Building Permits

Now the prophets, Haggai and Zechariah the son of Iddo, prophesied to the Jews who were in Judah and Jerusalem, in the name of the God of Israel who was over them.  Then Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel and Jeshua the son of Jozadak arose and began to rebuild the house of God that is in Jerusalem, and the prophets of God were with them, supporting them. – Ezra 5:1-2

Probably around 538 B.C., the Persian king Cyrus issued a decree to allow the rebuilding of the temple.  When the exiles returned and began to rebuild, they began to encounter opposition.  Religion itself is not necessarily offense to the flesh, so long as it benefits and respects the fallen nature and gives it its due.  The king’s decree had been intended to placate the religious instincts of the various conquered and subject peoples.  As far as the empire was concerned, there was no difference between the Lord God of the Jews and the gods of the Assyrians or the Elamites or some other tribe.  But God is different. 

True spiritual worship of the one true and living God denies the primacy and ascendency of the flesh.  It rejects the restrictions and rules of the carnal nature.  Building, specifically rebuilding, the temple typifies the resurrection life of the believer and exalts the supremacy of the Spirit.  This led to resistance on the part of some of the non-Jewish people who had been settled in the region around the ruins of Jerusalem. 

Oddly enough, the first thing their enemies did was offer to help:

Now when the adversaries of Judah and Benjamin heard that the returned exiles were building a temple to the LORD, the God of Israel, they approached Zerubbabel and the heads of fathers' houses and said to them, Let us build with you, for we worship your God as you do, and we have been sacrificing to him ever since the days of Esarhaddon king of Assyria who brought us here (Ezra 4:1-2).

The old nature is always ready to jump in and help us out.  Like Zerubbabel, though, we have to understand that the flesh can have no part in the new life.  It has been crucified and put to death in Christ.  All it can offer is corruption, all it does will pass away.  We are building for eternity, to stand the test of time and the purifying fire: 

According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building upon it. Let each one take care how he builds upon it.  For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.  Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw—  each one's work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done (1 Corinthians 3:10-13).

When their offer of help was rejected, the adversaries began to plot against the builders, sending letters to the king to stir up suspicions and rumors of rebellion.  The Christian seeks always to live in peace.  We are not troublemakers, yet, over and over, this is exactly what we are accused of being.  Because we do not wish to go along with the fashions of the world, because we cling to “old-fashioned” truth and the values associated with it, we make the modern, secular world uncomfortable. 

We are loyal subjects of the True King.  Our enemies are the ones who have rejected the King’s authority and follow after the usurper, the rebellious prince of this world.  They project their own rebellious thoughts and intentions onto us.  We seem to have a secret.  We must be hiding something.  Because they have ulterior motives, they accuse us of having occult agendas. 

Sometimes the attacks get so intense that we forget our mission and purpose, that we are here to build the temple.  That is exactly what happened to those exiles.  Their enemies stirred up King Artaxerxes to issue a decree to stop the construction.  From about 530 B.C. to 520, work was halted and the temple sat exposed and unfinished.  This brings us to the point of the passage quoted above. 

The temple of God is built by the Word, the prophetic, anointed Word.  It is cannot be completed by secular force.  Like the “weapons of our warfare”, our tools for building are not carnal, but mighty through God (2 Corinthians 10:4).  Instead of pulling down strongholds, they are mighty to build up in the kingdom of God.  It is the truth and our faith in the truth that encourages and empowers us to press on in the face of the adversary's denunciations and contrary decrees. 

The temple is never going to be built if we wait for permission from those who do not understand the things of the spirit.  We do not need secular authority or the permission of temporal power.  We have the words of Jesus Himself -- And Jesus came and said to them, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me (Matthew 28:18).  What He says, we can do.

A Temple Eternal

… And all the people shouted with a great shout when they praised the Lord, because the foundation of the house of the Lord was laid.  But many of the priests and Levites and heads of fathers' houses, old men who had seen the first house, wept with a loud voice when they saw the foundation of this house being laid, though many shouted aloud for joy, so that the people could not distinguish the sound of the joyful shout from the sound of the people's weeping, for the people shouted with a great shout, and the sound was heard far away. – Ezra 3:11-13

One of the accusations brought against Jesus was that He spoke of destroying the temple then raising it back up again in three days (Matthew 26:61, Mark 14:58).  John’s gospel gives us the statement directly from Jesus in context (John 2:18-22).  Jesus had driven the moneychangers from the temple.  The Jews gathered round and asked Him, more or less, who He thought He was taking that kind of action on His own.  What sign are You going to show us, they wanted know, to justify Your usurpation of authority.  Jesus replied that if they were to destroy the temple, He would raise it up again in three days.  Literalism and Asperger’s being nothing new, someone objected that they had been building on the temple for forty-six years. 

