But if the Temple is now obsolete and destroyed, how has it been replaced ? Does God no longer long to dwell with his people ? Has he finally given up on us, and retreated to heaven and ‘closed the gates’ ? ‘me genoito’, as Paul would say: ‘Heaven forbid !’ Solomon himself, all unwittingly, in his prayer at its dedication gives us a clue as to how the Temple would be replaced. The keynote of this prayer is expressed in verse 29 of 1 Kings 8: “May your eyes be open towards this Temple night and day, this place of which you said ‘my Name shall be there’, so that you will hear the prayer your servant prays towards this place.” Then follows a series of hypothetical situations (though, in the event, many of them became all too real) in which the Israelites would need to pray for God’s forgiveness, protection or deliverance; in each one, Solomon asks that God will “hear from heaven, your dwelling-place (‘katoikesis’, LXX) when they pray towards this Temple”. Solomon knew, as we have seen, that God’s permanent dwelling-place was in heaven, not in a Temple made-by-human-hands; yet God had promised that his name would be there, even though an earthly building could not even begin to accommodate all his greatness. So to pray ‘towards the Temple’ was to pray in God’s name, just as Christians now pray to a sovereign God enthroned in heaven in the name of his incarnate Son, Jesus. It is Jesus who has replaced the Temple, and the Tabernacle, and made them both obsolete, and so it is to his incarnation that we must now proceed.
Wednesday, 14 December 2011
SKENE: the Temple replaced
But if the Temple is now obsolete and destroyed, how has it been replaced ? Does God no longer long to dwell with his people ? Has he finally given up on us, and retreated to heaven and ‘closed the gates’ ? ‘me genoito’, as Paul would say: ‘Heaven forbid !’ Solomon himself, all unwittingly, in his prayer at its dedication gives us a clue as to how the Temple would be replaced. The keynote of this prayer is expressed in verse 29 of 1 Kings 8: “May your eyes be open towards this Temple night and day, this place of which you said ‘my Name shall be there’, so that you will hear the prayer your servant prays towards this place.” Then follows a series of hypothetical situations (though, in the event, many of them became all too real) in which the Israelites would need to pray for God’s forgiveness, protection or deliverance; in each one, Solomon asks that God will “hear from heaven, your dwelling-place (‘katoikesis’, LXX) when they pray towards this Temple”. Solomon knew, as we have seen, that God’s permanent dwelling-place was in heaven, not in a Temple made-by-human-hands; yet God had promised that his name would be there, even though an earthly building could not even begin to accommodate all his greatness. So to pray ‘towards the Temple’ was to pray in God’s name, just as Christians now pray to a sovereign God enthroned in heaven in the name of his incarnate Son, Jesus. It is Jesus who has replaced the Temple, and the Tabernacle, and made them both obsolete, and so it is to his incarnation that we must now proceed.
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