Charles Ellicott Commentary Isaiah 66:1

"Thus saith Jehovah, Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool: what manner of house will ye build unto me? and what place shall be my rest?" — Isaiah 66:1 (ASV)

The heaven is my throne... —We are left to conjecture the historical starting-point of this utterance of a Divine truth. Was the prophet condemning in advance the restoration of the temple on the return from Babylon, or, as some critics have supposed, the intention of some of the exiles to build a temple in the land of their captivity, as others did afterwards at Leontopolis in Egypt? Was he anticipating the vision of the Apocalypse, that in the new Jerusalem there was to be “no temple” (Revelation 21:22)? Neither of these views is satisfactory, as Isaiah 56:7, Isaiah 60:7, and the writings of Ezekiel, Haggai, and Zechariah all presuppose the existence of a new temple.

It seems better to see in the words the utterance, in its strongest form, of the truth that God dwells not in temples made with hands, that utterance being compatible, as in the case of Solomon himself (2 Chronicles 6:18), of our Lord (John 2:16–17; John 4:21–23), of St. Stephen, who quoted this passage (Acts 7:48–50), with the profoundest reverence for the visible sanctuary. Cheyne quotes a striking parallel from an Egyptian hymn to the Nile of the fourteenth century B.C., in which we find the writer saying of God, “His abode is not known ... there is no building that can contain Him.” (Records of the Past, iv. 109.)