2 Chronicles 6:40-7:5 (NIV)  

⁴⁰ “Now, my God, may your eyes be open and your ears attentive to the prayers offered in this place.

⁴¹ “Now arise, O Lord God, and come to your resting place, you and the ark of your might.  May your priests, O Lord God, be clothed with salvation, may your saints rejoice in your goodness.

⁴² O Lord God, do not reject your anointed one.  Remember the great love promised to David your servant.”

^7:1 When Solomon finished praying, fire came down from heaven and consumed the burnt offering and the sacrifices, and the glory of the Lord filled the temple.  ² The priests could not enter the temple of the Lord because the glory of the Lord filled it.  ³ When all the Israelites saw the fire coming down and the glory of the Lord above the temple, they knelt on the pavement with their faces to the ground, and they worshiped and gave thanks to the Lord, saying,

“He is good; his love endures forever.”

⁴ Then the king and all the people offered sacrifices before the Lord.  ⁵ And King Solomon offered a sacrifice of twenty-two thousand head of cattle and a hundred and twenty thousand sheep and goats.  So the king and all the people dedicated the temple of God.

John 2:15-21 (NIV)

¹⁵ So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple area, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables.  ¹⁶ To those who sold doves he said, “Get these out of here!  How dare you turn my Father’s house into a market!”

¹⁷ His disciples remembered that it is written: “Zeal for your house will consume me.”

¹⁸ Then the Jews demanded of him, “What miraculous sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?”

¹⁹ Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.”

²⁰ The Jews replied, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?”  ²¹ But the temple he had spoken of was his body.

I think this passage encourages us to think about what a temple is, and what Jesus claims about this temple and what sort of differences that might make in our lives.  If we take Jesus seriously at His word, what can that mean for us?

The larger picture though, was that the believer, each temple, whether in Jerusalem or the pagan temple, in other parts of the world, each temple was a sacred place where Yahweh is in Jerusalem, or other gods in the pagan temple, came close to their worshippers.

It was a place where heaven and earth were closer than anywhere else, where eternity and the temporary came together.

It was where the divine resided in a special way, and where people experienced a little more of the divine because the gap between God and us was bridged.

All ancient people knew that God was a mystery behind what they experienced, a power that was over us.  And at the same time, there was a gap between that power and us; so, we couldn’t experience that God directly.  The gap needed to be bridged where a transcendent power could not and hopefully appease, bridging that gap.

What does a temple mean today?

The enlightenment movement told us that what ancient people considered divine, or eternal mysterious, was really just products of natural causes.  Everything can be scientifically explained, everything and a natural cause, which means that we don’t need a temple.

There is no gap to bridge, no mystery, nothing behind the material world.  Enlightenment can explain all of our problems sociological, psychological, and physiological.  All of this means we can be affected and the problem solved, because knowledge will save us.

People have begun to think that all of our issues are going to be solved successfully.

The logical conclusion which requires thinking: if there is no divine, then there is nothing ultimate.

C.S. Lewis says in the book The Abolition of Man, “But you cannot go on ‘explaining away’ forever: you will find you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the garden beyond it is opaque. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.

Everyone who tries to explain away God then has to philosophically deal with the fact that then explanation doesn’t hold up to scrutiny either.

People are realizing the limits of science, and that science doesn’t explain everything.  Science cannot explain love, hope, or how the universe began.

People can believe that there is a God, because God makes the most sense of how things come to be, even though they are confusing, perhaps, as to what extent God is and what He is like.

We remember something that we can’t touch anymore, that we are strangers longing to be invited in, to bridge the chasm between us and reality as part of the secret of who we are.

What is Jesus claiming here?  That He is the ultimate reality we are looking for.  The temple where we find what cannot be explained away, what can’t be seen through, the one thing that explains everything else.

What is in the temple (2 Chronicles 7:1-3) when Solomon finished praying?  Fire came down from heaven and consumed the burnt offering and the sacrifice, and the glory of Yahweh filled the temple.

When the Israelites saws this power then fell down and worshipped the Lord saying, “The Lord is good, His love endures forever.”

Jesus claims here is the temple, filled with God’s glory, is Him.  His physical person holds the divine glory, just like the temple did where Solomon prayed.

Jesus says in today’s passage, “I am the ultimate reality, the very glory and presence of God.”

At every temple there is a gap that must be bridged, in the past there was animal sacrifice.  But Jesus bridges the gap between Him and man.  Jesus paid the penalty.  Jesus is the priest and alter and the lamb that was slain.

Jesus death on the cross is the forever bridge over the unpassable abyss between the Holy God and us.

This was Jesus’ claim; no one has ever said this.

Only Jesus can claim He is the temple.  Not only does God reside in Jesus, but He is the one who bridges the gap, not us.

I doubt the people in the temple were trying to pray, they were there to fulfill the rituals, offer a lamb because they had to, and then get back to life.

If my house belongs to Jesus, then He gets to come in and make the changes He wants to make.  Because He is the glory of God, He is the absolute authority in my life.  Jesus is the owner of my life.

When we invite Jesus to rule over our lives, He will do exactly that.

Jesus is your temple, He is waiting for you to give Him the authority and then having our backs because life gets exciting.

If Jesus is the temple, then all people are invited and welcome.  The temple (Jesus) will get you ready to come further up and further your life with Jesus.

Have you given all of your life to Jesus?  If not, talk to me and let’s pray and get together and begin allowing Jesus deeper into your life.  God bless.