December 6, 2020 “There” – Ezekiel 48:30-35

Ezekiel 48:30-35 (p. 396 in Prophets)
“There”
December 6, 2020 – Second Sunday in Advent

It’s hard not to be there. Many of us felt that as we celebrated Thanksgiving apart, separated from family and friends with whom we might have sat down together in any other year. Zoom helps a little, but it’s a world of difference between a hug and a wave, between pictures of food shared on screen and dishes passed hand to hand.

Those of us with other family events, like the birth of a grandchild or a wedding, happening in far off places also ache from the impossibility of being there, especially when we see and hear our children struggling and want to comfort them, hold that crying baby for them, and just reassure them with our presence.

Maybe all that absence instead of presence gives you and me a little taste of God’s feelings as the book of Ezekiel unfolds. The first and larger part of the prophecy shows us God’s glory, His presence, departing from the Temple, and from Jerusalem. We may have focused on the human emotion of the Jewish people as they learned God had left them. But consider for a moment God as Father forced by the disease of sin to be gone from His people like a virus has forced some of us to be apart from our children, from grandchildren, and from other family. That sadness is like God’s sadness as told by Ezekiel.

In our text, Ezekiel’s final vision is a city with twelve gates named after the twelve sons of Jacob whom God called Israel. It does not start out that promising. Page 396, verse 30, says “These will be the exits of the city.” It’s “exits,” not “entrances.” And “gates” sound like something to keep people out rather than to let people in. It feels a bit like a vision of more separation and sadness. There is something to that feeling.

Just as we hope for some lasting solution to COVID-19 in the form of a vaccine, God declared there would be a lasting solution to human sin. We get the hint of that at points in Ezekiel. God will make changes in His people. He will give them a new heart and a new spirit, perhaps a new immunity to sin.

Yet human sin and evil is powerful. Part of the picture Ezekiel paints is God forcefully dealing with it. In oracles like we’ve read in other prophets, he prophesies that corrupt and evil cities and nations will be judged, Tyre, Sidon, Egypt. Leading up to a description of a new Temple and then finally this new city, on page 379, chapter 38, a mysterious evil enemy, a prince, appears. His name is Gog. He comes from a land called Magog. Those names show up again in the book of Revelation, chapter 20. But the promise here in Ezekiel is that God will overthrow the evil powers that oppress His people. He will bring down every wealthy and arrogant force which holds them captive.

As we’ve said all along from Isaiah on forward, God promised to defeat His people’s enemies and bring them home. The exile to Babylon would end. Here in Ezekiel we get the further promise that God would meet them there, that the glory which departed the Temple because of their sins would come back. There would be a new Temple and a new order of things. Our text today captures that in the last sentence of Ezekiel. The city will have a new name. It will be called “The Lord is There.”

You and I need to think about that prediction and ask, “Where is that ‘There’ where the Lord will be?” In other words, what exactly is Ezekiel talking about? Does it mean anything for you and me? If you’ve read these last dozen chapters of Ezekiel, you know that much of it is about a new Temple and then a regathered, re-ordered nation of Israel. That Temple has incredible dimensions, with 10-foot thick walls. But no temple was ever built according to those plans given to Ezekiel.

The exiles started rebuilding the Temple when they went back to Jerusalem in 539 B.C. Herod the Great remodeled and expanded and beautified it five hundred years later, partly during Jesus’ life on earth. But it was not Ezekiel’s temple. Nor did anyone even seem to notice it was not Ezekiel’s temple. In Ezra 3 verse 12 we read that old people who had seen the first Temple wept when the saw the second one, probably because the new one could not compare to that old one. But no one compared it to Ezekiel’s plan.

Then on pages 395 to 396 in Prophets, chapters 47 and 48, there’s a whole scheme for a very orderly portioning out of the land of Israel between the 12 tribes, never mind that ten of them were long gone, as I said last week. Our text wraps it all up with the picture of a perfectly square city, a mile and a half on each side, with three gates on each wall, named after the original sons of Jacob who was Israel.

