The True Temple (By Chris Barnes)

1 Kings (Chapters 1- 7) 
OBSERVE: We read in the early chapters of 1 Kings that it is Solomon (David’s Son) who will be the one to build the temple for God. We also see that this was no quick or easy task. It took Solomon seven years to build God’s Temple with a labor force of 30,000 men from all over Israel. During the construction, the Lord gave a message to Solomon. “Concerning this Temple you are building, if you keep all my decrees and regulations and obey all my commands, I will fulfill through you the promise I made to your father, David. I will live among the Israelites and will never abandon my people Israel“(1 Kings 6: 11-13).

INTERPRET: But God’s people did not obey all his commands, so eventually the Lord withdrew his presence from the Temple, and “Nebuzaradan, the captain of the guard and an official of the Babylonian king, arrived in Jerusalem. He burned down the Temple of the Lord” (2 Kings 25: 8-9). The temple was rebuilt after God’s people would return from exile, but it never regained its former glory over the next 400 plus years.

APPLICATION: By the time Jesus came, Herod’s reconstructed Temple had become a place where empty religion and profiteering replaced true worship and prayer. This angered Jesus, and when he drove out those who perverted his Father’s house, the religious leaders responded:

“What are doing? If God gave you authority to do this, show us a miraculous sign to prove it.” ‘All right,” Jesus replied. “Destroy the 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 that he had said this, and they believed both the Scriptures and what Jesus had said. (John 2: 18-22)

Jesus’ opponents, obsessed by the old order, could think only of the bricks and mortar. But the Temple in Jerusalem had always been a preview of the temple to come in Jesus himself. It was his body, the True Temple that was raised in three days to give us life for all the days to come. CHRIST IS RISEN! HALLELUJAH!

REFLECTION / QUESTION: What does the Resurrection mean to you?

PRAYER: Lord Jesus, you are the true temple, you are everything to me. I pray for a heart that chases passionately after you all the days of my life. AMEN.

SONG: Christ is Risen (By Phil Wickham)