Today, I am reading and commenting on Ezekiel 44-45.

As part of his prophecy about the new temple in his vision, Ezekiel condemns the Israelites for putting foreigners who did not worship God in charge of the sanctuary of God.  He refers to those who had been put in charge as uncircumcised in flesh and in heart.  Then Ezekiel goes on to talk about those who will be priests in this new temple he sees and what they are to do.  They are to teach God’s people the difference between the holy and the common, and show them how to distinguish between the clean and the unclean.  Other translations say sacred and profane instead of holy and common.  I think that the other translations give us a clearer understanding of the job of our religious leaders, and a better idea of the importance of learning this distinction.  The NIV leaves us with the impression that there is the ordinary and the holy, and, while that difference is important, that it is OK to be ordinary.  When, in fact, everything we do is either sacred or profane, clean or unclean.  So, that makes it very important that we learn to distinguish between the sacred and the profane, between the clean and the unclean.  Here Ezekiel condemns the Israelites for, in the past, bringing the profane, the unclean, into the sacred spaces of God’s temple and warns them against doing so in the future.  In Acts 10 Peter was told not to call unclean that which God had made clean.  These two commands tell us the importance of having leaders who can teach us to distinguish between the sacred and the profane.  We must not bring into God’s presence that which is profane, but we also must not exclude those whom God has declared clean.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.