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Ezekiel Chapter
Forty-four
Ezekiel 44
Chapter Summary
This chapter contains ordinances relative to
the true priests. The prince evidently means Christ, and the words in verse 2, may remind us that no other can enter
heaven, the true sanctuary, as Christ did; namely, by virtue of his own
excellency, and his personal holiness, righteousness, and strength. He who is
the Brightness of Jehovah's glory entered by his own holiness; but that way is
shut to the whole human race, and we all must enter as sinners, by faith in his
blood, and by the power of his grace.
── Matthew Henry《Concise Commentary on Ezekiel》
Ezekiel 44
Verse 2
[2] Then said the LORD unto me; This gate shall be shut, it
shall not be opened, and no man shall enter in by it; because the LORD, the God
of Israel, hath entered in by it, therefore it shall be shut.
Shall not be opened — Shall not ordinarily
stand open.
No man — None of the common people.
The Lord — That glory which was the visible sign of his presence.
Verse 3
[3] It is for the prince; the prince, he shall sit in it to
eat bread before the LORD; he shall enter by the way of the porch of that gate,
and shall go out by the way of the same.
He — The king might sit before the Lord, others might not.
Bread — That part of the sacrifice, which was allowed to the
offerer.
Verse 4
[4] Then brought he me the way of the north gate before the
house: and I looked, and, behold, the glory of the LORD filled the house of the
LORD: and I fell upon my face.
He — Christ in the appearance of a man.
Verse 5
[5] And the LORD said unto me, Son of man, mark well, and
behold with thine eyes, and hear with thine ears all that I say unto thee
concerning all the ordinances of the house of the LORD, and all the laws
thereof; and mark well the entering in of the house, with every going forth of
the sanctuary.
The entering — The persons who may, and who may
not enter.
The sanctuary — Taken here for the courts, rather
than the house itself.
Verse 6
[6] And thou shalt say to the rebellious, even to the house
of Israel, Thus saith the Lord GOD; O ye house of Israel, let it suffice you of
all your abominations,
Let it suffice — Let the time you have spent on
your sins suffice.
Verse 7
[7] In that ye have brought into my sanctuary strangers,
uncircumcised in heart, and uncircumcised in flesh, to be in my sanctuary, to
pollute it, even my house, when ye offer my bread, the fat and the blood, and
they have broken my covenant because of all your abominations.
Bread — Either the meal-offering or first-fruits of corn and
dough, and the shew-bread.
They — The whole nation of the Jews.
Verse 8
[8] And ye have not kept the charge of mine holy things: but
ye have set keepers of my charge in my sanctuary for yourselves.
Have not kept — You have not observed the laws I
gave you for the keeping of my holy things, house, sacrifices, and worship.
Have set — You have substituted others in your rooms.
Verse 10
[10] And the Levites that are gone away far from me, when
Israel went astray, which went astray away from me after their idols; they
shall even bear their iniquity.
Are gone away — By their idolatry.
Verse 11
[11] Yet they shall be ministers in my sanctuary, having
charge at the gates of the house, and ministering to the house: they shall slay
the burnt offering and the sacrifice for the people, and they shall stand
before them to minister unto them.
Ministers — Servants employed in the lowest
work.
Sanctuary — Not the temple itself, but about
the courts of it.
Having charge — They shall be porters to open and
shut, and sweep, and go on errands.
To minister — To wait on the priests.
Verse 12
[12] Because they ministered unto them before their idols,
and caused the house of Israel to fall into iniquity; therefore have I lifted
up mine hand against them, saith the Lord GOD, and they shall bear their
iniquity.
Iniquity — The punishment of it.
Verse 13
[13] And they shall not come near unto me, to do the office
of a priest unto me, nor to come near to any of my holy things, in the most
holy place: but they shall bear their shame, and their abominations which they
have committed.
Shall bear their shame — They shall be dealt
with according to their abominations, and bear the punishment thereof.
Verse 15
[15] But the priests the Levites, the sons of Zadok, that
kept the charge of my sanctuary when the children of Israel went astray from
me, they shall come near to me to minister unto me, and they shall stand before
me to offer unto me the fat and the blood, saith the Lord GOD:
That kept the charge — Were constant,
zealous, and faithful in their priestly office.
Verse 16
[16] They shall enter into my sanctuary, and they shall come
near to my table, to minister unto me, and they shall keep my charge.
Into my sanctuary — Both to the altar, to
the temple, and the high-priest into the holy of holies.
