Greater than the Temple

And remain standing, if you would, while we go to the book of Acts.

Luke, account of the early church in the book of Acts, and I'll be reading verses

1 through 15, verses 1 through 15.

For together then, listen to what I'm about to read, because this is the holy

and inspired word of God.

Now, in these days when the disciples were increasing in number,

a complaint by the Hellenists arose against the Hebrews because their widows

were being neglected in the daily distribution.

And the twelve summoned the full number of the disciples and said,

It is not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables.

Therefore, brothers, pick out from among yourselves seven men of good repute,

full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we will appoint to this duty.

But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word.

And what they said pleased the whole gathering. And they chose Stephen,

a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit, and Philip, and Prochorus,

and Nicanor, and Timon, and Parmenas, and Nicholas, a proselyte of Antioch.

These they set before the apostles, and they prayed and laid their hands on them.

And the word of God continued to increase. The number of disciples multiplied

greatly in Jerusalem, and a great many of the priests became obedient to the faith.

And Stephen, full of grace and power, was doing great wonders and signs among the people.

Then some of those who belonged to the synagogue of the freedmen,

as it was called, and of the Cyrenians and the Alexandrians and those of Cilicia

and Asia, rose up and disputed with Stephen.

But they could not withstand the wisdom and the spirit with which he was speaking.

Then they secretly instigated men who said, We have heard him speak blasphemous

words against Moses and God.

And they stirred up the people and the elders and the scribes,

and they came upon him and seized him and brought him before the council.

And they set up false witnesses who said, This man never ceases to speak words

against this holy place and the law.

For we have heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place

and will change the customs that Moses delivered to us.

Gazing at him, all who sat in the council saw that his face was like the face

of an angel. This is the word of the Lord.

Thanks. You can be seated.

Let's pray together. Father, we ask you now in Jesus' name that you would send

your Holy Spirit to be among us to open our eyes and hearts and soften us,

help us to hear whatever we need to hear and see what we need to see as we are

called to love and to follow our Savior, Jesus Christ, this morning.

We pray in his name, amen.

So this morning is a sermon about Stephen, but it's an introductory sermon into his long discourse.

I thought about, when I looked at Stephen's address, you know,

Stephen's address is the longest single New Testament address in the whole of the New Testament.

It's got the record for the longest sermon, I guess, or something along those lines.

It's a long address. And so as a preacher, you're thinking, how many sermons

could I or should I get out of this?

How can you really go about slicing this up? So I saw there's a section between

the call of Stephen as a deacon and the deacons in general and in his actual

address once he's arrested.

And in this address, what seems to be stirring them up so much is Stephen's

constant reference to what they perceive to be a destructive attack against the temple.

Stephen, by our standards, as we read through Acts, I find it fascinating,

especially as a kid and even now. You read through Acts and you're sort of thinking

as a Protestant evangelical, well, they're just giving the gospel, right?

But as they're giving the gospel, you'll notice it's in the context of the Old

Testament and everything that everyone had been expecting up to that time about

the Old Testament, particularly Jerusalem and the temple.

The temple was the ultimate symbol of the religion.

In this temple, there is the place where they meet with God.

This is the dwelling place of God. This is the house of God.

This is where God comes to meet with Israel.

Without the temple, there is no Israel in that sense.

There's no meeting place with God. And so in our minds, when we hear them preaching.

The cornerstone, the chief cornerstone that you've rejected has become the chief

cornerstone of the entire building. What building? The new temple.

This sounds to us pretty cool because we're evangelical Protestants and we like

that symbolism. We're used to it.

Yes, I'm the temple of the Holy Spirit. You're the temple of the Holy Spirit.

If you told a Jew that, as Stephen is doing at the beginning of this whole new

epoch, this whole new period, we would say, thems fighting words, right?

This means that if it's true that Jesus Christ is the new temple and that he's

building a new creation, a new temple in his own people, and there's no longer

going to be one place where Jesus, where God meets with his people.

This is radically transformative and it's radically bad news for those who want

it all to remain in Jerusalem and in that temple.

That's why towards the end, right before Stephen gets his chance to go through

all this redemptive history and it's a long sermon.

I don't never preach the sermon as long as Stephen's sermon.

I don't think I will either, but on this beginning of this long sermon,

you'll notice that the hostility increases to a stage in which they're like,

let's get this guy. And they literally grab him and they arrest him.

