The Changing Temple

Psalm 104:30–31 (ESV) —  When you send forth your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the ground.  May the glory of the Lord endure forever; may the Lord rejoice in his works,

Part of the Holy Spirit’s work of creating and giving life is making a place for God and man to meet. Originally, this meeting place was the whole of creation. Through time, it has been in more localized places, like the Tabernacle and the Temple. Now, it’s the Christian Congregation(s) throughout the world because they are the Body of Christ. This theme, revealed to us in Scripture, helps us understand how the Holy Spirit’s mission in the New Testament is the same as in the Old. 

Recap

The original question that gave rise to this series was something along the lines of “how did the Holy Spirit work in the Old Testament?” What we have done over the last many articles is lay out, from Scripture, a few foundational points. 

The first is that the Holy Spirit’s mission is to create and give life. That is who He is. He is the Lord, the giver of Life, just as we confess in the Nicene Creed. The first three articles in this series laid out that point. 

Since then, we have been looking at various aspects of the Holy Spirit’s work. We’ve pointed out some Scriptural testimonies that explain how He works, and we’ve made notes about various things He is accomplishing. We’ve spent quite a bit of time showing from Scripture that the Holy Spirit uses the Means of Grace to save people, and we’ve especially focused on the promises made to believers through Christian Baptism. 

We haven’t exhausted talking about the Holy Spirit working through the Means of Grace yet though. We still have quite a bit more to explore about the inspired Word and about the Lord’s Supper, but a deeper and more focused look at those two Means of Grace will have to wait.

For now, we are spending some time looking at the Holy Spirit’s work as a whole, in the hope that it will help us understand the connections between the Old Testament to the New. 

The Glory of The Lord

The previous article in this newsletter series showed that in the Bible, the often-recurring phrase “The Glory of the Lord” is for all practical purposes equivalent to saying “The Holy Spirit.” This is not because the terms are synonymous, but because wherever the Glory of the Lord is, there the Holy Spirit and the Word of God are working together. 

The work of the Holy Spirit is often announced by the phrase “The Glory of The Lord.” When we see that, we easily see that He was as busy in the Old Testament as He is in the New. 

The religion of the Old Testament saints, with its emphasis on animal sacrifices and a physical temple, looks like a very different religion than the faith of the New Testament. Clearly, something big had to have changed. The Glory of The Lord once rested on a mountain (Exodus 24:17), then a tabernacle (Exodus 40:32), then a temple (2 Chronicles 7:1-3) where animal sacrifices (which we don’t do) and numerous feasts (which we don’t celebrate) were held. 

Something has changed. We don’t sacrifice animals anymore and our Temple of God is now built with believers, not bricks (1 Peter 2:5). Is, then, the faith of the New Testament an entirely different faith? Did God change Himself? Is that why we needed a different religion? How does the flow of “The Glory of The Lord” through history help us understand all this? 

Still One Mission

Yes, the religious practices of the Old Testament were given a substantial overhaul as we entered the era of the New Testament. This, though, did not represent a change in our God. He is unchanging (Malachi 3:6). The Lord God’s interactions with the world may differ from epoch to epoch. They even differ slightly from person to person, but this is not an indication that He Himself is changing (Exodus 6:3).  

Actually, even within just the Old Testament we see the religion changing while the God we worship always stays the same. The first time the “Glory of the Lord” is mentioned as being seen, He’s not even in a temple yet. In Exodus 16, the Glory of the Lord just appears to the people because they are hungry. He fed them bread (manna) from heaven, but He also wanted them to understand it was a gracious gift from Him. 

He didn’t appear as a response to their merit or religious works. Immediately before the Glory of the Lord appeared, the whole nation of Israel had been grumbling against the Lord. The Glory of the Lord appeared to extend grace to the people of Israel. They were in the wilderness and potentially would have starved. They didn’t, because the Spirit of Life gave them bread. 

The Spirit of the Lord gave them bread, because He is the Lord: the giver of life. His mission is to give life and, in that moment, life required bread. Yet we know that man does not live by bread alone (Deuteronomy 8:3, Matthew 4:4). There is way more than just food and clothing (Matthew 6:25). True life is knowing God and having a relationship with Him (John 17:3). 

Change of Venue

We tend to think of a temple as a building you use to do work for God. The truth is, however, that the main function of the Tabernacle and the Temple is to be a place of meeting. It’s not a place we go to draw God to us. It’s a place we go because God has told us to meet Him there. 

