Revelation and Temple

Phil Almond raised what I think is a valid criticism of what I’ve posted about the Temple and the Second Coming in his comment on my Re-placing the Temple. He wrote,

Mark 13 and Matthew 24 have material in common. Mark 13 is in answer to the some of the disciples’ question, ‘Tell us, when these things will be, and what the sign when all these things are about to be completed?’ In Matthew the question is expressed as, ‘Tell us, when these things will be, and what the sign of thy presence and of the completion of the age?’ Mark 13:27 has the Son of Man sending the angels to assemble the chosen. Matthew 13:40-41 says at the completion of the age the Son of Man will send his angels to gather and cast those doing lawlessness into a furnace of fire and then the righteous will shine forth. In the light of this your statement that Mark 13:26 is not a reference to the Second Coming seems over-dogmatic.

With reference to his conclusion, though I would not use the word ‘dogmatic’, I do think an interpretation and application of Mark 13:26 which excludes the Second Coming is overly restrictive.

Both the Mark passage itself, and the parallels in Matthew (24:1-44) and Luke (21:5-36), make it clear that the return of the Son of Man is in view. Yet it seems to me that a reference to the Son of Man entering the heavenly Temple is also more or less required by the language and the overall biblical context.

I would argue that we need to take into account that the disciples have asked a valid question, which demands an answer, but also that they are starting from assumptions (about Israel and the nations) which make a simple answer elusive (rather, I would suggest, like the child who asks, “Mummy, how did I get into the cabbage patch?”). Their question (I would hold) assumes a straightforward sequence in which the Glory returns to the Temple, followed by the establishment of God’s dominion over the world with Israel as its geo-political centre. This assumes a direct connection of Temple-restoration with the End of the Age, which both Jesus' words and subsequent experience deny.

Jesus’ answer embraces three things: (1) the fact that this scenario is wrong, (2) his actual entry into the heavenly Temple-presence of God and (3) the eventual ‘End of the Age’.

The wrongness of the disciples’ scenario is born out by predictions that the earthly Temple will be destroyed and rendered inoperable (the Abomination which causes Desolation). Incidentally, I do not think this is a reference to the crucifixion (contra Peter Bolt) unless there is also a double-reference here.

The entry into the heavenly Temple is referred to in the Son of Man coming with the clouds of heaven, following the parallel in Daniel 7. Stephen’s vision in Acts 8:56 ( “I see heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God”) is a practical consequence of this, but so is the theology of Hebrews 8:1-2 (“We do have such a high priest, who sat down at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in heaven, and who serves in the sanctuary, the true tabernacle set up by the Lord, not by man”) and Revelation 5:1-14 (see also 11:19, “Then God’s temple in heaven was opened, and within his temple was seen the ark of his covenant”).

Christ’s presence in the heavenly Temple is thus not only an accomplished fact but an ongoing reality.

However, this is a reality which is hidden from sight. Thus what happens (I suggest) when Christ returns is not that we move on to another stage, but that this reality is revealed (see, eg, 2 Thess 1:7; 1 Pet 1:7,13; 4:13).

We have to bear in mind that the Temple is not a place of ‘worship’ in the sense that its focus is on praise, but is the house and palace of God — his dwelling place from which he extends his rule. Thus when Christ’s reign is finally established, it is appropriate to describe it (symbolically) in ‘Temple’ language:

I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. ²³The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp. ²⁴ The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendour into it. (Rev 19:22-24)

Thus the narrative in Mark 13 and parallels embraces both the forthcoming reality of Christ entering into the heavenly Temple and the future reality of his reigning in the heavenly Temple being revealed at the End of the Age.

As to the angels, the translation may sometimes appropriately be ‘messengers’, as in evangelists, but will (obviously) sometimes be ‘angels’ as in heavenly beings.

I hope this may help.

John Richardson
30 September 2008

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Mark 13 in perspective

Recently at the Lowestoft Living Word convention, I chose to speak on Mark 13, sometimes called the ‘Little Apocalypse’ because it appears to anticipate the themes of the book of Revelation (The Apocalypse of John).