You'll notice also that the hostility is increasing with our confrontations, isn't it?

Peter goes to the temple, heals a man. There's a bit of a confrontation.

There's a bit of a squirreliness on the part of the leaders because they're

like, whoa, these guys are popular. We don't want to touch them.

And then there's more and more. Finally, they arrest them and then they beat them.

And now we're about to see that at this point when Stephen comes to the scene,

they're no longer even afraid of the crowds.

You'll notice in the story that even the crowds now are a part of it,

like, yeah, let's get this guy. We've had enough of this.

To us, the sweet news of Jesus as the new temple sounds very Protestant,

sounds very easy to receive, but for them, for the Jews, it meant the destruction

of everything they hoped for,

if they hoped for a Messiah who would remain geographically located in Jerusalem.

Back to this, what's happening too, by the way, I want us to notice the movement of the book of Acts.

We see that in the book of Acts, the apostles are recapitulating, they're redoing.

Is that a good word for it? Recapitulating just sounds theologically cool.

So recapitulating, but they're redoing. In other words, they're going through

and what Jesus did, Peter did.

And what Jesus suffered, Peter suffered.

And the miracles Jesus performed, Peter performed. Except with Peter,

he performs it with even greater measure.

See, more and more people, more and more acclaim. His shadow,

his shadow is able to heal people as he moves by, even more powerful in the

resurrection. And now we see something interesting.

Peter recapitulates or redoes the work of Jesus. Now Peter preaches.

We see him raise up disciples and they go out and they preach and they redo.

Redo just doesn't sound as cool as recapitulate, does it? They recapitulate.

They redo what Peter did.

In other words, what's happening in our book, and you can't miss it,

and hopefully I'm not going to let you ever miss it, that the book of Acts is

outlining the work of Jesus Christ. Where? In his church.

The church is going to fulfill the promises made to Israel and that temple.

It's radical. It's more radical than most of us are used to.

If most of us don't think too much about Jewish and Gentile relations,

I know a lot of guys online are stirring everybody up on all this Jewish stuff,

but most of us don't, aside from policies relating to Gaza or what,

most of us don't think a lot about, oh, you're a Jew and I'm a Gentile.

What's the big deal? We don't think ethnically that way.

But they did when Stephen began to preach and teach.

So this Stephen episode begins to be the culmination of the teachings of the

apostles and the church.

It's the culmination of the witness to the Jews of Jerusalem,

which had been the major subject all the way from chapter 2 up to verse chapter 5.

Stephen's martyrdom will mark a major turning point, by the way,

in which the enemies of Christ think they have won, but in reality the enemies

of Christ lose because it's an exact fulfillment of what was supposed to happen.

From Jerusalem to Judea to Samaria and to the uttermost parts of the earth.

Hopefully you know that by now, right? That was what was promised, that's what happened.

It comes as a, one author said that many of the victories in the past of Christ's

work in the church come to us as cleverly.

Right? Oh, this is a disaster. Stephen is going to be killed.

And it's a gruesome, grotesque death by stoning. We'll get to it.

It's not stoning. If you've ever seen, sometimes still happens today in the

Middle East, in certain places in Africa, where young people are stoned. It's a gruesome death.

And so Stephen's ministry ends in this gruesome death where he's crying out

to heaven, and we'll see all of that.

It begins here where the Jewish people begin to sense the global character of

this new church's mission in Christ.

It's no longer just Jerusalem or just the temple.

Peter has been a predominantly dominant figure here, and now Stephen comes along.

Remember, Stephen is a Greek Hellenistic Jew.

Both Stephen and the other guys that were ordained as deacons were all Jewish

or, excuse me, Greek names.

So what's about to happen is that this transitional figure, Stephen,

is going to be the transitional figure in which the church moves from,

not like Paul, but from this mission primarily in Jerusalem to Judea,

Samaria, and to eventually to the entire world.

And you'll notice that the church is very much now on the offensive.

They have been. Peter has not been afraid to go out.

But the church begins to go out, and it begins to serve, it begins to preach,

and it begins to attack, and it gets attacked, not because of anything they've done wrong.

Are we together on that? Remember, they don't do anything wrong.

In fact, what do they do? They do good things. They heal a guy at the temple entrance.

They heal another person. They cast out demons.