Bible students with a gift for detail and precision have created drawings of that new temple, even 3-D animations of it, along with maps showing the new boundaries of the tribes, delineating the location of the temple, the city and surrounding farmland to support it all. But where is it? God said He would be there, but where is “there?”

There are two sorts of answers to that question of where “there” is for Ezekiel’s final visions. The first kind aims at taking God’s prophet literally. Those temple drawings and maps are genuine attempts to visualize a structure and national borders which will actually appear on earth at some future time. So the “there” question is literally both a “where” and a “when” question. God will be there at a particular place on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea and at a particular time, as yet unknown, in the future.

Those who take the question “Where is there?” literally, typically wrap their answer in a whole outline of the future. For Jews it was when the Messiah would come. For Christians it is when Jesus comes back. Many images in Ezekiel show up in the book of Revelation and they tie all the literal fulfillment of this prophecy to the promise of Christ’s return to set up a kingdom on earth that actually has something like Ezekiel’s dimensions.

The first problem with that literal approach to all this is that it ignores the fact that neither Ezekiel nor John in Revelation want us to take their measurements and floor plans as actual blueprints. In Revelation that city with 12 gates gets encrusted with gem stones and the gates are pearl. Instead of Ezekiel’s square city a mile and a half on each side, John’s vision is of a gigantic cube 1,400 miles long and wide and high, with walls 216 feet thick. These are awesome dreams of what it would take to house the presence of God, not designs for civil engineers to carry out.

Of course, God can make all the engineering happen if He wants. As I said Friday morning, I may look back one day in eternity and say, like I will about a lot of things, “I was sure wrong about that.” Yet I just can’t believe that incredibly huge buildings and thick walls are the real point here.

The biggest problem with interpreting Ezekiel literally here and expecting some future massive construction project and geographical rearrangement in Palestine is that it offers nothing to anyone right now, nor to any of God’s people down through the ages until that supposed time arrives. What difference did that hypothetical temple and regathering of Israel make to the exiles during their fifty years in Babylon? What difference does it make to you and me as we drag through the months of COVID-19 isolation and get ready to celebrate Christmas alone in our homes? Not much, if it’s all still yet to happen.

So what if we do as the writers of Scripture themselves did and jump out of our Babylonian captivity to literal interpretation of every sentence in Scripture? We can then understand that God has already begun to fulfill this prophecy in our world, for people long ago, and for you and me today. The prophecy, the promise, is that God will bring a new and perfect order into this world and to our worship of Him. The promise is that wherever and whenever that new order appears, God will be there.

“God will be there” is what John the Baptist announced in our Gospel lesson from Mark 1 today, when he cried out, “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight!” Those perfectly square dimensions of Ezekiel’s temple and the city beside it, those careful orderings of priests and attendants in that temple, that perfect realignment of boundaries between tribes—they are all ways of saying the path for God’s arrival will be true and straight when He comes to live with us forever.

John the Baptist announced the coming of Jesus. He baptized people to show their repentance and their desire for the forgiveness of sins. He said Jesus would bring a pure, cleansing baptism of fire, the Holy Spirit, which would take away sin forever. Jesus came to defeat Gog, to overcome the forces of evil in this world, and to overcome everything which divides and separates people from each other. That’s what Ezekiel was writing about, even if he did not know it himself.

In Advent this year we are singing “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” each Sunday. That name Emmanuel means the same as that new name for the city in Ezekiel. Emmanuel means “God with us,” which is the same is saying “God is there,” if by there we mean right here, not off somewhere far distant and far in the future.

Read through that description of the ideal Temple and its rituals. Along with all the mind-numbing, repetitive dimensions and specifications for sacrifices to be offered, and new borders to be laid out, you also find the same concerns that we’ve heard from every prophet. First, God wants to live among people who are holy and single-mindedly devoted to Him. That’s all there in the warning about what clothes the priests will wear and who can enter the temple. On page 387 it’s all summed up by saying the rule for that new temple will be “absolute holiness.” Second, God expects this new order to be one of justice. At the bottoms of pages 390 and 392 there is the expectation that the “princes,” the government, will not oppress and rob people. No one is to get evicted from their home unjustly. Holiness and justice, love for God and love neighbor. As Jesus said, that sums up the Law and the Prophets. It sums up all these last visions of Ezekiel.

