Context No. 2961 of 4322 · Ezekiel

Ezekiel 40:38-43: in context

38A room with its door was by the posts at the gates. They washed the burnt offering there. 39In the porch of the gate were two tables on this side and two tables on that side, on which to kill the burnt offering, the sin offering, and the trespass offering. 40On the one side outside, as one goes up to the entry of the gate toward the north, were two tables; and on the other side, which belonged to the porch of the gate, were two tables. 41Four tables were on this side, and four tables on that side, by the side of the gate: eight tables, on which they killed the sacrifices. 42There were four cut stone tables for the burnt offering, a cubit and a half long, a cubit and a half wide, and one cubit high. They laid the instruments with which they killed the burnt offering and the sacrifice on them. 43The hooks, a hand width long, were fastened within all around. The meat of the offering was on the tables.

In Ezekiel's temple vision, this passage describes the practical rooms and tables by the gate: places to wash the burnt offering, and eight tables on which the burnt, sin, and trespass offerings were slaughtered and prepared, with stone tables and hooks fixed in the walls.

It is technical, even grim, this catalog of slaughter-tables. But behind the machinery is a serious truth: approaching God involved blood, death, and cost. The temple was not only gold and incense; it had tables for killing, because worship acknowledged that sin required a life. These carefully measured tables kept before every worshiper that fellowship with a holy God is never casual or cost-free. And for us they point ahead to the one sacrifice that made all such tables obsolete, the Lamb whose blood, offered once, needs no repeating.

Do I remember that access to a holy God was never cheap, and treasure the one sacrifice of Christ that opened the way for good?

Sources

Ezekiel 40:39: "On which to kill the burnt offering, the sin offering, and the trespass offering."
Hebrews 9:22: "Apart from shedding of blood there is no remission."
Hebrews 10:12: "But he, when he had offered one sacrifice for sins forever, sat down on the right hand of God."