Can I Ask That? – Part Eleven – What Was the Purpose of the Temple?
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelation%2021%3A1-5&version=NIV
Our congregation has recently finished a capital stewardship campaign to raise the funds we need to build our first building. A few weeks ago, one of our lay people said, “We are about to build a building. We are all excited to see it and to be able to use it; but, it will not be a church until we meet there in the name of Jesus. And, should we ever cease to meet there in Jesus’ name, it will go back to being just a building.”
Head/Mind – Helpful Information
God has always desired to dwell among his people. The earliest stories in the Bible say that before sin had disrupted the relationship God has with us, God would walk with his people in the garden in the cool of the evening. That is simple a way to say that it was always meant to be that people would genuinely know God and experience him in their life.
This idea was so important that in ancient Israel, God appointed a special meeting place for that to occur. That meeting place was the Temple, and the whole thing functioned as a way of facilitating the meeting of God and his people. God even provided instructions for how the people should approach God, such as describing behaviors that were appropriate and inappropriate for such a meeting. Those same instructions provided guidance for how to maintain a good and healthy relationship with God.
Now, to you may be wondering, why do we need a special place for that? But think about other special people and occasions that call for special places. Think, for example, of an anniversary celebration or a special trip for your graduating senior. You can celebrate in an ordinary place, but choosing a special place makes it as being importance. It gives special emphasis and highlights the significance of the moment. Now, hold on to that, because we will add a corrective at the end of the sermon.
The danger, of course, was that such a meeting place was subject to misuse and abuse. Those in authority over it could misuse their power and authority. And those who worshiped in the Temple could begin to develop superstitions about what it meant to have the Temple, such as believing that it acted as good luck charm to ward off bad fortune, or a guarantee that if you conducted the sacrifices the right way, God owed you a good life, regardless of the moral choices you made. Worse, the nation could begin thinking that control of the Temple gave them control over God. That is why the Temple was never meant to be permanent arrangement.
After the original Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians, some of the prophets promised that the Temple would be rebuilt, and that the glory it would have would exceed the glory of the original Temple (Haggai 2:9). But when the second Temple was built, it was so unimpressive in size that the people wept (Ezra 3). What they could not understand was that the promise was not about the size or grandeur of the building, but about God dwelling among his people in a new and powerful way.
The prophet Ezekiel described a Temple that would be built after the Messiah came. His description is something that is impossible to build and a part of the reason why ancient rabbis debated whether or not to include the book of Ezekiel in the Bible. Some of them believe that men would drive themselves mad trying to make sense of Ezekiel’s math and that the Temple he was describing would have to be built by God himself in the age to come. The author of the book of Hebrews agreed, saying that the Temple the Messiah is building is not something made by human hands (Hebrews 8-9). The Apostle Peter says that the Temple God is making now has Jesus as the foundation, and the rest is made not of stones, but of the people who follow Jesus as Lord.
When the Messiah came, he said that in the age to come, it will not matter where we worship. It will only that the Holy Spirit inhabits our worship (John 4). He also said that men in power over the Temple of his day were about to bring the destruction upon themselves and the Temple. He also said that the Temple was now redundant, because he himself is now the way in which God makes himself available to us. That is why Revelation states that in the New Jerusalem, there will be no Temple, because God himself and the Messiah are the Temple, the meeting place.
Heart – the Personal Connection
Christians and Jews still construct buildings in which to worship, study, and to do life together. Because of the sacred nature of these activities, we come to love and treasure these buildings. However, more important than the buildings themselves are the people who use them. God promises to meet with us in our acts of worship and prayer because we gather in his name, not because of the building in which we gather.
That means that we gather in a store front in an inner city, or an apartment in Beijing, or a Cathedral in France, or in an open field in Africa, we are meeting on sacred ground, because Jesus meets in the gathering.
Hands –
Worship is about joining together to focus on Jesus. It is about bringing honor and glory to him in any way that we are capable. It is about offering ourselves as living sacrifices. It is about what we do and how we do it. But more importantly, why we do it.
Father Maximillian Kolbe turned a prison cell in a concentration camp into a sacred cathedral by offering the Eucharist and the Lord’s Prayer. Enslaved peoples in antebellum America turned rice fields into sacred choir lofts by singing harmonious spirituals to their true Master. Secret Christians in communist China turn one room apartments into the Holy of Holies by attending to the Sacred Scriptures.