The Third Temple

Luke draws attention to the location where Peter preached his first two sermons. He mentions the Temple seven times (Acts 2:46; 3:1, 2, 3, 8, 10) between his accounts of these sermons.

This emphasis is striking. Forty-five days earlier, Jesus had said this Temple would fall in his generation (Luke 21:5–6, 32). Let us explore this somewhat ironic setting further.

Standing in the Temple courts, Peter declared God was fulfilling prophecy. In his first sermon, he mentioned the fulfillment of Joel’s prophecy about the “last days” (Acts 2:16–21; cp. Joel 2:28–32). In his second sermon, Peter said, “God foretold by the mouth of all His prophets, that the Christ would suffer” (Acts 3:18). He also said, “Yea, and all the prophets from Samuel and those that follow after, as many as have spoken, have likewise foretold of these days” (Acts 3:24).

This is an amazing thought: all the prophets had foretold the events that were occurring in the Temple’s “last days.” These events would establish the messianic age. Would it have a Temple?

Peter has already summarized the events necessary to launch the messianic age. They included Jesus’s death, burial, resurrection, and enthronement. Because of Jesus’s coronation, God had poured out the Holy Spirit. The destruction of the Temple and the passing away of the Mosaic age would soon follow.¹

This Temple was the latest in a series of houses in which God dwelled. God had told Moses to construct the tabernacle and its furniture “according to the pattern which was shown you on the mountain” (Exod 25:40). The New Testament says this tabernacle was “the copy and shadow of the heavenly things” (Heb 8:5). When it was complete, God came to dwell in it (Exod 40:34-35.)

About five centuries later, God showed David the building site for the First Temple (1 Chr 21:18; 22:1). Solomon then constructed the Temple on that site (1 Chr 22:6). This Temple was the Tabernacle in permanent form. As he had done with the tabernacle, God came to dwell in the Temple (2 Chr 7:1).

God used the Babylonians to destroy the First Temple in 587 BC. He promised to allow the Jews to build the Second Temple after seventy years of captivity. He fulfilled that promise when Ezra, Nehemiah, Zerubbabel, and others returned from Babylon (cp. Ezra 3:8–11).

Over four centuries later, just before Jesus’s birth, king Herod began to restore and embellish the Second Temple. This project required at least forty-six years (John 2:20).

As Peter preached, he stood near this refurbished Second Temple.² He knew God was about to destroy it. But he also knew God had planned to build a Third Temple.

When Jesus had cleansed the Second Temple, the Jews asked for a sign regarding his meaning. Jesus had replied, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19). 

Peter knew this Temple was not a brick-and-mortar building. It was Jesus’s physical body. His resurrection had created the Third Temple.

But there is more to this building project. Paul later said God “made us alive together with Christ” (Eph 2:5; cp. Isa 26:19). He also said the church “is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all” (Eph 1:23; cp. Col 1:18).

So, when Jesus rose from the dead, the church rose with him. The raising up of Christ’s physical temple-body was also the raising up of his church-body.

The implication is straightforward: the church—considered as the spiritual body of Christ—is the Third Temple. 

Many years after Pentecost, Peter made this clear. He said:

Coming to Him as to a living stone, rejected indeed by men, but chosen by God and precious, you also, as living stones, are being built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. Therefore it is also contained in the Scripture, “Behold, I lay in Zion A chief cornerstone, elect, precious, And he who believes on Him will by no means be put to shame.” Therefore, to you who believe, He is precious; but to those who are disobedient, “The stone which the builders rejected Has become the chief cornerstone,” and “A stone of stumbling And a rock of offense.” They stumble, being disobedient to the word, to which they also were appointed.” (1 Peter 2:4–8)

Here is the Third Temple. It is “a spiritual house” in which God dwells with his people.

The other New Testament writers expand this point. By a figure of speech (i.e., synecdoché³), Paul applied Temple-identity to subsets of Christ’s body. To an individual congregation, he said, “Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?” (1 Cor 3:16).

Paul told the Ephesians:

You are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone, in whom the whole building, being fitted together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit. (Eph 2:19–22)

The Apostle also applied this truth (by the same figure) to individual Christians. He asked, “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?” (1 Cor 6:19). Individual Christians should flee sexual immorality to avoid defiling the Temple of God (1 Cor 6:18–20).

John records Jesus’s promise to individual saints in his churches: “He who overcomes, I will make him a pillar in the temple of My God, and he shall go out no more” (Rev 3:12). 

God’s Third Temple is a present reality. May God bless us to offer “spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” in this Temple. It is the third and final Temple of God. The Bible speaks of no other.

1. We discussed these in our last post.
2. The image in this post is The Healing of the Lame Man by Raphael (1483–1520). This file (here) is in the public domain (PD-US).
3. See E. W. Bullinger, Figures of Speech Used in the Bible Explained and Illustrated (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1968), 613.