The Temple: The Dwelling Place Of The Holy

I had a talk with someone this week who said they don’t know why they are exhausted. I said, “When is the last time you got a massage, or took a day away for yourself, or simply said, “No?”

This person looked at me with deep puzzlement. She didn’t understand how a person could be Christian and still take care of themselves at the same time.

She asked, “Don’t you always have to put others before yourself? Don’t you have to sacrifice yourself in order to follow God’s ways?”

I told her those were excellent questions. Ones that I had struggled with myself for a long time. In order to do that, I want to go back in time, to one of the parts of the Easter story that we don’t like to think about very much. The crucifixion. I want us to look at it because there are several things happening at that exact moment of death, in the midst of this great universal upheaval.

as Jesus breathed his last, there was darkness over the earth; an earthquake struck; tombs of dead saints were opened; Jesus cried out. And “the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.”

When I was in middle school, it was cool to have holes in the knees of your jeans, so my friends taught me how to rub them out on the cement so they were easy to rip. But every time I had them looking perfect, my mom would patch them up!

Cloth is not hard to rip.

The veil that separated the Most Holy place, the one that tore when Jesus cried out, is described in pretty great detail both in scripture and in non-religious history books.

The veil before the Most Holy Place was 60 feet long, and 30 feet wide, and at least four inches thick…

In the beginning, in Genesis, we find God walking with Adam and Even in the cool of the day. He is close to them. They are free to be together, to converse and share. Then, they defile themselves with sin. They let sin enter the perfect paradise, and in the same way you cannot breathe underwater, Adam and Eve could no longer dwell in the garden. God had to send angels to guard it. But God did not stop loving his children.

In the book of Exodus, right after the Lord delivers the Children of Israel from the Egyptians, God comes to meet them on the mountain. The trouble is, the mountain is trembling, there is smoke and fire and the Israelites are so terrified that they send Moses on their behalf. God has Moses build a temple so that God can be with his people. He orders very specific directions for this temple. The thick curtain offers a barricade between the Holy of Holies in the temple and the most holy place so that the people can stand outside of all of this and be near God.

Now you have the background on the curtain.

The veil being torn from top to bottom is a fact of history.

But, still, it seems a strange thing to happen, don’t you think?

Ok… we also have to remember why Jesus came to be one of us. Sad, but true, not only did he put on human skin so that we could know God, but also to take our sin and death away so that we would not have to separated from God any longer. We could have eternal life! Jesus opened the way for us! And, we know this happened, because he came back to show people! Hundreds of people saw him! The veil in the temple separates the people from God. Because of sin, we cannot be in the presence of the Holy or we would become ash where we stand. We cannot look upon the radiance of God and live. We are not pure enough.

So… we know that God dwelled in the temple and God dwelled in the form of a human – Jesus.

When the human body released Christ’s spiritual body, he cried out! “It is finished!” What was finished? The separation between the people and God.

The veil separating the people from God was torn in two.

But, wouldn’t we all turn to ash?

Remember, during those days when Jesus was in the tomb, something was brewing. Something was happening, and I imagine, in the heavenly realms, we will never know the full of it, but when Jesus returned, he proved that he was God and that he was the first to conquer sin and death on behalf of us. The veil of sin had been taken away by the shedding of Christ’s pure blood, and now we have complete access to God.

But wait… there’s more…