The Doomed Temple

In an earlier post, I described how the early chapters in particular of Matthew's Gospel drew parallels between the life of Jesus and the history of Israel, making the point that Israel typologically represented Christ. Given that the primary theme of this series is the temple, I thought I would return to Matthew's Gospel to show what he records about this theme.

In Matthew 12:6, Jesus, speaking of himself, tells the Pharisees that "something greater than the temple is here." Understanding the grand significance of the temple in the history and worship of Israel, this is an audacious claim that could only be described as megalomania unless Jesus is, in fact, the Son of God. Certainly, no mere human or simple great teacher could make such a claim about himself.

However, we should turn to Matthew 21 to see the extraordinary teaching of Jesus regarding his authority over the temple and his coming as the true temple.

The chapter begins with Jesus triumphal entry into Jerusalem, which is followed by his going to the temple. Arriving there, he exercises authority over it by both cleansing it -- overturning the tables of the money changers, to whom he quotes scripture designating them as thieves -- and welcoming the blind and lame, to whom he brings healing. Thus, Jesus exercises the authority to determine both who is excluded and who is included in proper temple worship.

Following the cleansing of the temple, we find a hungry Jesus coming across a fig tree in early bloom that turns out to have no fruit. Discovering the lack of figs, Jesus pronounces a curse on the tree, which immediately begins to whither. Those who imagine that Jesus out of anger needlessly pronounced a curse on the tree miss the point of the story, which is subsequently amplified by Jesus in his conversation with the disciples the next day. The cursing of the fig tree occurred on the same day that Jesus cleansed the temple, pronouncing that those in it had reduced a "house of prayer" to a "den of thieves." The fig tree provided a physical picture of what the temple had become, a place of pretentious claims that provided no actual food.

Thus, when Peter expressed further surprise about the rapid withering of the fig tree, Jesus had more to say: "If you have faith and do not doubt, you will not only do what has been done to the fig tree, but even if you say to this mountain, 'Be taken up and thrown into the sea, it will happen.'"

This mountain. Which mountain? The temple mount.

Often we look at this passage and see it as teaching something about the power of prayer, which, of course, it does. But there is more here. The reference to "this mountain" as a matter of potential, even prayerful, destruction, shows a radical indifference to the relationship between the continuation of the temple and the true worship of God. A prayer, in faith, to cast the temple mount into the sea (presumably the Dead Sea) is something that could be answered affirmatively by God.

The chapter closes with the parable of the tenants, which is directed against the leaders of Israel, who had rejected the prophets and were now rejecting the son of the owner of the vineyard. Jesus again uses temple imagery, quoting from Psalm 118 that the rejected stone would become the cornerstone of a new temple. Jesus was applying this to himself.

Less than a week later, Jesus would be crucified through the efforts of these leaders and would be raised from the dead by the power of God. Having fulfilled all of the Scripture regarding the temple standing in Jerusalem, its priesthood, and its sacrifices, Jesus stood alone as the true temple, the true priest, and the once and all sacrifice for sin. Thus, the temple that would stand for another 35 years in Jerusalem, was obsolete. It was no longer a faithful temple offering required sacrifices. It was a pagan temple offering sacrifices that failed to acknowledge that Christ had made his once and for all sacrifice for sin.

The temple was doomed, a point that Jesus again made at the start of Matthew 24, and the Romans would execute that judgment a generation later.