YOU ARE BEING BUILT

I’ve met so many people over the years who can identify with the Israelites who lost their sanctuary when the temple was destroyed. Their sanctuary was leveled—that place in their lives where they felt safe and secure. A spouse may have died, and even though everyone knows the rule going into marriage—”til death do us part”—the parting still seems like a devastating tornado. A person may have been fired from his or her job. A child died of leukemia. A relationship turned bitter. Life fell to pieces.

Many of those people will tell you that the only thing they could cling to was God. Amid unanswered questions and threatening sky, an instinct inside said, run to God, and wedge yourself into him as if into the crevasse of a great mountain. Or, better yet, seek God at the temple.
There isn’t a temple in Jerusalem anymore, and it is probably hard for us to imagine the soul-satisfying sight that the temple was to the Israelites. It was the fixed point of their lives, the center of the map, the sanctuary that reminded them of the safety of God even if they lived miles away. The temple was a statement: God is here; he has a foothold in the world.

God is not contained in a temple. Rather, the temple was a statement which said that the great God who sits above the circle of the earth and who weighs nations like dust on a scale maintains contact with this world. He receives sacrifices and he gives oracles at the temple. The pillars speak of his strength, and the gold of his incomparable worth. The priesthood is evidence that mortals can stand before God (“priest” means one who stands).

But an invading army could and did knock down that temple. More than six hundred years later another army, the Romans, would break down the new temple Herod built a few decades after they struck down the temple that was Jesus’ body. But one of Jesus’ followers whom Jesus called “Rock” wrote about a brand new kind of temple. A new community of Jesus’ followers was being built together into a new kind of temple. In the first epistle of Peter we read:

“You also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 2:5).

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