Ezekiel's Temple

I've been interested in Ezekiel's temple lately. I've been studying up on this book of the Bible, being fascinated the mystics and strange people. Ezekiel probably fits in those categories, with all the inspiration he seemed to be under that was, to say the least, unusual.

So every word is worth considering.

I've always thought the temple section, everything from chapter 40 on, except for a couple of more interesting passages -- the returning of God's glory and the water flowing from the temple -- was very boring. I just stumbled through it, thinking of something else. Whatever!

But I've been more interested in that passage. And whether anyone has the key to it or not, and on the internet you can find all kinds of crap, I don't know. I tend to lean toward the passage as an idealized state of things from Ezekiel's point of view that is not going to be fulfilled in literal fact but still has symbolic, inner value. To me that's the kind of spirituality that's worth something.

Looking around on the internet, I found some of the graphics that people have come up with, which are very helpful to visualizing the structure of the temple set forth in the vision. And I came across something I'd never heard of, Google's SketchUp, which is like an architect's tool for putting building drawings in a program, so you can rotate it, zoom in, and see it like a viewer standing there.

There's a few graphics that folks have worked up about Ezekiel's temple with this program, and they are fascinating to look at. I couldn't really get the controls all to work, or maybe I'm expecting too much. But it's pretty fascinating to go into the Holy of Holies, for example, even if it's just a minimal computer mock-up. It's better than nothing!

I'd really like to be able to do more with it, but still it's worth checking out. You need to get the viewer.

After seeing the viewer, though, and moving things up and down and zooming in, all that, it feels weird looking at normal web pages. Like you're expecting them to move up and down just like that.