I think it is fair to say that most Christian interpretation assumes this passage is about the end of the world, but in preparing for the convention I began with a suggestion I associate (rightly or wrongly) with Tom Wright that the disciples’ concern lay elsewhere, and that actually we need to consider the passage as an answer to their question not ours.

We have to bear in mind that the disciples struggled to understand Jesus throughout his earthly ministry. Several times he taught them plainly about his death and resurrection, and yet when these things happened the disciples were like men taken by surprise.

So in Mark 13 they are not asking, “Lord, after your death and resurrection, and ascension into heaven, when will you come again in glory to judge the living and the dead?” That would be our question, but their eyes are firmly fixed on Malachi 3:1,

“See, I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come,” says the Lord Almighty.

They were, as Tom Wright has said, looking not for Christ’s ‘return’ but for the end of Israel’s exile — for the return of the glory, which is described as departing from the Temple in Ezekiel 10 and 11; and as returning in Ezekiel 43-44.

This perspective must be borne in mind when we look at what Jesus says in Mark 13. But at the same time, the disciples have a wrong perspective, and so we must take into account what Jesus is denying as well as what he is affirming.

And of course, the first thing Jesus says is that it is not even this temple to which the Lord is going to come: “Not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down” (13:2).

But given that Ezekiel had described an even more grand Temple than that built by Herod, the destruction of Herod’s Temple might have been seen as a preliminary ‘clearing of the ground’ for an even better structure in its place. It is Jesus’ words in v26, however, which both scotch this idea and which are the heart of the passage:

At that time men will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory.

Recent interpretation has realised the important connection between this and Daniel 7:13:

In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence.

The first thing to notice, then, is that the clouds are not those in the skies from which Jesus will come when he returns. Rather they indicate the Temple presence of God. In Exodus 40:34, the cloud covered the Tent of Meeting and the glory of God filled the Tabernacle. In 1 Kings 8:10-11, the cloud and the glory filled Solomon’s Temple. Thus the Son of Man in Daniel 7 is coming into the real Temple — the place where God is present.

The second thing to notice, however, is that at his trial Jesus describes this as an imminent occurrence:

Again the high priest asked him, “Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One?” “I am,” said Jesus. “And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven.” (Mark 14:61-62, compare 13:26)

Mark 13 and Mark 14 are linked. But how did Jesus expect the High Priest and those assembled there to see him ‘sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven’? The answer, I suggest, is not by the Second Coming. Rather, it is what happened subsequent to the resurrection, when the High Priest and the Jerusalem authorities were confronted by the empty tomb and the apostles’ preaching.

This is what Peter said to the crowds on the Day of Pentecost, in Acts 2:32-33,

God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of the fact. Exalted to the right hand of God, he has received from the Father the promised Holy Spirit and has poured out what you now see and hear.

It was by his death, resurrection and ascension that Jesus, as the Son of Man, entered the Temple presence of God, and it was that preaching which those who had crucified Jesus tried to deny and suppress by bringing the disciples before them on trial and forbidding them to speak. And so in Acts 4:5-8 we see Mark 13:9 and 11 being fulfilled:

They had Peter and John brought before them and began to question them: “By what power or what name did you do this?” Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them ... (Acts 4:7-8)

Indeed, the whole of Acts can be seen as the beginning of the fulfilment of Mark 13:27:

And [the Son of Man] will send his angels and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of the heavens.

... except that, as D Broughton Knox observed, the word ‘angels’ here needs to be translated with its common meaning of ‘messengers’, meaning gospel messengers. (‘Translating “Angel” in the New Testament’, Selected Works, Volume 1: The Doctrine of God, 369, Kingsford: Matthias Media, 2000)

Verse 30, “this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened”, then presents no problems as the rest of the chapter concerns not events prior to the ‘Second Coming’, but rather those surrounding the destruction of the Temple in ad 70 and the ongoing proclamation of the gospel.

There is, however, one problem (at least!) with this tidying up, which is that here, and in the gospel parallels, and in other parts of the New Testament, it is clear that similar language is applied to the expectation that Jesus will stage a dramatic and unmistakable ‘return’ at some time in the future. In 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17, for example, we read,

For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.

