The inner room was 35 feet square. “This,” he told me, “is the Most Holy Place.”
Ezekiel 41:4 (New Living Translation)
There are people who are comfortable with numbers. They understand how digits can come together to either get bigger or to get smaller. They are so comfortable with digits that they often go out to play together and have great fun. I am not one of those people. I don’t understand numbers.
Some people would be able to comment on the importance of the 35 square feet. My focus is on what would be going on in that space.
This scripture comes from the time when the Israelites were in Babylon, 25 years after they had been taken captive and removed from their homes — and their place of worship. When Moses led his group out of Egypt, God told them how to create a Temple out of their tents. This would be a place where people could approach God and a relationship could be re-established. The size was dependent on what they had. The outer court would have to hold everyone, so it covered the biggest area. As a person came closer to the heart of God, however, the space became smaller until the Most Holy Place was reached — in the heart of the Temple.
When Solomon finally built a more permanent structure, it followed the same trend with a huge outer court and smaller spaces and rooms until the heart was reached — the Most Holy Place. The Most Holy Place was separated from the Holy Place by a curtain and only the high priest could enter that space and he could only enter one day a year, the Day of Atonement. The Ark of the Covenant, with the tablets upon which God had written his commandments, was housed in that room and could only be seen by the high priest on that one day each year.
We still tend to follow that same philosophy — kind of like the Venn Diagrams. We start with a big circle that represents the universe of possibilities. Then we carve out subsets: those people who don’t believe in God, those people who don’t believe that Jesus is the Son of God, those who don’t speak English (or who don’t believe the same things we believe) until we realize that we are our own high priest, and the remaining space becomes our Most Holy Place.
We forget that God is the God of the universe. God created everything and everything is his. The thing is, God is so much bigger than we can imagine. What manner of building could hold God?
In Isaiah 66:1 God speaks to Isaiah about his house. “Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool. Could you ever build me a temple as good as that?” If the Most Holy Place is where we meet with God, it should probably be a pretty big room.
Becky Gillette is a former teacher, newspaper reporter, and preacher who seeks to take an original approach to life’s lessons. She has recently published her first book, Jessie’s Corner: Something To Think About, which is now available for purchase. Based on several lesser-known scriptures from the Bible, this is a collection of articles which she wrote for a weekly newspaper.
