In visions of God he took me to the land of Israel and set me on a very high mountain, on whose south side were some buildings that looked like a city. – Ezekiel 40:2

Today's Scripture Reading (August 25, 2023): Ezekiel 40

Perception is a strange thing and often depends on experience. Often, we see what it is that we expect to see. When I was eight, my family moved west toward the mountains. We need to understand that the eastern mountains are different from the western mountains. The mountains from where my parents used to live were lower and usually covered with trees and vegetation. But, the western mountains were higher, rockier, and some were snow-covered at their peaks twelve months a year.

At the time of the move, I remember arriving at our new home, and my mother looked up at a nearby hill and declared that we had a mountain in our backyard. The locals smiled. The hill might have fit in with the mountains back home; even there, it might have been a little undersized, but it wasn't close to the mountains that could be visited just an hour's drive further west. My Mom perceived something from her experience, but it wasn't the new reality of the place that would become our home.

There is so much that we don't know about what follows in the rest of Ezekiel. It is an image of a Temple that has never existed. It is not a match for any of the Temples of the past; in some ways, it is a Temple that sometimes seems to be impossible to build in the future. And yet, many stress that this Temple is intended to exist in our "real world.'.

We don't know the Mountain that Ezekiel was taken to, although some believe it might be Mount Moriah, the site of Solomon's Temple. If it was Moriah, then the city was Jerusalem. Or maybe, more accurately, the new Jerusalem. The old city was still in ruins at this point in history.

But others aren't so sure. Others wonder if this new Temple was so vast that it seemed to Ezekiel to be a city. Nothing in Ezekiel's past had prepared him for what lay before him. And the hint is that Ezekiel says he saw "some buildings that looked like a city." Whatever it was that Ezekiel saw, it reminded him of a city, yet there was also something quite different from a city. The view from the mountain was both familiar and alien at the same time.

Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Ezekiel 41