Expanding Temple

First there is only a tabernacle in the wilderness. Yahweh’s house, by itself, surrounded by a curtain. No priests live on the tabernacle grounds; the sanctuary is bounded off from everyone.

By the time of Samuel, the little boy is sleeping in “the temple” at Shiloh. It’s still a tent, and surely Samuel’s hasn’t put up a little cot in the holy place. The tabernacle apparently has been in permanent place so long that the priests have build up their own homes and buildings around it. It’s become a tabernacle complex.

Then the temple. 1 Kings 6 begins with “Solomon began the house of Yahweh” and the next chapter ends with “Solomon finished the house of Yahweh,” but smack in the middle of the text is the description of Solomon’s public buildings and palaces (1 Kings 7:1-12). The house of God is no longer just the temple. It now includes the house of the Davidic king, Yahweh’s son.

In itself, the second temple is smaller, less grand, than Solomon’s. But the house of God keeps expanding. Cyrus gives permission to the Jews to rebuild the house of God, but after they build the temple they keep building. They don’t finish building the “house of God” until Nehemiah dedicates the walls of the city of Jerusalem. Once only the Davidic king lived in the house of Yahweh; now every resident of Jerusalem is a Jew/Judahite, an honorary Davidite, resident in the civic house of God.

Of course, the temple undergoes massive restructuring and expansion in the New Covenant. It bursts beyond the bounds of Jerusalem, beyond Israel, to encompass the world. Wherever Jesus is the temple is because Jesus is the temple. Wherever Jesus is, there is His body, which is the dwelling place of the Spirit, the home of priests and kings bought by Jesus’ blood.