Ezekiel 40:4
Most of us have a Bible with a few pages that still look brand new. The genealogies. The tabernacle blueprints. The chapters where a man walks around measuring a building. We don’t skip them on purpose. We just start reading faster when we get there.
Ezekiel 40 is one of those places. The Lord carries the prophet off in a vision and sets him down on a very high mountain. A man is standing in the gateway, “a man whose appearance was like bronze, with a linen cord and a measuring reed in his hand” (Ezekiel 40:3, ESV). Then the measuring starts. The gate. The threshold. The side rooms. Six cubits here, twenty-five there. It runs on like that for pages.
But notice what God says before a single measurement gets written down. “Son of man, look with your eyes, and hear with your ears, and set your heart upon all that I shall show you” (Ezekiel 40:4, ESV).
Set your heart on it. On the measurements.
That’s not how most of us come to a chapter like this one. We treat it as filler. Something to get through on the way to the part that preaches. God treats it as something to study carefully, listen to, and take to heart.
It helps to remember who was reading it first. Ezekiel was a captive in Babylon. The temple he had grown up with was a pile of burned stone hundreds of miles away, and the men who tore it down were still in charge. Then God hands him a set of plans. Every wall accounted for. Every room laid out. Those measurements weren’t trivia to a man in exile. They were proof that God still had a place in mind for his people.
That’s usually how it goes. The passages we were sure had nothing to say to us turn out to be holding something. Some call them golden nuggets, or hidden gems. God isn’t hiding anything from us in his word. But there are things in it we’ll never see at the speed we normally read.
David understood that, and he already had the book in front of him. “Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law” (Psalm 119:18, ESV). That’s a prayer prayed before reading, not after.
“All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable” (2 Timothy 3:16, ESV). All of it. The letters we love and the lists we skim. Six chapters of cubits included.
So here’s something worth trying this week. When we reach the part we’d normally skim, let’s slow down and pray our way into it instead. Let’s ask God to show us the thing we’ve been reading past for years. He has already promised his word is doing its work in us whether we feel it or not, “the word of God, which is at work in you believers” (1 Thessalonians 2:13, ESV).
At work. Even in the chapters we’ve been skipping.
