In the start, God created humanity in order that we’d live with him, having fun with and glorifying him eternally. Adam and Eve enjoyed unhindered access to and relationship with God. The entrance of sin into the world modified all that – Adam and Eve found themselves forged out of Eden, away from God’s presence, with no way back.
In one sense or one other, the remainder of the Bible tells the story of how God re-establishes relationship with human beings. He longs to dwell with us, and he makes a way for us to be present with him. A key means for re-establishing his presence is thru the tabernacle and later the temple. These Old Testament sanctuaries are hugely vital for the New Testament writers as they seek to make sense of who Jesus is and what he got here to do.
One example is John’s Gospel. Jesus speaks of the ‘body of his temple’ in John 2. He is saying that his human body is the dwelling place for the divinity, the way in which wherein God has come near to be together with his people again. This ‘temple Christology’, the thought of ‘Jesus-as-temple’, is hugely vital in John and has often been noticed. Alongside it, there’s the related idea of ‘heaven-as-temple’. This idea is widespread within the New Testament, constructing off the longstanding and ancient concept that the earthly tabernacle or temple mirrors heaven (see Exodus 25:9 and 40) or that heaven is or incorporates a temple (see Ezekiel 40-48).
The ‘Jesus-as-temple’ and ‘heaven-as-temple’ ideas in John usually are not in competition. Instead, they complement and reinforce one another. In John’s prologue, Jesus is just like the divine Wisdom which dwells with God and is shipped out from heaven to dwell with God’s people within the temple (compare the deutero-canonical books Sirach 24 and Wisdom of Solomon 9).
In John 1:14 we read, ‘The word became flesh and tabernacled amongst us.’ In Jesus’s encounter with Nathanael at the top of John 1, he describes himself as Jacob’s ladder from the vision Jacob had at Bethel (literally ‘house of God’) in Genesis 28. The ‘ladder’ isn’t a rickety wood affair or a free-standing stone staircase, but relatively the steps up the side of a ziggurat or mountain-temple. Jesus is saying that he’s the purpose of connection between heaven and earth.
The same idea emerges in Jesus’s encounter with the Samaritan woman in John 4, where he states that ‘a time is coming while you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem’, because true worshippers will worship ‘in Spirit and truth’. Jesus and the Spirit give the access to the heavenly holy space that was previously available only through the earthly temple.
The ‘heaven-as-temple’ idea is most evident in John 14, where Jesus speaks of his Father’s house (a phrase only used elsewhere in John in chapter 2 to explain the temple). It has many rooms, just because the earthly temple had rooms and chambers alongside it, and Jesus is getting in his death and resurrection to arrange a spot before returning to take his followers there as well.
In these ways, John draws on temple imagery to signal that, in Jesus, God has fulfilled his intent and promise to search out a solution to dwell with us – now by his Spirit, and in the longer term in a renewed creation when Jesus returns to take us to be with him and the Father in a renewed creation.
Rev Dr Nick Moore is the Warden of Cranmer Hall, Durham, and the creator of The Open Sanctuary: Access to God and the Heavenly Temple within the New Testament (Baker Academic, 2024)
