Jesus, the Temple Rebuilt in Three Days
“Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” Then the Jews replied, “It took forty-six years to build this temple, and You will raise it up in three days?” But He was speaking of the temple which was His body. So when He had risen from the dead, His disciples remembered what He had said. And they believed and trusted in and relied on the Scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken.” (John 2:19-22, AMP)
Have you ever had a moment when you are really going through something that seems needless or meaningless? When we’re actually going through those moments, we wonder why God is doing something a particular way, or why it’s happening to us at all. It’s often that when we gain the perspective that only time and persevering with the Lord can bring that we actually see what He was doing. We look back and see that our struggles and our suffering was refining us and working something out within us. We were learning lessons in those moments that we couldn’t have learned if everything was at an even keel.
This method is something that Jesus was well-versed in. There are many times in scripture where Jesus spoke in parables to help explain the mysteries of God, and even more times when Jesus spoke about His death, resurrection, and the coming of the Holy Spirit before any of it ever came to be.
He does it in John 2, when He cleanses the temple during Passover. The people confront Him, asking Him for a sign to prove His authority to clear out the enterprising and opportunistic merchants in the outer courts. To this, Jesus answers that the temple would be destroyed and He would raise it up in three days. In the moment, the disciples and Jews that witnessed the event think that Jesus is talking about the actual temple in Jerusalem that Solomon built.
But Jesus is not talking about that physical temple that took 46 years to build or the structure that Jews in Jerusalem cherished as a holy, sacred building. It takes years of time and the perspective of a post-cross-and-empty-grave mindset for the disciples to realize that instead of the actual temple, Jesus was talking about Himself. The temple was his physical, human body that would be destroyed and hung on a cross, buried in a grave and resurrected three days later.
What’s more is that Christ says in three days HE will raise that temple, which is outright proof of Christ’s fully God, fully man experience during His time on earth. Not only did He know of the coming cross, but He knew that He would rise from the dead and accomplish every prophetic word about Him through the generations since Adam. He wasn’t merely a man until the moment he hung on the cross, where His Godship then took over. He wasn’t only God to the point where He didn’t understand or walk through the struggles and heartaches that we do in this life.
But He did know the cross was coming, and though the people of that day thought He spoke in riddles or about other things, He spoke about God’s plan for redeeming our sinful humanity throughout His ministry.
And not only that, but we find in scripture that Jesus makes this claim that He will raise Himself up from the dead, but Paul also writes about God the Father and the Holy Spirit having a hand in the same thing. In Romans 8:11, Paul writes, “And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you.” He also writes in His opening introduction of the same letter about the Holy Spirit empowering Christ to rise from the dead.
Likewise, Paul also writes of God the Father doing the same. Romans 6:4 states, “We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.” And the idea is repeated again in the opening of Paul’s letter to the Galatians.
Does this mean that Paul, Jesus, and any other person that asserts a member of the Trinity raised Jesus from death to life again is inconsistent? Does it mean that there is misinformation or room for interpretation in the Bible? No. What it does mean is that all three members of the Trinity– Father, Son, and Holy Spirit– came together to accomplish God’s work of redemption. God the Father does not hold all the power on behalf of the Son and the Spirit. Jesus is wholly man and wholly God, as we established before. His deity is not reserved for certain moments and then handed back over to the more mystifying aspects of His being when not in use. The Holy Spirit is not an ethereal presence that fills in as the power source for the Father and the Son when they need it. They are all three working at once with the same godly power and might.
What does this mean for us? It means that we follow a God that is sovereign. He knows and ordains all. He knew about the cross and every other miracle and lesson along the way. He knew about the empty grave and every soul that would be saved and brought back to Him because of it. He knows your struggles and the character He’s building in us through that pressure and resistance. He knows where you’ll end up when it’s all said and done.
It also means that we worship a God who is always working. And He’s not pushing responsibilities or projects on to someone else. God the Father isn’t pushing paper to the Holy Spirit’s desk and asking Him to fill the gap on any particular item. Jesus isn’t trying to garner approval from the Father in order to work something in you.
No, God is working– three in one– to refine you, teach you, mature you, and to prove His glory through you. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all coming together to accomplish the will of the Lord. You serve a God that doesn’t let any of His people slip through the cracks. He doesn’t place any one of us on the back burner to deal with a more pressing matter. He is at work in all of us, building His kingdom, leading His sheep, and showing us His love for us.
