The Geometry of Grace: God's Perfect Altar Text: Ezekiel 43:13-17
Introduction: The Scandal of Specificity
We live in an age that loves abstract spirituality but despises concrete religion. Our culture wants a god who is a warm, benevolent fog, a deity of good vibes and general niceness, a god who would never be so gauche as to have strong opinions about measurements, materials, or directions. The modern mind is perfectly happy with a god of the heart, so long as he stays there and doesn't start issuing blueprints. The idea of God handing down precise cubits and handbreadths for an altar strikes the contemporary sensibility as bizarre, primitive, and frankly, a bit obsessive compulsive.
But this is because we have forgotten what worship is. We think worship is about our self-expression, our feelings, our authenticity. The Bible teaches that worship is about God's self-revelation, His glory, and His authority. And God is not a vague abstraction. He is the ultimate concrete reality. He made a world of atoms and mountains, of physics and physiology. And when He condescends to dwell with men, He does so with a terrifying and glorious specificity. He does not ask for our interior design tips. He gives the design.
Ezekiel is a prophet in exile. The temple in Jerusalem, the one built by Solomon, has been obliterated because of Israel's high-handed idolatry. They had taken the glorious house of God and defiled it, turning it into a syncretistic mess. They wanted to worship God on their own terms, mixing in a little bit of this and a little bit of that. And God's response was to level the entire thing. Now, in this vision, God is showing Ezekiel the new temple. But we must have our New Testament glasses screwed on tightly here. The book of Revelation is, in many ways, a Christian rewrite of Ezekiel. This temple that Ezekiel sees is not a stone-and-mortar building to be rebuilt in the modern state of Israel. This temple is the Christian church, and its glory, its life, and its center is the Lord Jesus Christ.
So when we come to these verses, with their meticulous, almost tedious, architectural details about the altar, we are not reading an archaic building code. We are being shown a picture. This is divine geometry. Every cubit, every ledge, every horn, and every orientation is a theological statement. This is the grammar of our salvation, the blueprint of the cross. God is showing us, in the unyielding language of mathematics, that our access to Him is not a fuzzy feeling but a finished work, precise, perfect, and entirely of His own design.
The Text
"And these are the measurements of the altar by cubits (the cubit being a cubit and a handbreadth): the base shall be a cubit and the width a cubit, and its border on its edge round about one span; and this shall be the height of the base of the altar. And from the base on the ground to the lower ledge shall be two cubits and the width one cubit; and from the smaller ledge to the larger ledge shall be four cubits and the width one cubit. And the altar hearth shall be four cubits; and from the altar hearth shall extend upwards four horns. Now the altar hearth shall be twelve cubits long by twelve wide, square in its four sides. The ledge shall be fourteen cubits long by fourteen wide in its four sides; the border around it shall be half a cubit, and its base shall be a cubit round about; and its steps shall face the east.”
(Ezekiel 43:13-17 LSB)
The Divine Standard (v. 13)
We begin with the standard of measurement itself.
"And these are the measurements of the altar by cubits (the cubit being a cubit and a handbreadth): the base shall be a cubit and the width a cubit, and its border on its edge round about one span; and this shall be the height of the base of the altar." (Ezekiel 43:13)
Right out of the gate, God establishes the standard. The cubit to be used is not the common cubit, but a royal cubit, "a cubit and a handbreadth." This is God's cubit. From the very beginning, He is making it clear that the standards for approaching Him are His own, not ours. We do not get to bring our own measuring tape. In the economy of grace, God sets the terms. The world wants to approach God on its own terms, with its own diminished standards of righteousness. But the standard of God's holiness is absolute, and it is larger than our own.
This altar is built from the ground up, starting with a solid base, a foundation. This base is a cubit high and a cubit wide, with a border around it. This speaks of the stability and foundational nature of sacrifice. There is no access to the presence of God, whose glory has just returned to this temple in the previous verses, without a firm, unshakeable foundation of blood atonement. This is not an afterthought; it is the first thing specified. Before you can get to God, you must stop at the altar. And that altar is built on God's measurements, not man's.
Ascending to God's Presence (v. 14-15)
The structure of the altar is a series of ascending ledges, leading to the place of sacrifice.
"And from the base on the ground to the lower ledge shall be two cubits and the width one cubit; and from the smaller ledge to the larger ledge shall be four cubits and the width one cubit. And the altar hearth shall be four cubits; and from the altar hearth shall extend upwards four horns." (Ezekiel 43:14-15)
Notice the structure. It is a tiered platform, a ziggurat of grace. One ascends from the ground level, to a lower ledge, then to a larger ledge, and finally to the very top, the altar hearth, called "Ariel" in Hebrew, which means "hearth of God" or "lion of God." This is a picture of our approach to God. It is an ascent. We do not saunter into His presence. We come by stages of consecration, all of which are built into the very design of the altar.
