SKENE 13: the Temple: as temporary as the Tabernacle

But there is another paradox here that also needs exploring. The move from Tabernacle to Temple represents a move from transience to permanence. The Tabernacle was ideally suited to a nomadic people looking forward to the day when God would lead them into the promised land – it was mobile and temporary, and God, as he himself said, was graciously pleased to live in a tent among his people (2 Sam 7.6). Now, though, 480 years after the exodus, they were a settled people occupying a land that was theirs; they had a king living in a palace in a great city, and it was fitting that God should live in a great temple, a permanent residence among his people. After the consecration of the Temple, God said to Solomon: “I have consecrated this Temple, which you have built, by putting my name there for ever. My eyes and my heart will always be there” (1 Kings 9.3 – so we may speak of God in such human terms !). In the event, however, the Tabernacle seems to have lasted, in some form or other, longer than the Temple: the Tabernacle, as we have seen, for 480 years, the Temple for less than 400, completed in about 950 BC but destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BC. The second Temple was built 70 years later, but was then destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. The destruction of the first Temple was God’s judgement on his people for their failure to abide by the Old Covenant; the destruction of the second was God’s demonstration that the New Covenant had made redundant a Temple ‘made-by-human-hands’. Stephen seems to have been the first to realise that the Temple was no longer the centre of the religious universe, the place where, uniquely, God was to be located. I suggested earlier that he may have been pondering the significance of Jesus’ use of the Temple as a metaphor for his own human body. Perhaps he concluded that, since this metaphorical ‘temple’ had now indeed been destroyed and raised from the dead in a new form, a resurrection body, so the actual Temple had been destroyed, in God’s purpose if not yet in history, and replaced by a spiritual temple, not-made-by-human-hands, namely, the body of the church, God’s New Covenant people. In the first 6 chapters of Acts the early church continued, by force of habit, perhaps, to gravitate towards the Temple; but after Stephen’s speech and subsequent martyrdom, with the widespread scattering of the believers under persecution, the Temple slips into the background – until Paul’s appearance there in chapter 21 provokes a riot: “the whole city was aroused, and people came running from all directions. Seeing Paul, they dragged him from the Temple, and immediately the gates were shut” (v.30). Some have seen the closing of the Temple gates here as symbolic: God finally shutting down a building and a sacrificial system that had been redundant ever since the crucifixion. At that time its redundancy had been signalled by the symbolic tearing from top to bottom of the veil barring access to the sanctuary - of which, more later. All that was now needed was to send in the demolition squad: the Romans were good at that !