Come near — To set the shew-bread on, and to
take it off.
To minister — To offer sacrifice at the altar,
and incense in the house. God will put marks of honour upon those who are
faithful to him in trying times, and will, employ those in his service, who
have kept close to it, when others drew back.
Verse 17
[17] And it shall come to pass, that when they enter in at
the gates of the inner court, they shall be clothed with linen garments; and no
wool shall come upon them, whiles they minister in the gates of the inner
court, and within.
And within — In the temple.
Verse 19
[19] And when they go forth into the utter court, even into
the utter court to the people, they shall put off their garments wherein they
ministered, and lay them in the holy chambers, and they shall put on other
garments; and they shall not sanctify the people with their garments.
Shall not sanctify — By the law, common
things, touching holy things, became consecrated, and no more fit for common
use.
Verse 20
[20] Neither shall they shave their heads, nor suffer their
locks to grow long; they shall only poll their heads.
To grow long — Priding themselves in it, as
Absalom.
Shall only poll — When the hair is grown, they
shall cut the ends of their hair, and keep it in moderate size.
Verse 21
[21] Neither shall any priest drink wine, when they enter
into the inner court.
Drink wine — Or any other strong liquor, when
they go either to trim the lamps or set the shew-bread in order, or to offer
incense in the temple, or when they go to the altar to offer a sacrifice, which
stood in the inner court.
Verse 24
[24] And in controversy they shall stand in judgment; and
they shall judge it according to my judgments: and they shall keep my laws and
my statutes in all mine assemblies; and they shall hallow my sabbaths.
Shall judge — Shall determine the controversy.
Assemblies — Publick congregations.
Verse 26
[26] And after he is cleansed, they shall reckon unto him
seven days.
Cleansed — After for seven days he hath kept from the dead.
They — The priests, who are about the house of God, shall
appoint seven days more to this defiled person for his cleansing before he is
admitted into the sanctuary.
Verse 28
[28] And it shall be unto them for an inheritance: I am their
inheritance: and ye shall give them no possession in Israel: I am their
possession.
It — The sin-offering: but under this one, all other
offerings are couched.
For an inheritance — Instead of lands and
cities.
Verse 30
[30] And the first of all the firstfruits of all things, and
every oblation of all, of every sort of your oblations, shall be the priest's:
ye shall also give unto the priest the first of your dough, that he may cause
the blessing to rest in thine house.
And the first — So soon as the first-fruits are
ripe in the field, your vineyards, and olive yards.
Every oblation — Whether free-will offering, or
prescribed.
The first of your dough — 'Tis conceived this
was of every mass of dough they made, and of the first of the dough, which
every year they first made of the new corn, as by the custom of the Jews at
this day appears.
That he — The priest may bless, and pray for thee.
── John Wesley《Explanatory Notes on Ezekiel》
44 Chapter 44
Verses 1-31
In that ye have brought into My sanctuary strangers.
The relation of the stranger to the service of the temple
What is reprobated is not of course allowing foreigners to present
sacrifices to Jehovah, which they might do (Leviticus 17:10; Leviticus 17:12), but allowing them to
officiate in the offering, and in general in the ministry of the sanctuary.
This is regarded by the prophet as a profanation of the house, and an
infraction of the covenant between Jehovah and Israel. It is the latter from
the nature of the case. Israel was the people of the Lord, and His service must
be performed by Israel. These heathen were uncircumcised both in flesh and
heart; their service was purely mercenary, and without religious reality. (A.
B. Davidson, D. D.)
No stranger, uncircumcised in heart, nor uncircumcised in flesh,
shall enter into My sanctuary.
God’s care of His altar
Is not this rather severe upon the stranger? The injunction does
not rest upon the fact of the strangeness of the stranger, because in Ezekiel 47:22-23 there is a distinct
provision for the stranger in Israel. God will therefore have the stranger in
Israel have his inheritance, his lot; but when it becomes a question of the
altar, God naturally looks round for the Levite. In this case the Levite was
not present; the Levite had “gone away.” How had the Levites disqualified
themselves? The facts are given in the context and in the text itself. First,
in Ezekiel 47:10, they “are gone away.” The
man who has exchanged vows with God should always be found in his place. When
he goes away it is like high treason in the army; when such a man goes away it
is as if a troop had been cut down with the edge of the sword. Gone away far.
