Is Jesus the Third Temple?

Social IssuesReligion

  • Author Brennan Mcmahon
  • Published October 12, 2013
  • Word count 581

According to the Tanakh (Old Testament) and ancient days, where did God dwell while on earth? The tabernacle, and then the temple. Always with the Ark of the Covenant, right?

Now, remember this conversation Jesus had with the Jewish leaders…

But the Jewish leaders demanded, "What are you doing? If God gave you authority to do this, show us a miraculous sign to prove it." "All right," Jesus replied. "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." "What!" they exclaimed. "It has taken forty-six years to build this Temple, and you can rebuild it in three days?" But when Jesus said "this temple," he meant his own body. After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered he had said this, and they believed both the Scriptures and what Jesus had said. – John 2:18-22

Jesus was the Temple. He even says so and proves it by raising the "temple" in three days.

The words that I say to you I do not speak on My own initiative, but the Father abiding in Me does His works. Believe Me that I am in the Father and the Father is in Me; otherwise believe because of the works themselves. - John 14:10-11

Now the Father resides in the "Temple" and the "Temple" resides in the Father. They are one and the same. Or, THREE ones in the same when adding the Holy Spirit.

For in Him all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form. - Colossians 2:9

But there are measurements for the Temple!

Allow the Wikipedia Third Temple page, which I argue is a total valid source, explain…

This idea is related to the belief that Christ himself, having claimed to be and do what the temple was and did, is the new temple (John 2:19), and that his people, as a part of the "body of Christ" (meaning the church), are part of this temple as well (2 Corinthians 6:16; Ephesians 2:19–22; 1 Peter 2:4–5). The result, according to N. T. Wright, is that the earthly temple (along with the city of Jerusalem and the Land of Israel) is no longer of any spiritual significance:

[Paul] refers to the church, and indeed to individual Christians, as the ‘temple of the living God' (1 Cor. 3:16, 6:19). To Western Christians, thinking anachronistically of the temple as simply the Jewish equivalent of a cathedral, the image is simply one metaphor among many and without much apparent significance. For a first-century Jew, however, the Temple had an enormous significance; as a result, when Paul uses such an image within twenty-five years of the Crucifixion (with the actual temple still standing), it is a striking index of the immense change that has taken place in his [Paul's] thought. The Temple had been superseded by the Church. If this is so for the Temple, and in Romans 4 for the Land, then it must a fortioribe the case for Jerusalem, which formed the concentric circle in between those two in the normal Jewish worldview.[25]

In the teaching of both Jesus and Paul, then, according to Wright,God's house in Jerusalem was meant to be a ‘place of prayer for all the nations' (Isaiah 56:7; Mark 11:17); but God would now achieve this through the new temple, which was Jesus himself and his people.[25]

Much of the Tanakh/OT is open for interpretation. It is literally taken either figuratively or allegorically throughout by most Jewish scholars. So why, I ask, can't the mentions of the temple in Ezekiel be open for interpretation as well?

Brennan McMahon is a Christian researcher and writer who also works in the realm of SEO and Internet marketing. And he really likes when people read his stuff. Check it all out at BrennanMcMahon.com

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