As Truth Two reveals, when the Holy Spirit, God HImself, takes up residence in you, He brings with Him all the power, love, wisdom, understanding, joy, peace, and gifts of the Godhead. Let this truth sink in, God now lives in you. Not with you or by you or around you. But the Holy Spirit actually lives, right now, in you. Which, as the Scriptures teach, makes you a temple of the Holy Spirit, a dwelling place of God. Consider this:
Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? For you were bought at a price; therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s – 1 Corinthians 6:19-20.
For Christians today, the idea of a temple seems archaic and outdated. After all, temple worship is something we associate with false religions or is relegated to the pages of the Old Testament, a practice of ancient Judaism. And we’ve moved far beyond that, or so we think.
In Judaism, the heart of their worship was tied up in a building, a temple. Because it was only in a specific part of this building, and only on certain days, that man was able to meet with God. And to make matters worse, not all men could meet with God, only the priest, and only after going through rituals that make no sense to us today. God was understood to dwell in the temple made for Him to reflect His glory. And it was only in the temple that sacrifices could be made for the atonement for sins. Without the temple, there were no sacrifices. And without the sacrifices, there was no forgiveness of sin. So the importance of the temple to the Jewish understanding of the forgiveness of sins cannot be overstated.
The first temple was built by Solomon and later destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BC. After 70 years without a temple, the second one was built around 516 BC under the leadership of Ezra and Zerubbabel and stood for almost 585 years. Later, beginning around 20 BC and during the 18th year of his reign, Herod the Great made impressive improvements to this second temple so that it is commonly known to us as Herod’s Temple. It was destroyed by Titus Vespasian and the Fifth, Tenth, and Fifteenth Roman Legion during the siege of Jerusalem in 70 AD.
So without a temple, what were the Jewish people to do? How could they meet with their God? They could not. At least not in a temple made by human hands (Acts 7:48).
When Jesus died on the cross, He was the one, final, perfect sacrifice for the atonement of our sin (Heb. 10:1-18). There was no need any longer for the sacrifices of animals as a picture of what Jesus was to accomplish on the cross. Hence, there was no need for a physical temple whereby sinful men could come and offer the blood of goats and lambs to somehow atone for the penalty of sin for which Jesus had already suffered and died to forgive (Heb. 9:12). After Jesus, everything had changed.
Since there was no need for a temple, nor continual blood sacrifices, nor a high priest to act as an intermediatory between each of us and a Holy God, what has replaced these religious mainstays for us? The answer: Jesus. He became our High Priest (Heb. 9:11, 10:21) and His blood, sacrificed for us, has provided atonement for our sins, once and for all (Heb. 10:11-14). And the veil in the temple that separated sinful men from the presence of God in the Holy of Holies, was torn from top to bottom at the death of Christ (Matt. 27:51), indicating there was now no barrier between God and man. We now have bold access to the throne of God by the blood sacrifice of Jesus (Heb. 10:19-22).
And this...