They're curing the blind and helping the lame to walk, right?

So they're not able. No one's able. Remember, when we get persecuted,

it shouldn't be because we do something bad.

It's for good things, and yet the good things that the church does stirs up

the world to actually more hatred.

They hate them even more because of the good things they do.

They hate them even more because there's nothing they can say about them.

They end up having to do with Stephen what they did with Peter and what they

did with Jesus. They just make stuff. They concoct it.

So in this war, and they're at war now, the context is, it says,

verse 9, it says, then some of these who belong to the synagogue of the freedmen,

not quite sure exactly how that translates.

It must have been some, seems like some sort of former slave group,

a synagogue of former slaves.

And the Cyrenians and the Alexandrians, both of whom would be from North Africa.

Cyrene would be on the Tunisian sort of tip, and Alexandria, of course, in Egypt.

And from those from Cilicia, which would be Asia, Turkey in our present time,

and Asia rose up and disputed with Stephen.

So the very peoples that have been gathered from the expanded world are now

gathering around Stephen.

Like I said, up to this point, Peter and the others could find a little bit

of solace by the fact that there's just hundreds of people that support them.

Now, now the church is surrounded by people who say, I'm sick of this.

We're finished with these guys.

So the context changes. These Jews had probably come from all over the world.

And remember, it's really hard for us to get this, but most of the early Christian

church, most of the theology and the history of the early church occurred in

North Africa and what would be considered the Levant and Turkey,

Middle East, if you will.

So it's not all a European or American theology or history. It's mostly North

Africa and the Middle East.

So this is where the attacks are coming from. Notice the attacks come from false charges.

And by the way, it's interesting, it may very well have been Paul here.

We know, we probably sure it's Paul that held the coat when Stephen was killed.

And then afterwards it's clear that it's Paul, but it looks like Paul may have

also been involved in these false charges.

It's magnificent, actually, because the way God changed Paul and began to use

Paul as a missionary in all of this.

The nature of the false charges were blasphemy.

These guys are promoting blasphemy. You might say, blasphemy, about what?

Well, blasphemy could also be used to anything that you did or said that was

profaning to anything connected to God, such as the temple.

So Stephen could well have been accused of blasphemy in the sense that he said

the temple is going to be destroyed. the temple is useless. The temple is no longer important.

But the funny thing is, and you see this over and over, right?

In the book of Acts, the apostles are speaking.

And as they speak, they're speaking with beauty and with eloquence and with

persuasion so that they're all, everyone's like, I can't, I can't, we can't defeat them.

And I'm not going to, I'm not going to go crazy with this, but I am going to

remind you of it a little bit.

I mean, just recently we experienced the martyrdom in Christianity here in America.

And whoever did it and all the other things that are floating around,

notwithstanding, I just remember the similarities between what was happening

with Charlie Kirk and what happens here in our own story with Stephen,

is that it became increasingly obvious.

And you look at all the YouTube hits you want to, everyone's saying, Charlie Kirk's a bigot.

Ah, he's a hater. He's a racist. He actually thinks that marriage is between a man and a woman.

It's like, yeah, a real big hater He's a real hater I mean, he's a hater He

actually thinks that, you know, racism is wrong We shouldn't have racial questions

He's a hater But then when you look at his clips You're like, where's the hate?

He's a good debater. So you're reminded, in other words, that the people who

are debating Stephen are like, we're gonna get him and they go with this angle.

They can't defeat him. We're gonna go with this angle. They can't defeat him.

Every angle they took, he was not able to be defeated.

No power, it says. They had no power to resist his words. What amazing.

I love that. That's where we should be, church.

Where if we're gonna get killed, if we're gonna get martyred,

if we're gonna get persecuted, it needs to be because we're so persuasively

communicating the word of God that people say, I am sick and tired of it.

Because then it's out in the open, isn't it? The hatred is real.

And as we've seen it, we saw it with Jesus. We saw it with Peter. We see it now in Stephen.

Their hatred isn't with these people. It's to God.

It's evident. They can't resist. Remember with the apostles,

they said, these guys have been with Jesus.

And then they're like, oh yeah, we did the same thing to Jesus.

Irresistible. What did we do with Jesus? We falsely charged him with things that weren't true.

Because he couldn't resist his words. Couldn't resist his teaching.

Couldn't resist the good things. What are you going to do? Throw someone in prison?

