Ezekiel 40:1-27

40:1 | Ezekiel received this vision about 573 BC, a little over a third of the way through the 70 years of captivity prophesied by Jeremiah (Jer. 29:10). A dozen years after the destruction of Jerusalem, the exiles needed a fresh word of hope to keep them focused in a positive way on the future. They needed a reminder that God would indeed return them to the Promised Land – and Ezekiel’s vision of a staggering new temple no doubt brought enormous encouragement to their downcast hearts.

40:2-3 | Because the rest of the vision has to do with a new temple, we might assume that the city the prophet mentions is Jerusalem, but neither the city nor the very high mountain described in the passage are named. This may be one clue that the temple described in 40-48 belong to a future era many years away, because at present there aren’t any high mountains close to Jerusalem. Very likely the temple Ezekiel saw belongs to the period of the Millennium and is located in Jerusalem (17:22; 20:40; Isa. 2:2; Micah 4:1).

40:4 | A divine messenger, a being who had the appearance of bronze, served as Ezekiel’s tour guide for the temple. The messenger made it very clear that the prophet was to pay extremely close attention to everything he saw and heard in the vision, and then communicate everything in the vision with painstaking care to his countrymen. While the wealth of detail may not seem very important or interesting to us, it communicated to the exiles that God had very meticulous and expansive plans for the nation of Israel, despite the present captivity.

40:5 | Chapters 40-43 contain a multitude of measurements for the new temple, based on the long cubit. A normal cubit was the distance between the tip of the elbow and the tip of the middle finger, usually about 18 inches; a long cubit added a handbreadth, the length of the hand at the base of the fingers, normally about 3 inches. If these average measurements are close to what Ezekiel had in mind, the temple he saw was enormous.