Observe that next word. It was not a little lapse, one step aside; but “gone
away far from Me.” You cannot stop one inch away from God; one inch means two,
and two inches mean a foot, and the foot soon grows into furlongs and miles. To
what had they gone? They “went astray from Me after their idols.” Here is the
prostitution of reason. Here is no theological mystery, but a mystery of daily
life,--that a man shall know the true God, and turn away from Him; a man shall
know that there is a coming eternity, and yet shall tabernacle himself in the
huts of minutes and hours and all the other little details of perishing time.
To know the right, and yet the wrong pursue, is the miracle of manhood. But
were the Levites without excuse? They had their reasons. There was a general
decadence in Israel. In Ezekiel 47:10 we have these awful
words--“when Israel went astray.” It was not the movement of a man or two here
and there, or of a Levite or a priest, or an eminent legislator or leader; but
all Israel in one great mass, as it were, went away, and the Levites went with
them. Were not the Levites justified? May we not follow the times? The Lord
will not have it so. It is the part of the Levite to stem the torrent of the
crowd. It is the part of great statesmen and great writers and great characters
to stop others from doing evil, not to go along with them. The Levites should
have stood firm, whatever others did. Yet we must not make a perverted use even
of this explanation. There God expects every man to be firm, and we only
increase in responsibility as we increase in capacity, in opportunity, in
faculty, and in profession. Whilst, therefore, it is quite right to expect that
certain men should keep the faith and walk in the right way, our expectancy
concerning them is no excuse why we ourselves should go wrong. The Lord will
not deal with us in crowds, but in individual relationship to Himself, His
throne, and His law. What was the result? Were the Levites wholly discharged?
No; the word “yet” with which the eleventh verse opens point to an exercise of
the Divine clemency that is really wonderful, and it is worth while to indicate
this in words, because it continues unto this day. The Lord will never give up
a man until the man literally wrenches himself out of the Divine grasp. What
became of the errant Levites? First, they were deposed, put down to lower work;
degraded, we may say, to the second place; taken down one step, three steps, a
dozen steps, but still not wholly banished and excommunicated from the service
of the sanctuary. Now this may happen with all of us. What some men might have
been! They might have led us; instead of that they are put down to menial
service. Search into the reason, and you will find there has been a moral
lapse, or an intellectual infirmity, or some proof of disqualification. They
are not cast into the bottomless pit, they are not put beyond the reach of
light and hope and mercy; but it is of necessity that they should be deposed or
degraded. What is true of men individually is true of men ecclesiastically.
Churches are put into the second place; churches are put back into the third
place. The Church that ought to lead the world because of its wealth, its
learning, its historical opportunities and advantages, may so act that men who
have no name, no status, no background of history, shall come forward by the
voice and appointment of God, and lead the world into redemption and liberty
and prospect of heaven. Was the Lord then left wholly without faithful men? You
find the contrast in Ezekiel 47:15. There is always a contrast
in history. We thought in the preceding verses that all Israel had gone astray,
we find in the 15th verse that the sons of Zadok “kept the charge of My
sanctuary when the children of Israel went astray from Me.” There has always
been a faithful party in the state. There has always been an element of
constancy in all the mutation of men and times and institutions. God keeps
watch over that permanent quantity; it is as His own ark in the wilderness of
time. Sometimes the case of the ark has been brought very low; now and then in
history it would seem as if the kingdom of God had been within a very short
distance of extinction: but what is a “short distance” in the estimation of
God? A hair’s breadth is a universe; if there is one moment between a nation
and destruction, in that one moment God can work all the miracles of
deliverance. “Man’s extremity is God’s opportunity.” This lies within our
province and within our hope, may it lie also within our sense of duty, that it
is possible for us though few to be faithful; it is possible when all others
have proved faithless for us to be faithful found. (J. Parker, D. D.)
Faithful to our charge
“A beautiful story was told by Dr. Cooke, of Belfast, about a
gunner at Waterloo. Just as the recruits came up, who were the means of
turning, under Wellington, the great battle of modern days, the smoke and noise
was so great that he could not see five yards in front of him. But he felt the
swaying tides of the battle going this way and that, and did not know at one
time whether he was among English or French, friends or foes; and Dr. Cooke
asked him afterwards, ‘Well, my friend, and what did you do?’ ‘I stood by my
gun,’ replied the man. And that is what we have to do.”
They shall teach My people the difference between the holy and
profane.
Steering between the rocks
I. You can judge
of the moral character of any amusement by its healthful result, or by its
baleful reaction. In proportion as a ship is swift, it wants a strong helmsman;
in proportion as a horse is gay, it wants a stout driver; and people of
exuberant nature will do well to look at the reaction of all their amusements.
