After the completion of the building of the house, the glory of the Lord returned. In an earlier vision, Ezekiel had seen the glory of the Lord depart. First, the glory of the Lord left the temple and hesitated upon the threshold (9:3; 10:4). From the threshold it went out to the city. From the city the glory of the Lord went further out to the Mount of Olives on the east side of the city (11:23), and from there the glory ascended into the heavens (10:19). When the Lord in His leaving stopped on the threshold of the house, it indicated that He was not happy to leave. The Lord did not want to leave, but He was forced to leave. His staying at the threshold of the temple indicated His unwillingness to leave. He was lingering and hesitating, but eventually He was forced to leave because of the abominations, the whoredoms, the carcasses, and the degradation of the people. Hallelujah! Now the glory of the Lord is returning by the same way He left. He departed from the east side and now He is returning from the east side (43:1-3).
Why did the glory of the Lord return to the earth? It returned because the building of the temple was completed. This is a very important point! How much the Lord desires to come back to this earth! Yet, for His coming back He needs a place for the soles of His feet to rest. He needs a place upon which He can place His two feet. His habitation, His house, is the very place on this earth where He can put His feet. Through all the centuries the enemy in his subtlety has kept Christians from knowing anything about the building. Christian teachers stress greatly the matter of salvation and to some extent the matter of spirituality, but they rarely stress the matter of building. It is not merely a matter of salvation or spirituality; it is also a matter of the building. For years now the Lord has burdened us with one thing—the building! the building! the building! What is the building? It is nothing other than the church.
Brother Watchman Nee was surely committed by the Lord with the burden for the church. Many of us knew him very well, and we knew that he was burdened for the church and for the building up of the church. He realized that for the building up of the church, there was the need of the inner life. So the Lord gave him many messages on the inner life. These messages were not released so that people could be spiritual in an individual way, but so that the church could be built up. All of his inner-life messages were for the building up of the church. But the subtle enemy, Satan, has utilized a number of so-called spiritual people to publish many of his messages on the inner life to be used for individual spirituality. Those people who put out the inner-life books by Brother Nee do not have much regard for his books on the church life. Many of the Christian bookstores sell The Normal Christian Life, Sit, Walk, Stand, What Shall This Man Do? The Song of Songs, and so forth—all books on the individual spiritual life—but very few of them sell Brother Nee's books on the church. They seldom sell The Normal Christian Church Life, The Glorious Church, Further Talks on the Church Life, or other books by Brother Nee which have the word church in the title.
Have you seen the subtlety? Do you believe the Lord cares only for spirituality? Let me tell you that the Lord does not care for mere spirituality! The Lord cares for the building up of the church. We must expose the subtlety of the enemy. Some have said that Witness Lee is different from Watchman Nee—that Watchman Nee is for the spiritual life, but Witness Lee is too much for the church. This is the subtlety of the enemy. Such a false accusation forced us to publish Further Talks on the Church Life, The Orthodoxy of the Church, and The Glorious Church, all by Brother Watchman Nee. These books exposed the false accusations. The sad thing is that those so-called Christian bookstores will rarely carry these books by Brother Nee. Some people on the east coast even sent out a circular letter notifying their customers that they did not carry Further Talks on the Church Life. How ridiculous to notify people of what products you do not sell!
The Lord today is not merely for the individual spirituality. Suppose many spiritual giants such as Daniel were raised up in Babylon by the river Chebar. Do you think the Lord's glory would go there and fill them? The glory of the Lord did not return to Daniel, but rather it returned to the temple after it was rebuilt.
After the completion and the measuring of the whole building, the Spirit brought Ezekiel to the east gate where he saw the appearance of the glory of the Lord returning. "And it was according to the appearance of the vision which I saw, even according to the vision that I saw when I came to destroy the city: and the visions were like the vision that I saw by the river Chebar; and I fell upon my face" (Ezek. 43:3). When I first read this word I felt surely the text must be wrong. I thought the "I" should be "He." To my impression it should read, "When He came to destroy the city." All of the best translations, however, used the pronoun "I." It seems so strange that Ezekiel would say that he came to destroy the city. Such a translation is very significant. It means that when the prophet went to Jerusalem, the Lord also went to Jerusalem. The Lord was going in Ezekiel's going.