It is hard to see how this could be read as a reference to Jesus’ death, resurrection and ascension. Does our tidying up then fall apart? My suggestion would be that it does not. Rather, what we have (and what we must read into Mark 13 and the parallels) is two different apprehensions of one reality.

The event is that the Lord has entered the heavenly tabernacle, “set up by the Lord, not by man” (Hebrews 8:2), of which the earthly Temple was a “copy and a shadow” (Heb 8:5).

The first apprehension of this, in the present age, is via the proclamation of the gospel, that Jesus is the Lord who has gone into the heavenly Temple to take his throne ‘at the right hand of God’, bearing the blood of his own sacrifice which atones for our sins and opens the way for us to enter also into God’s presence (Hebrews 10:19).

The second apprehension, at the end of the age, will be the revelation of this presence in the heavenly Temple, so that “every eye will see him” (Revelation 1:8).

This is clearly different from the disciples’ perspective, but somewhat different also from the perspective of many Christians.

The disciples’ perspective seems to have been one of looking forward to the point where God would intervene in history, coming down from heaven to re-enter the Temple, following which his reign would extend over the whole world via the establishment of Jerusalem as the world centre and Israel as the ‘lead’ nation.

The perspective of many Christians is that, having entered the world, Jesus has now left it, but will return. Meanwhile, we preach the gospel of his death for sin, and his future coming to reign.

In the case of the disciples, the action to establish God’s reign lay (hopefully) in the immediate future. For the typical Christian, the action lies in the indefinite future.

This perspective on Mark suggests that the decisive action lies in the past (though it was future in Mark 13). As the result of the saving action of his death, resurrection and ascension, Jesus is now reigning. His return is thus not to begin his reign but to extend it.

In some ways I can see echos here of Tom Wright’s insistence that the gospel is the lordship of Christ, not Caesar. However, it seems to me vital to be clear that Jesus’ entering the heavenly Temple is with the blood of sacrifice that opens the way for us. Thus Jesus’ Temple presence means he is Lord and Saviour.

The challenge to the evangelical perspective is to be aware that the manifestation of Jesus’ reign in the future — what we call the Second Coming — is a manifestation of his reign in the present, and that this needs to inform both our gospel preaching and our understanding of gospel living.

But more of that, perhaps, when I have had time to think on these things further.

John Richardson

7 September 2008

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Living for tomorrow today

Right now I’m in Lowestoft, almost at the most eastward part of England. I’m here to speak at ‘Lowestoft Living Word’ on the topic of ‘The End’ — which is to say, the ‘last things’, the ‘end times’, ‘Second Coming’ or, to use a more biblical expression, ‘the Day of the Lord’.

This is a particular favourite of mine due to my conviction that ‘missiology follows eschatology’. That is to say, the mission of the Church will be determined by its understanding of and expectation about the future.

This is, of course, true about societies and individuals as well. I have noticed amongst teenagers a lack of expectation that they can change the future for the better. The result is not (as one might expect) despair, but a ‘live for today’ outlook. The problem is, of course, that today becomes tomorrow, and tomorrow brings eventual decline, decay and death. Therefore, without any way of making sense of this, one must also live with a ‘dissonance’ between practice and reality.

In society, meanwhile, one can only speculate how long it will be before there is a general realization that things are not likely to get substantially better — that we have reached the point, in the West, of ‘what goes around comes around’, with the only dramatic changes likely to be for the worse. At very least, this realization is likely to result in a general ennui, but it surely also has much to do with our present political environment.

There is much excitement about the American presidential election because it is believed by many that ‘getting rid of George Bush’ will ‘make the world a better place’. To my mind, this is the same as the belief in the 1980s that the collapse of Communism would ‘make the world a better place’.

Even at the time, I was quite convinced, simply on the basis of history, that it wouldn’t. It would certainly make the world a different place, and it would relieve many millions of people from the problems Communism caused, but it would be only a matter of time before fresh problems would emerge — problems would couldn’t occur under Communism and Soviet domination, but which could once those factors disappeared. And so it has proved to be.

Similarly, we may recall the euphoria which greeted Tony Blair’s triumphant election. Again, my reaction was, ‘Give it time ...’ And here we are.