If an amusement sends you home at night nervous, so that you cannot sleep, and
you rise up in the morning, not because you are slept out, but because your
duty drags you from your slumbers, you have been where you ought not to have
been. If any amusement sends you home longing for a life of romance and
thrilling adventure, love that takes poison and shoots itself, moonlight
adventures and hairbreadth escapes, you may depend upon it that you are the
sacrificed victim of unsanctified pleasure. Our recreations are intended to
build us up; and if they pull us down as to our moral or as to our physical
strength, you may come to the conclusion that they are in the class spoken of
by my text as obnoxious.
II. Those
amusements are wrong which lead you into expenditure beyond your means. The
table has been robbed to pay the club. The champagne has cheated the children’s
wardrobe. Excursions that in a day make a tour around a whole month’s wages;
ladies whose lifetime business it is to “go shopping”; bets on horses and a box
at the theatre have their counterparts in uneducated children, bankruptcies
that shock the money market and appall the Church, and that send drunkenness
staggering across the richly figured carpet of the mansion, and dashing into
the mirror, and drowning out the carol of music with the whooping of bloated
sons come home to break their old mother’s heart. When men go into amusements
that they cannot afford, they first borrow what they cannot earn, and then they
steal what they cannot borrow. First, they go into embarrassment, and then into
lying, and then into theft; and when a man gets as far on as that, he does not
stop short of the penitentiary. There is not a prison in the land where there
are not victims of unsanctified amusements.
III. Those are
unchristian amusements which become the chief business of a man’s life. Your
sports are merely means to an end. They are alleviations and helps. The arm of
toil is the only arm strong enough to bring up the bucket out of the deep well
of pleasure. Amusement is only the bower where business and philanthropy rest
while on their way to stirring achievements. Amusements are merely the vines
that grow about the anvil of toil, and the blossoming of the hammers. Alas for
the man who spends his life in laboriously doing nothing, his days in hunting
up lounging places and loungers, his nights in seeking out some gas-lighted
foolery! The amusements of life are merely the orchestra playing while the
great tragedy of life plunges through its five acts--infancy, childhood,
manhood, old age, and death. Then exit the last chance for mercy. Enter
the overwhelming realities of an eternal world!
IV. Those
amusements are wrong which lead into bad company. If you belong to an
organisation where you have to associate with the intemperate, with the
unclean, with the abandoned, however well they may be dressed, in the name of
God quit it. They will despoil your nature. They will undermine your moral
character. They will drop you when you are destroyed. They will give not one
cent to support your children when you are dead. They will weep not one tear at
your burial. They will chuckle over your damnation.
V. Any amusement
that gives you a distaste for domestic life is bad. How many bright domestic
circles have been broken up by sinful pleasuring! The father went off, the
mother went off, the child went off. There are today the fragments before me of
a great many blasted households. Oh, if you have wandered away, I would like to
charm you back by the sound of that one word “home.” Do you not know that you
have but little more time to give to domestic welfare? Do you not see, father,
that your children are soon to get out into the world, and all the influence
for good you are to have over them you are to have now? Death will break in on
your conjugal relations, and alas, if you have to stand over the grave of one
who perished from your neglect! (T. De Witt Talmage.)
I am their inheritance.
God an inheritance
We possess God as the flower the sunlight; as a babe the mother.
All His resources are placed at our disposal. The seed cast into the ground
immediately begins to take from earth and air the nutriment of its life, and we
have the same power of deriving from the infinite fulness of God all that shall
make us pure and strong and gentle. Ours are the unsearchable riches of Christ;
we are made full through the fulness which God the Father has been pleased to
make dwell in Him. All the resources which have been placed at His disposal in
His ascension and eternal reign are gifts which He holds for men. Alas for us
that we fail to possess our possessions! (F. B. Meyer, B. A.)
God the portion of the people
Christ is all in all to His people. He is all their strength,
wisdom, and righteousness. They are but the clouds irradiated by the sun, and
bathed in its brightness. He is the light which flames in their grey mist and
turns it to a glory. They are but the belt and cranks and wheels; He is the
power. They are but the channel, muddy and dry; He is the flashing life which
fills it and makes it a joy. They are the body; He is the Soul dwelling in
every part to save it from corruption and give movement and warmth.
“Thou
art the organ, whose full breath is thunder;
I
am the keys, beneath Thy fingers pressed.”
(A. Maclaren, D. D.).
──《The Biblical Illustrator》