Exodus 25:22 (ESV) —  There I will meet with you, and from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim that are on the ark of the testimony, I will speak with you about all that I will give you in commandment for the people of Israel.

True life is knowing God (again, John 17:3). God gave the Tabernacle and the Temple as places where mankind could meet with God and hear God as He speaks to us. That’s how you know Him. That’s how you have life.

The Holy Spirit is the one that did the work of making these places. He may have used laborers to wield the tools and set the stones, but the more you study it, the more you realize that the Holy Spirit is the power of the Temple. He’s the power that built it, and He’s the power that sanctified it. In numerous places in the Bible, He announced God’s presence in the Temple by revealing The Glory of the Lord.  

If you look at Exodus 31:1-11, you find the Lord explicitly explaining to Moses that the Holy Spirit had already empowered the craftsman that built the Tabernacle. Then, at the completion of the Tabernacle, the presence of the Glory of the Lord was so powerful that Moses could not even enter the Tabernacle for a time. The Spirit of the Lord blessed the Lord’s people by giving them the Tabernacle. In the Tabernacle, the presence of the Lord God was brought near to them. In short, God made Himself known at the Tabernacle, so God gave life through it. 

The Word of the Lord, which is just as important for life as our daily bread, was given to Israel by the Glory of the Lord, through the Tabernacle. This is, of course, entirely in line with the Holy Spirit’s mission of giving life. The whole thing was repeated again later with the building of Solomon’s Temple (1 Kings 8:1-21). In Moses’ day, and in Solomon’s, God rescued people from eternal death and brought them into eternal life partly through the ministries of the Tent and Temple. 

From the Tabernacle to Solomon’s Temple, there was a change of meeting place as the Arc of the Covenant was moved. Actually, that wasn’t even the first change of venue for the Lord’s presence. Before the Lord met with Israel in the Tabernacle (which they could carry with them as they wandered around in the wilderness), the Lord met with them on top of Mount Sinai (which to this day hasn’t moved, Exodus 24:16). 

Old Testament history is a complicated but fascinating story of the Lord God coming to meet with people so they could have life. This happened in a lot of ways, but the mission throughout was the same: to make Himself known and thus give life. The Holy Spirit has been at work through all of it, from Genesis 1:2 to Revelation 22, making a place where God and man can meet. 

New Temple, Same God

Genesis 1:2 (ESV) —  The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

Luke 1:35 (ESV) —  And the angel answered her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God.

The New Testament begins with something wild: The Holy Spirit hovers over Mary and by His power, Jesus is conceived. This is actually somewhat parallel to Genesis 1:2, only instead of hovering over the waters of chaos, He hovered over Mary’s waters. 

Creation itself was made as a place where God and man could dwell together. We see this in Genesis 2 and 3, where Adam and God are conversing and later God walks through the Garden to speak with His creations. Sadly, we broke the first creation through our sin, and we were cast out of our first meeting place with God: the Garden of Eden. 

This is partly why the parallels between Genesis 1:2 and Christ’s incarnation story are such good news for us. Jesus’ incarnation is the beginning of a New Temple. It’s an important step toward returning to the fellowship we originally had with God.

God has come to man by becoming man. The ultimate meeting place between God and man is a man. Jesus is our temple. 

John 2:19–21 (ESV) —  Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”  The Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?”  But he was speaking about the temple of his body.

The first change of Temple in the New Testament era happened when the Word of God took on human flesh. This wasn’t a change to God or in God, but it was certainly a change for mankind. And yet, for all that change, the Holy Spirit’s mission remained unchanged. His work and power brought Jesus into our world as a man. You can even hear this mission of bringing life echoed in Jesus’ own description of who and what Jesus is: 

John 14:6 (ESV) —  Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 

The Holy Spirit’s work of creating and giving life, which actually began before the fall (Genesis 1:2), continues unabated in the era of the New Testament (and beyond). These different temples that the Holy Spirit has given us all have one thing in common: they are the place where God meets with man, thus giving man life. 

The Un-Ending Mission of Life

In coming months, we’re going to continue to explore this theme, as it helps bind together the two eras (the Old Testament and the New). There is a lot more to explore, like the public announcement of the new Temple (Acts chapter 2 and others), the trajectory of this Temple expanding throughout creation (the book of Revelation) and more. One particularly interesting topic is the Holy Spirit’s work of purifying the Temple, but we will leave those things for future months. For now, it’s enough for us to ponder the fact that throughout all ages the Holy Spirit has worked to give us life by creating a space for us to meet with and worship our great God.