This is not to be cynical, but rather realistic. Nor is it to suggest that things can’t get better. They can. But to get better, you must have a conceptual basis from which to develop the improvements which itself corresponds to reality. In other words, you’ve got to understand how the world really is, before you can hope to improve it.

Secular Liberalism does not understand the world, any more than Communism did. What will be interesting, then, is to see whether there will eventually be a similar collapse of the former system as once affected the latter. (‘Interesting’ in the sense of the Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.”) What we have in the UK at the moment is an abundance of ‘secular liberal’ manipulation of social structures to try to produce the ‘utopian’ vision. But it is an impossibility that will always end in failure.

Equally, scientific materialism does not understand the world. Yet many advocates of that viewpoint similarly want to change the world, and believe that they have the tools to do it. We must hope that their inevitable failures will be less drastic than those of the secular liberals.

And again, Islam wants to change the world, Russian nationalism wants to change the world (or at least, Russia), as does Chinese communism, and so on, and so on.

However, the utopian vision for the world is, arguably, a derivation of Christian eschatology — the doctrine of the end. And without that theology, one must not only find another set of criteria by which to define ‘progress’, but one must also admit that permanent improvement is impossible. Even if the world can be made a better place, it cannot be kept that way, because ultimately, and finally, the world and everything in it faces inevitable extinction.

Like the death of the individual, this is the great ‘unmentionable’ that confronts all the schemes and dreams of our politicians. And it is, I would suggest, why the American co-mingling of religion and politics is less pernicious than our own tendency to divorce the two.

The ultimate reality is this: “God commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead.” (Acts 17:30-31).

The world, in other words, is heading to a decisive end point entailing a moral judgement. And for many centuries, that understanding of reality has been part of Western consciousness. Sometimes, during times of revival, it has been at the forefront. Sometimes it has been submerged almost out of sight. Sometimes it has been transmuted into an alternative form, such as during the French or Russian Revolutions, or even, arguably, under Fascism and Nazism. Indeed, the post-war vision of Britain reflected this viewpoint.

And of course it is true, and so even attempts at utopianism which deny religious belief and ignore cosmic reality will appeal to the human heart and find their adherents.

The challenge to the Church is to keep on target with the original vision, losing neither heart nor confidence.

To live for the future is the only way to change the present, but you have to get your future right.

John Richardson
3 September 2008

PS, I hope to get back soon to the theme of Tom Wright’s ordo salutis by reading through all the comments and trying to sum up where they left us.

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Mission: why the future determines the present

One of the great truths of church life is this: missiology follows eschatology.

Missiology refers to the mission of the church — what the church does, or aims to do, in the world in the present. Eschatology is the doctrine of the ‘last things’ — where the church thinks the world is heading and what the future holds.

And the important thing to recognize is that the church’s understanding of the future absolutely dictates the church’s mission and ministry in the present.

However, it is also important to recognise that the church often approaches mission without any clear or coherent view of the future. How, then, (someone might ask) can this dictate the church’s mission? The answer is simply that if there is a lack of clarity about the future, there will be a lack of clarity about the present. A missiology without a clear eschatology will lack focus and coherence.

Nevertheless, just as Abraham Lincoln once said we cannot escape history, so we cannot escape eschatology either. The end of all things is heading towards us at the pace of sixty seconds a minute, sixty minutes an hour.

Leaving aside any theological considerations, and barring other occurrences, the Earth is going to be destroyed in some 5 billion years time when the Sun becomes a ‘red giant’. This will be global warming on a grand scale — in fact the Sun will expand in size to embrace the Earth’s orbit. It may, however, have become uninhabitable before then, not because of the ‘global warming’ about which we currently exercise ourselves but because of things like the fact that the Moon is moving away from us and eventually our tides will cease and our planet will be free to tilt on its axis to the extent that we don’t have any seasons either.

These are just raw, inescapable, scientific facts, and if anyone thinks they’re a long way off, I used to think being 57 was a long way of as well, but here I am! Time will take care of everything eventually.