Like the older generation -- those representing the Law of Moses and the priesthood of Aaron, in the days of Ezra, some compare the elegant simplicity and grace of the Gospel to the stately, formal, complex, and, perhaps, baroque requirements of the Law and find themselves grieving for the loss.  They fail to see the beauty and liberation of Christ’s Melchizedek priesthood.  They weep, longing for the orderliness of Aaron and the solidity of the stones raised by Solomon. 

The heart is soft.  It is subtle and easily moved.  The temple of stone does not move.  It is set in time, still, a monument to God, a testimony that lasts through generations.  Though it may stand for five hundred years, a hundred lifetimes of the priests who serve within, it, too, is temporal.  Even if not overthrown by the hand of man, wind, rain, and dust, heat and cold, sun and ice, root and tendril, even the shifting of the bedrock below will bring it to nothing, leave it a ruin buried like dry bones in the earth. 

Man, every man, is eternal.  Our bodies pass away and are laid aside like the tabernacle of Moses, but the golden ark at the heart in which dwells “the law of the Spirit of life”, overshadowed by the presence of God himself goes on forever. 

The order of service in the temple was predictable, regular, and precise.  It could be intricate and elaborate, but it was comprehensible.  It could all be known by the experts.  This is not the case when the heart of man becomes the dwelling of God, when the Spirit asserts His undeniable precedence over the letter.  Aslan is not a tame lion.  The Law of Moses can be made to jump through man’s hoops.  The wild Law of Christ, the Law of Love cannot, and we must, instead, surrender to it. 

It is no wonder that some weep as other shout for joy.  Freedom is a fearful thing, but the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.

Don't Stand So Close To Me

In their setting of their threshold by My thresholds, and their post by My posts, and the wall between Me and them, they have even defiled My holy name by their abominations that they have committed. There I have consumed them in My anger. – Ezekiel 43:8

God likes His space. Despite the multitude of stars, space is mostly, well, space. Detachment is an essential principle in knowing God. We usually call it separation, being set apart, or in more technical terms – holiness or sanctification. Back in high school, I wrote a bit of doggerel that summarized my understanding at the time: Detachment is wondrous; involvement is pain./ It’s better to watch than be caught in the rain.

What I didn’t realize, of course, is that detachment is not the opposite of involvement and that separation meant, often, living in the rain. At that same time, I had pinned to the wall in my bedroom a copy of Ecclesiastes 1:18 – “For in much wisdom is much grief, and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”

Wisdom and holiness are closely related. Even in the most mundane things, we gain insight by “stepping back” either physically or mentally. We say that we “turn a problem over” in our minds and look at it from a different perspective. We speak of being too close to something to clearly understand it.

This helps to understand why the Bible talks about the “fear of God” – which is the beginning of wisdom. In order to know God, we must have some distance, respectful distance, you might say, from Him. You can get too close, too familiar, too attached to your piece of the Rock, and you lose perspective on the whole. There are groups of Christians -- or people who call themselves Christians, who get so heavily invested in some tiny point that they become all but demonic. The members of the Westboro Baptist Church – those misguided souls who protest the funerals of fallen servicemen – come to mind.

It’s another of those biblical paradoxes that in order to draw near to God we must give Him some room.

Once we have come to that understanding, we find this passage applies in a different way as well, for we are the temple of the Holy Spirit. We can’t let the things of the world get too close to us. We need space, a buffer around us. If the world presses in too close to the temple, our light cannot be seen by those who crowd around us. The vertical element doesn’t help here. It’s like entering the downtown canyons of a major city. You can see the tops of the skyscrapers from miles away, but once you are down on the streets, it much harder to figure out where you are. We need the horizontal separation as well. Holiness is not some whim God has. It serves a critical purpose. We are called to be a “peculiar people”, different than the secular sleepers who surround us. He wants us to stick out like sore thumbs.

Under Joshua’s leadership the Israelites were to follow the Ark across Jordan and into the Promised Land, but in order to go the right way, they had to give it space, allowing it to be seen by all.

And they commanded the people saying, “When you see the ark of the covenant of the LORD your God and the priests the Levites bearing it, then you shall remove from your place and go after it. Yet there shall be a space between you and it, about two thousand cubits by measure. Come not near unto it, that you may know the way by which you must go, for you have not passed this way heretofore” (Joshua 3:3-4)