Online Resource Library
Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comJamieson Fausset Brown Commentary - Ezekiel 11:16 - 11:16
(Show All Books | Show All Chapters)
This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
Although - anticipating the objection of the priests at Jerusalem, that the exiles were “cast far off.” Though this be so, and they are far from the outer temple at Jerusalem, I will be their asylum or sanctuary instead (Psa 90:1; Psa 91:9; Isa 8:14). My shrine is the humble heart: a preparation for gospel catholicity when the local and material temple should give place to the spiritual (Isa 57:15; Isa 66:1; Mal 1:11; Joh 4:21-24; Act 7:48, Act 7:49). The trying discipline of the exile was to chasten the outcasts so as to be meet recipients of God’s grace, for which the carnal confidence of the priests disqualified them. The dispersion served the end of spiritualizing and enlarging the views even of the better Jews, so as to be able to worship God everywhere without a material temple; and, at the same time, it diffused some knowledge of God among the greatest Gentile nations, thus providing materials for the gathering in of the Christian Church among the Gentiles; so marvelously did God overrule a present evil for an ultimate good. Still more does all this hold good in the present much longer dispersion which is preparing for a more perfect and universal restoration (Isa 2:2-4; Jer 3:16-18). Their long privation of the temple will prepare them for appreciating the more, but without Jewish narrowness, the temple that is to be (Ezekiel 40:1-44:31).
a little - rather, “for a little season”; No matter how long the captivity may be, the seventy years will be but as a little season, compared with their long subsequent settlement in their land. This holds true only partially in the case of the first restoration; but as in a few centuries they were dispersed again, the full and permanent restoration is yet future (Jer 24:6).