Ezekiel 43:7, Ezekiel’s Temple Dream

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….”

//In today’s verse, God speaks to Ezekiel and tells him that a new Temple must be built as his holy house. God dictates to Ezekiel several chapters of precise building instructions, describing a magnificent picture of a second Temple.

Ezekiel was not the only one to dream of a second Temple. Here is Isaiah’s promise, written much earlier, from which Ezekiel surely finds inspiration.

In the last days the mountain of the LORD’s temple will be established as chief among the mountains; it will be raised above the hills, and all nations will stream to it.

This will be quite a thing, won’t it? Except for one thing. Ezekiel, an “exile prophet” (he prophesied during the period of time the Jews spent in exile in Babylon) was describing the day when the Jews would be released from bondage, and allowed to travel back to their homeland. When that day came, a magnificent second Temple would be erected, and God would dwell there with his people forever.

Then the day came. Israel was allowed to go home, and the second Temple construction began. But it was such a poor, pathetic attempt that the elders, those who remembered the glory of Solomon’s temple, sat and cried. No way would God come and dwell there forever! They scanned the horizon for a descendant of King David to arrive and rule their new kingdom, but he never arrived. For hundreds of years the Jewish nation floundered, and eventually King Herod the Great began construction on a newer, grander Temple for the Jews, resurrecting the dream of a Davidic Messiah who would arrive and rule. But again the dream dissipated. Before the Temple was finished, in 70 A.D., it was destroyed by the Romans.

Two thousand years later, many people point to the prophecies that didn’t pan out and continue to dream of yet another Temple.