Ezekiel 11:16

16. Yet will I be to them as a little sanctuary R.V., “and have been to them a sanctuary for a little while.” For a time Ezekiel and the exiles were to find the presence of Jehovah manifested as in the vision of Chebar (Ezekiel 1:4-28), or felt spiritually, and this would make the spot where they found themselves as fully a holy place as the temple had been. There also they would have a “house of God.” But this was not to be their permanent lot. There was to be a restoration to the “land of Israel” (Ezekiel 11:17; Ezekiel 37:21), to the visible sanctuary, to a sacred temple no longer desecrated by the pollutions that had defiled the first. “The thought that it is the presence of Jehovah that makes the sanctuary, not the sanctuary that secures the presence, Ezekiel may have learned from the fate of Shiloh (Psalms 78:60). In the fact that in John’s vision of the heavenly Jerusalem there is no temple, but the presence of the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb (Revelation 21:22), we find the crowning development of Ezekiel’s thought.” Plumptre.

Where’er they seek Thee Thou art found,

And every place is hallowed ground.

The above explanation seems better than that which would translate this difficult phrase, “and have been to them for a sanctuary but little,” and would thus minimize the privileges given to the exiles (Kautzsch, Davidson, etc.).