Others may dismiss this as an irrelevance. What matters, they will say, is the problems we are facing now: ecological disasters, HIV, poverty, injustice, starvation — indeed all the things and more that are covered by the Millennium Development Goals. But the problem here is that, to a greater or lesser extent, we in the West have already achieved six of these goals: eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, achieving universal primary education, promoting gender equality and empowering women, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health and combatting HIV, malaria and other diseases. Yet no one is seriously suggesting that the church’s work is done or that we have in some sense ‘arrived’.

To define our eschatology, therefore, we have to go beyond these issues and ask, “Even assuming these goals could be met, what happens next?”

The reality, one suspects, is that no one is really asking that question at all, because no one really thinks it is going to happen. Our tacit assumption (unspoken, but widely assumed) is that the poor will indeed always be with us, and that surmounting one set of problems will merely reveal another set — like Western obesity, for example.

Under these circumstances, we may expect the church to focus on achieving short term goals of ‘improvement’, but not to be looking too far into the future — in fact, this is precisely what we do find in many situations.

At the same time, however, the church will generally couch its mission in biblical terms, primary amongst which is the notion of the Kingdom of God. The problem is, of course, what we mean by this expression, and here we find a wide divergence.

For many in the church, this ‘Kingdom’ is coterminous with achieving the Millennium Development Goals and whatever will succeed them as the next set of problems reveal themselves.

Biblically, however, it is something else. In biblical terms, we see three exemplars of the Kingdom. The first is the idealised situation in Eden: mankind in harmony with God, with themselves and with nature. The second is the geo-political nation of Israel: every man dwelling under his vine and under his figtree all the days of king Solomon. The third is the person of Jesus: the blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor.

Yet there is still a future Kingdom, quite distinct from, though foreshadowed by, these particular instances. Moreover, the biblical witness shows that each of these other instances is inadequate as expressions of the coming Kingdom. The Garden of Eden is lost through the Fall, the kingdom of Solomon is lost through idolatry. The incarnate ministry of Jesus is terminated by the powers of this world. If the Kingdom is to arrive, rather than always be a future hope, something must change.

This also means that the church must not mistake the present manifestations of the Kingdom, which share the character of these earlier manifestations, with the Kingdom itself. Eden is lost. The kingdom of Solomon proved unsatisfactory. The ministry of Jesus is a foretaste. We may plant our gardens, we may fight in the political arena, we may heal the sick and bring good news to the poor. But the Kingdom is still to come.

And the other aspect of this future Kingdom, in biblical terms, is that between us and it lies individual judgement and divine wrath.

It should be obvious, then, that if this is our eschatology, it will give a particular shape to our missiology. On the one hand, we ought to be concerned with how we can live the life of the Kingdom in the present, just as Jesus did. On the other hand, we ought to be concerned, just as Jesus was, with how people, including ourselves, can be saved from the coming wrath.

A ministry which treats the present as an irrelevance in terms of our engagement with life is failing to understand what it means to be a citizen of the Kingdom in the present. A ministry which treats the future as an irrelevance in terms of judgement, wrath and salvation is failing to understand what it will mean to be a citizen of the Kingdom in the future.

How we understand these things will then shape how we proclaim Christ. If our understanding of the future is hazy about judgement and dismissive of wrath, we will focus on those aspects of Christ which relate to life in the present. In short, we will downplay the cross, despite our emphasis on the life of Jesus. The justification for evangelism will become the benefit to the individual, in terms of a life made fuller, and to society in terms of a world made better. We will want to see people converted, but the unanswered question will be, “What happens to those who are not?”

It is, however, possible to forget that Jesus’ own ministry shows that the life of the future Kingdom is to be lived in the present. And when this happens the church’s ministry is again distorted. Then we find there is no real difference between the believer and the unbeliever — except that the believer believes that they are saved! And this, we must recognise, is just as much a false gospel, and just as serious a threat to salvation, as ignoring future salvation entirely.

It is much to be doubted whether the church currently has a good grasp of these issues. Some of us live as though there were no judgement in the future. Others live as if there were no purpose in the present. The answer, however, is not to ‘get the balance right’. It is to get the right perspective. Christ is coming again, but when he comes, will he find faith on earth (Lk 18:8)? Getting that right should be enough to keep any of us occupied until he returns.

Revd John P Richardson
26 June 2007