What form does worship take in the Millennium, and are Ezekiel’s sacrifices memorial?

Question 10198.

Millennial worship is described in more detail than most Christians realise, and the details are the reason the subject causes trouble. Ezekiel spends nine chapters on a temple, a river, a prince, a priesthood and a calendar of offerings, and anyone who believes the sacrifice of Jesus was once for all wants to know what those offerings are doing there.

I take those chapters as a description of real millennial worship rather than an elaborate figure of the church, and I take the sacrifices in them as memorial. Let me show my working.

What Ezekiel actually describes

From Ezekiel 40 to the end of the book the prophet is given a guided tour with a measuring reed. He records gate dimensions, chamber counts, wall thicknesses, altar measurements, the allocation of land to each tribe, the duties of the sons of Zadok, the offerings for new moons and Sabbaths, and the boundaries of a portion set aside for a prince.

Then in Ezekiel 43:1 to 5 the glory of the Lord returns to the house by the eastern gate, the same glory Ezekiel had watched depart in chapter ten. That return is the theological centre of the whole vision, and it tells you what millennial worship is for. The presence has come back.

Chapter 47 adds a river flowing from the threshold, deepening as it goes, turning the Dead Sea fresh and lining its banks with trees whose leaves are for healing. Chapter 48 names the city Yahweh Shammah, the Lord is there. Millennial worship, on Ezekiel’s account, happens around a God who dwells with His people in a fixed place on a real map.

Why I read it literally

The simplest reason is the measurements. Symbols do not need cubits. If the vision were a picture of the church, the surveying would be pointless, and Ezekiel is told in Ezekiel 43:10 and 11 to declare the plan to the house of Israel so that they may be ashamed of their iniquities and keep the whole design.

The second reason is that no past temple matches it. The dimensions do not fit Solomon’s house, the second temple, or Herod’s reconstruction, and the tribal land allocation of chapter 48 has never been carried out. A prophecy that has never been fulfilled is not thereby cancelled.

The third reason is consistency. If I allegorise Ezekiel’s temple while reading Ezekiel’s promise of a restored nation literally, I have made myself the referee of which promises count. I would rather let millennial worship stand as described and admit the questions it raises than tidy it away.

The problem the sacrifices create

Ezekiel lists sin offerings, burnt offerings and grain offerings, and in places uses language of making atonement. Meanwhile Hebrews 10:11 to 14 says that Jesus offered one sacrifice for sins for all time and then sat down, and that by that single offering He has perfected those who are being sanctified. Hebrews 10:18 adds that where there is forgiveness there is no longer any offering for sin.

You cannot hold that any millennial worship re-earns forgiveness. That would be a denial of the gospel, and no amount of prophetic enthusiasm justifies it. So either Ezekiel is not describing literal offerings, or the offerings do something other than atone.

I take the second option, and I think Scripture itself points that way, because the Old Testament sacrifices never took away sin in the first place.

Why memorial is the better answer

Hebrews 10:4 says it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. That is stated as a permanent principle, not a change of policy in AD 33. Every offering under Moses looked forward to the cross and did its work by pointing, never by paying. The Hebrew word for the sin offering, chattath, described the ritual by which the worshipper acknowledged guilt and God graciously accepted a substitute that prefigured a better one.

If an offering could point forward without paying, it can point backward without paying. That is exactly what we do at the Lord’s table. Bread and wine involve no atonement whatever, and yet they are physical, corporate, commanded and full of meaning, and nobody accuses us of undermining Calvary by observing them.

Millennial worship, on this reading, gives a converted nation living in natural bodies a visible national memorial of the cross, in the land, at the appointed times, in a temple where the glory has returned. The Hebrew term for atonement in these chapters, kaphar, carries the sense of covering and of ceremonial cleansing, and it is used of ritual purification of objects and places as well as of persons.

Some object that Ezekiel uses atonement language and that memorial offerings would therefore be misdescribed. The answer is that the same vocabulary was used throughout the Mosaic system for rituals which everyone in the New Testament agrees never removed guilt. If the words could describe a forward looking shadow then, they can describe a backward looking memorial in the kingdom.

What else millennial worship involves

It is not only offerings, and it would be a shame if the argument about sacrifices hid the rest. Zechariah says that the survivors of the nations will go up year after year to keep the Feast of Booths and to worship the King, the Lord of hosts, and that those who refuse will have no rain. Isaiah pictures nations streaming to the mountain of the house of the Lord to be taught His ways.

There is a priesthood from the line of Zadok, a prince who brings his own offerings and enters by the eastern gate, and a restored calendar of Sabbaths and new moons. There is music, since the Psalms describe the nations singing, and there is instruction, since the King Himself judges between the peoples.

Above all there is presence. The dominant note of millennial worship is not ritual but proximity. God dwells with His people, and the Hebrew idea behind shakan is exactly that of settling down to stay.

Holding Ezekiel and Hebrews together

Some very careful men take a different route and read Ezekiel’s temple as symbolic, and I understand why. My objection is that the symbolic reading has to decide where the figures stop, and the tribal boundaries and the river make that decision look arbitrary.

Others suggest the vision was a conditional offer to the returning exiles which their disobedience forfeited. I cannot make that work either, because the glory returns in the vision and the presence of God is not offered on the strength of Israel’s building programme.

So I hold both texts. Hebrews tells me the atonement is finished and cannot be repeated. Ezekiel tells me the nation will worship in a temple in the kingdom with a full order of service. Memorial is the reading that keeps the gospel intact and the prophecy standing, and it fits the pattern of temple sacrifices after the cross in the book of Acts, where believing Jews continued in temple observance without any suggestion that they were rejecting the finished work.

Where this fits in the prophetic programme

The temple of Ezekiel is not the temple of the Tribulation. During the Tribulation there is a rebuilt house which the Antichrist desecrates, and I deal with that in the article on whether the temple will be rebuilt. Ezekiel’s house belongs after the second coming, when the glory has returned and the land has been reallocated.

Nor does it continue into the eternal state. John says plainly that he saw no temple in the New Jerusalem, because the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb are its temple, which I explore in the article on that verse. Millennial worship is a stage, not the destination.

That progression is worth noticing. Tabernacle, temple, incarnation, church, millennial temple, and finally no temple at all because the presence fills everything. God has been moving in one direction the whole time.

One more distinction is worth making. Millennial worship happens in a world where the King is physically present in Jerusalem, which changes the character of every ceremony in it. Nobody in that temple will be wondering whether God is near. The offerings will be made in a city where He is visibly enthroned, which is about as far from empty ritual as it is possible to get.

So, now what?

Two things follow for us. If millennial worship is memorial, then our own memorial meal matters more than we usually let it. The kingdom itself will keep looking back to the cross, and so should we, without embarrassment and without rushing.

And if the whole vision ends with the name Yahweh Shammah, the Lord is there, then what God is chiefly promising is Himself. Is that what you actually want from the future, or have you been hoping mainly for the absence of trouble?

And the name of the city from that time on shall be, The Lord Is There.

Ezekiel 48:35 (ESV)