What can Ezekiel’s Temple have to do with the Christian Gospels? Didn’t Ezekiel live 500 years before Christ and those New Testament accounts of His life? Isn’t there being four of them just an accident of early church history? And the prophet could certainly not have foreseen their different characteristic themes or emphases, could he? The author’s more comprehensive article, “Ezekiel’s Temple and the Christian Gospels” (on the Free Articles page) shows how Ezekiel does anticipate aspects of the Gospels’ four-fold structure.
To introduce this notion, the pattern of four things, and especially messages—where the fourth is in some way distinguished from the preceding three—is deeply ingrained in the Hebrew Scriptures (the Christian “Old Testament.”) The Jewish scholar Robert Alter (The Hebrew Bible, vol. 3, p.467) and the Jewish Study Bible (p.333) both remark how common these “3 plus 1” (or “3-4”) patterns are. There are several examples in the books of Proverbs and Amos. In Job chapter 1, after Job hears in a third message that three groups of raiders had stolen his camels, a fourth messenger brings worse news than the three before him—a wind had collapsed the four corners of a house, killing all his children. Balaam’s fourth oracle (Num. 24) is more universal—even Messianic—than his three preceding messages. Three “beasts” in Daniel 7 are followed by a more dreadful fourth.
In the Pentateuch, the Levites camp around the Tabernacle (Num. 3) with their three divisions (responsible for its furnishings, fabrics, and supports) on three of its sides, but the specially honored sons of Levi (Moses and the priests) camp on the fourth (east) side. The three books of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers that present God’s Sinai covenant and law are followed in Deuteronomy with Moses’ concluding discourses, in his own words, to shape that covenant for Israel’s settled life in the Promised Land. Finally, in the case of the four New Testament Gospels, the three synoptic (“seeing alike”) Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are followed by John’s special demonstration of the Deity of Christ.
The early church father Irenaeus in the second century, and A.W. Pink in the twentieth, said there had to be four Gospels—not more or fewer—to testify to the Person and work of Christ. If Ezekiel’s Temple is a divine standard of the completeness and perfection that Irenaeus and Pink saw in the four Gospels, then their general idea may receive support from the closeness with which one respected scheme for characterizing Matthew, Mark, Luke/Acts, and John overlays the plan of Ezekiel’s Temple.
This superimposed plan is discussed in the author’s “Ezekiel’s Temple and the Christian Gospels” article on the Free Articles page (and can be seen cycling on the Home Page of this website.) Immediately apparent are the two overlapping “3 plus 1” relationships—first, that of the three Temple axes to the central sanctuary (on its “fourth” axis), and second, that of the three synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) to the fourth Gospel (John). This is not just a coincidence. John’s Gospel is distinguished from the others by its emphasis on Christ’s Deity, and in the Temple diagram, John’s (and Ezekiel’s sanctuary’s) only “outward” connection is to God’s heavenly Temple above—Jesus said He received honor from His heavenly Father (John 12:28, 17:1-5) but not from men (5:41).
But that is only the beginning of the connections between Ezekiel’s Temple and the four Gospels that are discussed in the longer article, leading ultimately to a demonstration of how the four faces of the cherubim (man, lion, ox, eagle) in Ezekiel’s chapter 1 “Chariot” vision correspond to particular Gospels (given certain assumptions about what Ezekiel’s text says and means) and how the movements of the chariot in the directions of the four faces constitute the dynamics of the individual Gospel messages, as Jesus’ life and work is traced out on the Temple axes.
Lastly the article on the Free Articles page shows how applying that identification of the four “Gospel symbols” to John’s vision of God’s heavenly throne in Revelation chapter 4—a second, independent biblical source for those symbols—yields a result consistent with that obtained from Ezekiel.
At the end of this admittedly provisional study, the reader is welcomed to reject the assumptions on which it is based, or the reasoning from them. On the other hand, may any who find those assumptions and deductions true to Scripture give glory to God, and derive encouragement that indeed all the Bible points to Christ. The author hopes this may at least make some small contribution in the direction of lifting up and spreading abroad God’s Word, who became flesh and dwelt (and dwells) as His living Temple among men.