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no varying standards of holiness

Ezekiel 40:17-19 (JDV)

Ezekiel 40:17 Then he brought me into the outer court, and I noticed there were chambers and a paved surface laid out all around the court. Thirty chambers faced the pavement,
Ezekiel 40:18 which flanked the courtyard’s gates and corresponded to the length of the gates; this was the lower pavement.
Ezekiel 40:19 Then he measured the distance from the front of the lower gate to the exterior front of the inner court; it was 100 cubits. This was the east; next the north is described.

no varying standards of holiness

Fairbairn’s explanation of this section is helpful:

“The determinate things in the description are, that the compass of the outer court was exactly defined, an hundred cubits; that it was finely paved, as a place which should be trodden only by clean feet (emblem of internal purity); and that the erections belonging to it were to be a square of a hundred cubits, and consisting of thirty apartments. So that here also nothing was left to men’s caprice or corrupt fancies; as had been the case of old. While from the first there appears to have been an outer court connected with Solomon’s temple, it seems to have been left to a certain extent open to alterations, as well as the intrusion of idolatrous inventions; hence we read in 2 Chron. xx . 5, of “a new court, ” and in 2 Kings xxiii. 11, 12, of the profanation of the place, by some of the worst things of heathenish idolatry being set up there, for which, no doubt, the innovators would plead the absence of any express statutes determining what should or should not belong to it. Now, however, there should be no room for such displays of human arbitrariness and corruption; a more perfect state of things was to be brought in; and even all in the outer court was to be regulated by God’s
hand, and bear the impress of his holiness.”

God’s new people will not have varying standards of holiness. Each believer, washed clean by the blood of the Lamb, will stand pure and undefiled.

LORD, may our standards of holiness be yours.