Jesus Christ -- The True Temple
Reconstruction of the Temple Courts
Jesus Christ — The True Temple
When Jesus declared, “I tell you, something greater than the temple is here,” (Matthew 12:6) and then told a Samaritan woman that he can give her “living water” (John 4:10-14), we are given a major clue that the pre-messianic understanding of God’s temple must be reinterpreted in the light of Jesus’ messianic mission.
The temple occupies a significant place in the witness of Israel’s prophets regarding God’s future eschatological blessing for the nation. This witness points forward to the coming of Jesus. When Jesus connects his mission to this prophetic expectation, we are greatly aided in our understanding of the nature and character of the millennial age as a present reality—not a future hope.
We begin with the Old Testament expectation regarding the temple in Jerusalem at the commencement of the era of “Second Temple” Judaism. Isaiah 2:2-4 and Micah 4:1-5, both speak of God’s future blessing upon Israel in the last days, depicting it as a time when God’s people will go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the rebuilt and reconsecrated temple, where God’s people will once again renew themselves in the ways of the Lord.
In Isaiah 56, the prophet speaks of those who hold fast to God’s covenant (v. 4), and who love the name of the Lord and keep his Sabbaths (vv. 6-8). They will be brought to the holy mountain and house of the Lord, which is the temple and the house of prayer for all the nations (v. 7). A similar vision is given in Isaiah 66:20-21. Isaiah speaks of how the Israelites will bring their grain offerings to God’s temple, as God renews the priesthood (vv. 20-21). In Zechariah’s prophetic vision, we are told that one day the sacrifices of Israel will once again be offered and will be acceptable to God (Zechariah 14:16-19).
With such prophetic expectation in the minds of virtually every Jew living in first century Palestine, it is no wonder that Jesus’ declaration of God’s coming judgment upon the magnificent temple as rebuilt by Herod came as both a shock and an offense. “Truly, I say to you, there will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down” (Matthew 24:2). How dare this man say that the prophetic expectation of a glorious temple is fulfilled in his own person. Jesus challenged this misguided expectation, by declaring “destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19). It was not until after Jesus had died and was raised from the dead, that the meaning of these words became clear; when Jesus spoke of the destruction of the temple, he was speaking of his own body (John 2:22). This self-identification is what he meant when he said that one greater than the temple is here!
Furthermore, there is the Old Testament prophecy of a new and glorious temple, found in Ezekiel 40-48. Ezekiel envisions a future time for God’s people in which the temple will be rebuilt, the priesthood will be re-established, true sacrifices will once again be offered and the river of life will flow forth from the temple. How we interpret this prophecy will have a significant bearing on the question of whether or not we believe that there will be a future millennial age upon the earth.
Our dispensational friends believe that this prophecy will find a literal fulfillment in the millennial age. According to the dispensational stalwart J. Dwight Pentecost,
“The glorious vision of Ezekiel reveals that it is impossible to locate its fulfillment in any past temple or system which Israel has known, but it must await a future fulfillment after the second advent of Christ when the millennium is instituted. The sacrificial system is not a reinstituted Judaism, but the establishment of a new order that has its purpose the remembrance of the work of Christ on which all salvation rests. The literal fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophecy will be the means of God’s glorification and man’s blessing in the millennium.” [1]
Apparently, Pentecost was aware of the standard amillennial criticism that such images of perpetual animal sacrifice and temple worship after the second advent of Jesus undermine our Lord’s saving work. This is especially the case, given the fact these aspects of Mosaic economy of the Old Testament are fulfilled at Calvary. Pentecost is careful to explain that Ezekiel’s prophecy is not connected to a renewed Mosaic economy, but to an entirely new order, one which commemorates the saving work of Christ in the distant past.
Pentecost was committed to a “literal fulfillment” of Old Testament prophecies, and unfortunately, not willing to grant that Jesus and his apostles reinterpreted these texts in the New. Because he was well aware that Christ’s own redemptive work fulfills the typology of the Mosaic economy, Pentecost contends that temple worship in the millennial age yet to come is associated with a wholly new order which brings about blessing and God’s glory. Yet, these things are necessarily temporal, provisional, and not eternal.