So in our text every tribe has a gate into the city. There’s no favoritism. There are no more lost tribes. There is no more division. Everyone is welcome. On the bottom of page 394, chapter 47 verse 22, it says that even foreigners will have an allotment of land in that new Israel and “They will be like native-born Israelites to you.” No one who wants to be in, who wants to belong to the Lord, will be left out.

All of this gets fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Jesus is the new and perfect Temple. Some of our men Friday wondered about what it says on page 387, chapter 43 verse 10. God tells Ezekiel to describe the plan for the new temple, “so they will be ashamed of all their sins.” That doesn’t make a lot of sense if this is only about measurements for blocks of stone. But if it’s about the living Temple of the Body of Christ, then it makes perfect sense. Looking at the perfect life of Jesus, anyone should be ashamed of how he or she measures up to Him.

So God’s answer to sin, God’s lasting solution for evil, is also fulfilled in Jesus. John came baptizing with water for the forgiveness of sin, and Jesus added to that the baptism of fire, which is also the living water of the Holy Spirit. One more wild and crazy piece of Ezekiel’s vision is a river that starts in the temple. With no obvious tributaries it just keeps growing deeper and wider till it runs down into the Dead Sea and brings it to life, turns salt water to fresh, and fills it with fish. Like the holy city, that River also appears in Revelation, the River of the Water of Life. That too is Jesus, my friends.

Where is there? There is where Jesus is. There is anywhere you or I or anyone prepares straight paths for Him and welcomes Him into the place where they live. We celebrate Communion today to remember that. Covenant people and many, many Christians talk about the fact that Jesus is present there when we eat that bread and drink that cup. We call it the “real presence” of our Lord in the sacrament. And when we receive that sacrament as we must today, spread out in our homes, physically apart, He is still there, still in His people, still holding them together as one people, as one Body.

Where is there? Ezekiel is not just pointing us to some incredible monument to be built in the future. He’s pointing us to our Lord’s promise that He is there wherever people turn to Him in faith, in hope, even in simple need. Jesus is there in your home right now, even if you are all alone. That’s where there is.

Where is there? Jesus is there wherever anyone is alone or feels alone. He is there in that care facility where residents are isolated and family cannot visit. He is there in tents set up by people who have no other homes strung out in makeshift campsites around our town. Jesus is there in prison cells where COVID-19 runs rampant and no one seems to care very much. Jesus is in that solitary hospital room where a patient is dying by herself and at her graveside where family members stand six feet apart and try to remember what she looked like because they haven’t been able to see her for days or weeks. Jesus is there.

Where is there? Jesus is there when a nurse puts on his mask, says a prayer, and enters a hospital room to care for and comfort a patient. Jesus is there as you say prayers for a baby struggling to breathe in Salt Lake City and for persecuted Christians in China and Iran and North Korea. Jesus is there when children light Advent candles and listen to promises about His coming for the first time in their lives. Jesus is there.

Where is there? Just in that fantastic Temple, in that holy city? No, you and I don’t have to wait for them to be built. We don’t have to wait for the day we get to go there, like my wife and I are waiting to go see our new grandchild in England. Jesus has come into the world. He is there. He is here. As we come to this Table now, connected by camera and screen, which still feels awkward and strange, Jesus is still here, and still there with you.

In the middle of page 387 in Prophets, chapter 43 verse 7, God told Ezekiel, “Son of man, this is the place of my throne and the place where I will rest my feet. I will live here forever among the people of Israel.” John the Baptist said he was not worthy to even untie the laces of Jesus’ sandals, but Jesus came walking into this world anyway, placing His feet on our ground and making it holy. We are not worthy either, but Jesus still comes to us.

Where is there? It’s here. It’s us. We the people of Jesus Christ are the City whose new name is, “The Lord is There.” He is. He is there with you and He will be there forever.

Amen.