The Full Picture Restored

This book began with a photograph of a man with his fist raised and his mouth wide open, who seemed to be shouting in anger until the frame was widened and he was seen standing in a ballpark, cheering with the crowd. For many of us, the question of the temple and the Torah was settled by a picture cropped in just that way. A few verses, cut away from what stood around them, seemed to make the answer obvious: the old was finished, and the new had taken its place.

We said at the start that the picture had been cropped. Forty-four chapters later, the edges have been put back. Let us look at the whole picture one more time.

The Temple from Solomon to the New Jerusalem

We began with the man who built the temple, and we heard him say on the day it was dedicated that the heavens of the heavens cannot contain God. Solomon was not canceling his own house. He was explaining why it was holy: the God whom nothing can contain had chosen a place to put His name. Stephen quoted the prophet who said the same thing, and false witnesses twisted his words. Paul said it in Athens, in a city crowded with idols, about the gods of the Greeks.

Then we followed Paul to Jerusalem and watched him walk into the temple, years after the resurrection, to purify himself and to pay for the offerings of others. We saw that the commands bound to the place were paused, not deleted, while the temple lies in ruins. We met the one who will sit in God’s seat. We read Ezekiel’s measurements, Zechariah’s earthquake, and the reservation Yeshua made at the table of His kingdom, and we ended with a city shaped like the holy of holies. The temple was never canceled. It is growing until it fills the new creation.

Synagogue, Temple, and Table

Next we saw Moses read in the synagogues every sabbaton σάββατον sab'-bat-on, Gentile believers sitting in those synagogues to hear him, and thousands of Jewish believers in Jerusalem, every one of them zealous for the Torah. Then we took off glasses we had not known we were wearing. We saw that the New Testament was written while smoke still rose from the altar, and that its writers called the gathered believers a temple and treated the Lord’s table with the fear due to an altar. And we weighed what it costs to lead God’s people, for those who lead carry the duty to teach the difference between the holy and the common.

What Paul and the Apostles Did

Then we walked the road the apostles walked. We found a zeal that needed steering rather than removing, and a Way that outsiders called a sect, whose people still worshiped in the temple. We met four rules for the first day, with the rest to be heard in the synagogue every sabbaton. We met one Torah for the native and the stranger, one olive tree, and a husband who died and a law that did not. We found festivals that the Colossians were keeping, which is why anyone could judge them, and a shadow still falling, because the body that casts it is still coming. We read the account of the farewell meal in Troas for what it says. We saw the Sabbath repeated after the resurrection, and a Lord of the Sabbath who defined it rather than broke it. At the end of that road stood one old word: return.

His Calendar and His Offerings

Last of all came God’s calendar. We saw feasts given to everyone who joins himself to the LORD. We counted nine appointed times on God’s wall and seventy bulls on His altar. We met a king who wanted the mountain of meeting, and a God who gathers those who grieve to be far from it. And around the holy we found the Torah’s own definitions page, which the apostles never rewrote, a holy table where wine and carelessness did harm, and a family crest given to one house.

The Edges Put Back

Now widen the frame to take in all four parts at once.

When the verses are read in their places, with the words that come before and after them, with the original words beside the English, and in the order things happened, the break we were told to look for is not there. The wider picture shows no line where the old was cut away. The house where God put His name, the first believers who never left it, the apostles who walked its road, and the appointed times that set its rhythm make one building, joined at every point from Leviticus to Revelation. Nothing in it was torn out and set aside, and it still stands.

In the first chapter of this book we read Isaiah’s words, “The heavens are my throne.” At the end of that same chapter of Isaiah, the prophet says something more. We have read it before, and we read it once more here, because it shows where the whole building is heading:

Isaiah 66:23 And it shall come to pass, from new moon to new moon, and from Shabbat to Shabbat, all flesh (basar בָּשָׂר baw-sawr') shall come to worship before me, says the LORD.

“From new moon to new moon, and from Shabbat to Shabbat.” The prophet does not speak of one people only, but of “all flesh (basar).” The God who would not be contained by a house chose a house. The God who set the lights for appointed times will one day gather every nation to keep them. He never canceled the temple, because He never canceled the meeting.

What Comes Next

Still, a careful reader will have one hand raised. What about Paul, and the verses that seem to say the law is over, such as the line that we are not under law but under grace? What about Galatians? Those verses are real, and they deserve better than a quick answer at the end of a book about the temple.

So they will have a book of their own. Book 2 of this series, St. Paul on Trial, opens the letters most often used to set the Torah aside and reads them the way we have read everything here: in their places, in their own words, and in the order they were written. It takes up sin, grace, Galatians, and the new covenant, one by one.

The edges of this picture have been put back. In the next book, we widen the frame once more.