The top, the hearth, is where the fire of God meets the sacrifice. It is four cubits high, and from it extend four horns. These horns were critically important. They were symbols of power and strength. A fugitive could grab hold of the horns of the altar for asylum. The blood of the sacrifice was smeared on these horns, signifying that the power of the atonement reached to the four corners of the earth. This is a picture of the Lord Jesus Christ. He is our altar. His sacrifice is the place where God's holy fire meets the offering, and in His cross is the power of our salvation, a power that extends to all nations. To cling to the horns of this altar is to cling to Christ, our only refuge.
The Perfection of the Cross (v. 16)
The dimensions of the altar hearth are given with perfect symmetry.
"Now the altar hearth shall be twelve cubits long by twelve wide, square in its four sides." (Ezekiel 43:16)
The place of the actual sacrifice is a perfect square, twelve by twelve. The number twelve in Scripture is the number of the people of God. You have the twelve tribes of Israel in the Old Covenant and the twelve apostles of the Lamb in the New. This altar is perfectly sufficient for the entirety of God's people. Its shape, a perfect square, speaks of divine order, completeness, and equity. The four equal sides look out to the four corners of the earth. The gospel of this sacrifice is for all the world.
This is not a haphazard arrangement. This is the mathematics of redemption. The work of Christ on the cross was not a frantic, last-minute plan. It was designed with perfect, geometric precision from before the foundation of the world. It is a complete work, a finished work, a perfect work. It is twelve by twelve, a sufficient foundation for the entire New Jerusalem, which itself is a city built on the foundation of the twelve apostles and having twelve gates for the twelve tribes.
The Way of Approach (v. 17)
Finally, we are given the dimensions of the larger ledge and a crucial detail about its orientation.
"The ledge shall be fourteen cubits long by fourteen wide in its four sides; the border around it shall be half a cubit, and its base shall be a cubit round about; and its steps shall face the east.” (Ezekiel 43:17)
The structure is solid, symmetrical, and bounded. God's grace is not sloppy. There are borders, definitions, and ledges. This is a safe place, a defined place. But the final detail is the most telling. "And its steps shall face the east." Why the east? In the old tabernacle, there were no steps up to the altar, to prevent any indecent exposure by the priests (Exodus 20:26). But here, in this ultimate temple, there are steps. There is a way up.
And that way faces east. The entrance to the Garden of Eden was on the east, guarded by cherubim after the fall. The entrance to the Tabernacle and the Temple was on the east. And in this very book, Ezekiel saw the glory of God depart from the temple to the east (Ezekiel 10:19), and just before our text, he saw the glory of God return from the east (Ezekiel 43:2-4). The east is the direction of the rising sun, the direction of new beginnings, the direction from which glory comes. The steps to the altar face the coming glory of God. We approach the sacrifice with our backs to the west, the direction of sunset and darkness, and we face the dawn.
This is a profound gospel statement. Our approach to God is through the sacrifice of Christ, and as we do, we are facing the direction of His glorious return. We are a people of the sunrise. We are a people who look east, awaiting the Sun of Righteousness to arise with healing in His wings.
Christ, Our Measured Altar
So what do we do with all these cubits and spans? We are to see Jesus. This altar, in its divine precision, is a portrait of His finished work. He is the foundation, the base upon which our salvation is built. He is the way of ascent, the steps by which we draw near to God. He is the hearth, the place where the fire of God's wrath was fully satisfied. He is the horns of power, our refuge and our strength, whose salvation extends to the ends of the earth.
The perfection of the altar's measurements teaches us that Christ's work was perfectly sufficient. It was not almost enough. It was not nearly complete. It was twelve by twelve, a perfect square. It is finished. There is nothing we can add to it. Our good works, our religious efforts, our earnest feelings, they are all our own funny-sized cubits. We must throw away our measuring tape and accept God's perfect standard, which is Christ alone.
And because Christ is our altar, we are now called to do something on that altar. Paul tells us, "I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship" (Romans 12:1). We do not come to this altar to die, because Christ has already died. We come to this altar, which is Christ, to live. We lay our lives, our ambitions, our schedules, our money, our families, our everything, upon Him. He is the one who makes our paltry sacrifices acceptable.
We are the temple of the Holy Spirit, and the center of that temple is this altar. The Christian life is a life lived at the altar. It is a life that is constantly being offered up to God through the perfect mediation of Jesus Christ. We must not be like the Israelites of old who defiled God's house. We must not try to build our own altars of self-righteousness or worldly compromise. We must come to the one, perfect, divinely-measured altar. We must climb the steps that face the dawn, and there, on the firm foundation of His finished work, offer ourselves up to the God who has bought us with a price.