse is the absence of God; His absence is the ultimate punishment! Consider the child guilty of some grave wrongdoing. The parent can punish with a solid administration of the rod, but the parent can also choose for a while to ignore the child altogether. And the child experiences the latter punishment as much worse than the former. To be rejected, ignored for the remainder of the day; nothing is as bad as that! So it is with God’s departure. The absence of God is the ultimate horror! That’s why Jesus on the cross cried out His desperate anguish: "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?!" That forsakenness is what makes the fires of Jerusalem so terrible. With the absence of God there is no possibility for grace anymore , for the God-of-grace is gone! See there why hell is so awful!! And why the fires of hell burn on and on…, to eternal weeping and gnashing of teeth. That, beloved, is portrayed by the departure of God from the temple in Ezekiel 10! His departure means His absence, and His absence means there can be no grace, and therefore fury eternal – the consuming fires of hell that never finish consuming. How terrible, how terrible that God leaves!

Now the question from the beginning arises again. On the cross of Calvary Jesus Christ experienced the rejection God’s people deserve because of our sins; He was rejected "so that we might nevermore be forsaken by Him" – to say it in the words of the Form for the Celebration of the Lord’s Supper. So the triumphant Christ, after His ascension into heaven, poured out His Holy Spirit on His own, and in the Spirit made His home in us (Jn 14:23). That’s why Paul says that in the New Testament dispensation the saints are individually temples of the Holy Spirit (I Cor 3:16f; 6:19; II Cor 6:16). Understand that well, brothers and sisters: the same God who made His home so dramatically in the tabernacle of the Old Testament, the same God of glory who displayed His glory so majestically to Ezekiel, the same God who deserted the house of the dead in our chapter, has been pleased to make His home in sinners today. That’s gloriously marvelous!

But: can He leave us again? Can it happen to us as it happened to the temple of Ezekiel 10? In a sense the answer is No, and in a sense the answer is Yes.

I say it that way because the God Who has begun a work of salvation He will certainly bring it to completion (Ps 138:8; Phil 1:6). Those whom the Father has given to the Son, those for whom the Son has died and now indwells through His Holy Spirit simply cannot be snatched from the Father’s hand (Jn 10:29). That is why we confess in the Canons of Dort that comforting doctrine of the Perseverance of the Saints.

But –Dt 29:29- "the secret things belong to the Lord our God, but those things which are revealed belong to us and to our children forever." What’s revealed is not whether our names are written in the book of life in heaven; what’s revealed is the promises and obligations of the covenant. Dt 29: if you, whom God has claimed as His people, choose to serve other gods (instead of or beside the Lord of glory) you will die, become spiritually dead – for where sin abounds, the wages of sin must follow. Then Yes, God will depart, God will leave you to your own devices – and that is to say that ultimately you will find yourself in the fires of God’s anger in hell. It is the responsibility of God’s people-by-covenant to recognize who our God is, and serve Him with acceptable reference and awe. "Our God is a consuming fire" (Heb 12:29), and therefore we can give sin no room in our hearts or lives – lest we drive God out of our hearts, and so earn for ourselves a place in hell after all. Here is a call to serious self-examination!

What were the exiles of Babylon to learn from Ezekiel’s vision of God leaving the temple? Yes, it’s clear to us: they had to cut all sin out of their lives, repent of every evil that had received a place in their hearts – lest the God of the living discover that they were spiritually dead, and so abandon them, destroy them.

The God of Ezekiel 10 has not changed over the centuries. In His anguish on the cross Jesus Christ experienced that God hasn’t changed, and everyone not washed in Jesus’ blood will experience it too. For the God who rode His chariot-of-cherubim into His temple in Jerusalem and out again will return to earth on the clouds in great glory. He’ll take to Himself into glory all those washed in Jesus’ blood and made alive through His Holy Spirit. And He’ll cast into the everlasting fire those dead in sin. That’s our God, a "consuming fire", and so it’s imperative that "we may serve [Him] acceptably with reverence and godly fear" (Heb 12:29). Amen.