But is this what the authors of the New Testament teach us about these prophecies? No. The New Testament teaches that Jesus is the true Israel and David’s greater son (Matthew 2:15 as a fulfillment of Hosea 11:1; Acts 2:29-33, Galatians 3:16, Philippians 3:3; Hebrews 8-10 as a fulfillment of Jeremiah 31:31-34). [2] It is in Christ’s church--as Jesus' mystical Spirit-filled body--that we find the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies regarding Jerusalem and the Mountain of the Lord (Hebrews 12:18-24). The promise of a land (i.e., Genesis 12:1, 13:15-17; 15:12-21), will be fulfilled by a universal kingdom (cf. Romans 4:13; Hebrews 11:9-10). The New Testament is clear that Christ is the New Temple and that any new order of commemoration involving the ceremonies which are tied to the earthly temple found in a future millennium, can only commemorate the types and shadows, which unintentionally or not, denies the reality—at his return, the Risen and Ascended Jesus brings about the final consummation (the resurrection, the judgment, and the creation of a new heaven and earth).
This is a serious interpretive problem for those dispensationalists who argue, in effect, that redemptive history takes a U-turn in the millennial age, as the reality which is found in Christ’s fulfillment of the Old Temple imagery in his own body, supposedly returns to the types and shadows of the Old Testament.
How, then, is the temple imagery from the Old Testament fulfilled by Jesus Christ in the New? In Exodus 40:34, we read that the glory of the Lord filled his temple. When viewed against the overall backdrop of redemptive history, from the hindsight of fulfillment, we see how this expectation pointed forward to the day of Pentecost, when, through the indwelling Holy Spirit, the glory of the Lord filled his true temple, the church, which is the mystical body of Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 12:12 ff.). [3]
If Christ’s body is the true temple–as Paul puts it, “For we are the temple of the living God” (2 Corinthians 6:16)–what use remains for a future rebuilt temple in Jerusalem? That to which the temple had pointed is now a reality through the work of the Holy Spirit. Why return to the type and shadow?
It is also clear from chapters 8-10 of Hebrews, that in his death, Jesus fulfilled the priesthood typology of the Old Testament. In his own shed blood, Jesus put an end to the sacrificial system, once and for all! Says the author of Hebrews, “Now the point in what we are saying is this: we have such a high priest, one who is seated at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in heaven, a minister in the holy places, in the true tent that the Lord set up, not man” (Hebrews 8:1-2).
If the reality to which the Old Testament sacrifices and priesthood pointed is to be found in this heavenly true sanctuary and tabernacle, why look for a return to the types and shadows of an earthly temple with its bloody sacrifices, which served throughout Old Testament revelation to point us to this very heavenly scene?
Contrary to the view of dispensationalists, the prescribed New Testament commemoration of the ratification of the New Covenant is not to be found in a new order of temple worship, which includes a rebuilt temple in Jerusalem, a new Levitic priesthood and further animal sacrifice, supposedly yet to be re-instituted in an earthly millennial kingdom in which Jesus rules on David’s throne in Jerusalem. Rather, when Jesus utters the words of institution, “this is my body, this is my blood, do this in remembrance of me,” he institutes the divinely-approved method of commemoration of his sacrificial work, the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, about which Jesus declares “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood” (Luke 22:20). It is in this way, through faith in Christ’s promise, the people of God feed on the Savior in their hearts through faith and commemorate his doing and dying on their behalf.
When Jesus tells the Samaritan women that he can give her living water and that “everyone who drinks from this water will never be thirsty again,” Jesus is self-consciously declaring that he fulfills that prophetic image of which Ezekiel had foretold in the forty-seventh chapter of his prophecy, when he spoke of the water flowing from the sanctuary. [4] If Jesus is the true temple of God, then he alone gives us that “living water” which takes away human sin and longing for forgiveness.
Therefore, the dispensationalist’s insistence upon a return in the millennial age to the types and shadows associated with Old Testament prophetic expectation, amounts to a serious misreading of the course of redemptive history. By arguing for a new commemorative order based upon Old Testament typology which is yet to begin in the millennial age, dispensationalists see the future millennium not as a consummation, but as a return to the past. And this, of course, obscures the person and work of Christ, seeing the ultimate reality not in him, but in those types and shadows which were destined to pass away when the reality himself had nearly completed his messianic mission and declared to unbelieving Israel, “something greater than the temple is here.”
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[1] J. Dwight Pentecost, Things to Come, Zondervan, 1978, 531. See also more recent affirmations of the same point: Barry Horner, Future Israel, B & H Academic, ND, 70; and John MacArthur and Richard Mayhue, eds. Christ’s Prophetic Plans, Moody, 2012, 11; Matt Waymeyer, Amillennialism and the Age to Come, Kress, 2016, 64.
[2] See Sam Storms, Kingdom Come: The Amillennial Alternative, Mentor, 2013, for additional discussion (27,42).
[3] See, Kline, The Structure of Biblical Authority, Eerdmans, 194.
[4] Leon Morris, The Gospel According to John, The New International Commentary on the New Testament, Eerdmans, 1971, 259-261