The vision in context
Ezekiel 8–11 is a single vision. The prophet, sitting in his house in Babylon with the elders of Judah before him, is taken in spirit to Jerusalem and shown four chambers of escalating abomination in the Temple itself: an idol at the gate, elders worshiping creature-images on the walls, women weeping for Tammuz, and twenty-five men with their backs to the sanctuary worshiping the sun. The point is cumulative: the worship the LORD is owed is being given to other gods inside the building dedicated to him, by the people charged with stewarding it.
Chapter 9 opens with the response. Six men, each with a slaughter weapon in his hand, come from the upper gate facing north. With them is a seventh — clothed in linen (the priestly dress; cf. Lev 16:4 for the Yom Kippur high-priestly garment) and carrying a writing case at his side. The glory of the God of Israel rises from above the cherub where it had been and stands at the threshold of the house — the first stage of the glory's departure (it leaves stage by stage across chapters 9–11 until it stands on the Mount of Olives, 11:23).
Then the LORD speaks to the man in linen:
"Go through the midst of the city, through the midst of Jerusalem, and set a mark upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and that cry for all the abominations that be done in the midst thereof." (Ezek 9:4)
And to the six:
"Go ye after him through the city, and smite: let not your eye spare, neither have ye pity: slay utterly old and young, both maids, and little children, and women: but come not near any man upon whom is the mark; and begin at my sanctuary." (Ezek 9:5–6)
The six begin at the sanctuary, with the elders worshiping the sun. The marked are spared. The unmarked die.
Three readings of who gets marked
The text identifies the marked by their disposition: those who sigh (Hebrew anachim, deep groaning) and cry (ne'enachim, the verb of inarticulate grief) over the abominations. The mark is not given to those who try to fix the abominations; it is given to those who grieve them. The action will be the LORD's. The remnant is identified by what they feel.
This has been read three ways in the tradition:
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Strict literal (most rabbinic and Reformed reading) — the mark is a literal sign inscribed by a literal angel; the spared are an actual remnant in 6th-century Jerusalem, possibly fleeing to Babylon (the golah community Ezekiel addresses) or surviving in the Land. The historical Babylonian destruction of 586 BC is the judgment that follows.
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Symbolic / proleptic — the vision shows a permanent pattern: God identifies the grieving remnant before judgment falls. The 6th-century event is one instance; Ezekiel 9 is the template the NT will reuse in Revelation.
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Apocalyptic-cross typology (the patristic reading; Tertullian, Jerome, Cyprian) — the mark is taw in its paleo-Hebrew cross form, and the vision foreshadows the cross as the mark of the spared in the final judgment. This is the reading the founder's drawer engages.
The site presents all three. The strict literal is the most defensible textually. The patristic reading is the oldest Christian reading. The symbolic-template reading is the NT's own use of the chapter (Revelation 7 unmistakably reuses Ezekiel 9's structure).
Why "begin at my sanctuary"
The instruction in 9:6 inverts every human expectation. The spared are not the religious leadership — the elders are at the front of the line for slaughter. The judgment begins at the Temple, with the men responsible for its worship. Peter quotes the same logic in 1 Peter 4:17: "the time is come that judgment must begin at the house of God." The pattern Ezekiel sees is not parochial; it is procedural. God's judgment is not arbitrary, and it is not lenient with the people who knew better.