For healing the blind and causing the lame to walk and the deaf to sing praise

and lepers and prostitutes restored and tax collectors and public.

And what are you going to do?

Because that's the work of Christ and his kingdom. Christ is reclaiming the

lost from Satan back to himself and healing the sick, giving sight to the blind. What a great ministry.

So what do they have? False charges.

In a word, they're stubborn, right? The fancy word, word you'll see sometimes

in court cases is contumacy.

That's another cool word. It's just besides the recapitulation,

it's contumacy. They're just stubborn.

And stubborn people, another parallel to our culture, stubborn people can no

longer be persuaded by good arguments.

You bring an argument up, he said, I have an argument, A, B,

C. And they say, I don't care. What are you, Adolf Hitler? Okay.

Adolf Hitler, when you make an argument, now you're Adolf Hitler.

I don't know how fast that happened.

I came back to America and I heard people say, hey, I don't believe abortion

is right. Hitler, wait, what?

I haven't even finished saying what I'm going to say and I'm Hitler.

So we're confronting an increasing culture where there's just no real interest in debate.

Nobody wants to hear an argument. They don't wanna hear what's right or what's

wrong or what's the basis for what you're saying. They're stubborn. It's contumacy.

One writer says of Stephen, he said he had uncommon oratorical powers and unimpeachable logic.

No one was able to resist, so much so that his arguments were replete with even divine energy.

Scriptural authorities added to the great wonders of God. He's not only speaking

with eloquence, but beside him are the people that God is healing.

Oh, how angry that makes the enemies of God. They're stubborn and they're angry.

And still it could not bend the minds of the unwilling. That's what this deal

is. Still, it's not about a good argument.

And if you're looking around at our culture today, friends, you're seeing it.

It's not about who marriage between a man and a woman. Yeah,

that's been around for what? 6,000 years? 6,000 years.

Yeah, you bigot. Wait, what? Just because I believe in marriage?

Yeah, you're a bigot. We hate you. Okay.

We're into this sort of situation here culturally, and I think not as bad, praise God.

We're not nearly at the place that Stephen was, right?

Don't think you're Stephen every day.

But we're in a point where people are, you can see it where someone says,

hey, I don't believe this because I've got this argument. And someone says, you're Hitler.

You're a bigot. You're full of hate. we should just kill you.

That's the response. That's where we are in the passage. And that's where we

are sometimes in our own culture today.

It's a spiritual battle as well. You'll notice Ephesians, Paul says,

be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might.

Put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil.

It's interesting. And then that passage, Paul uses the same word that's in our passage.

It says that Stephen was giving arguments from the Word of God,

and they were pushed back.

The word is they were unable to stand.

It's the same word Paul uses when he says, stand firm.

It's actually a military phrase where I think one foot, left foot would be forward,

right foot would be slightly backwards and bent so that you're ready for battle,

so that you can't be pushed back.

So they were unable to withstand Stephen, and that's exactly what Paul says,

get ready to stand firm, brothers, and put on the full armor of God.

Why? Because the opposition won't play fair.

Well, they won't play fair. My boys accuse me of that falsely.

The older I get, the more I have to cheat when I wrestle.

And somehow they say that I'm not wrestling playing fair. But just be aware,

Satan and the opposition has no interest in playing fair.

They don't follow the rules of Marquis or whoever that is.

So what's the charge? The charge is blasphemy. And you'll notice it says,

they secretly instigated men

who said, we have heard him speak blasphemous word against Moses and God.

You'll notice that he uses the word incited or instigated.

It's a word always connected or almost always connected with dishonest activities

such as bribes to deduce or to reduce something, right? A fine or a fee.

It's always used as a bribe or some sort of scheme to overturn that which is

right or to undermine that which is just. And that's exactly what they do.

Did they have a just argument that Stephen was saying something about the temple?

You bet they did. Yes, as we'll see in just a moment.

Luke writes as the history that exposed the foolish and false interpretations

of the Bible were prevalent.

And Stephen is going about using the Bible to prove them wrong.

Stephen was arrested with some violence. It looks like they grabbed him and

dragged him away all based on false accusations and false witnesses and the false interpretation.

By the way, false interpretation of the Old Testament.

And this is where I think we can be helped as we're going through Acts.

This is a big question that's floating around in our atmosphere today about

Jews and Christians and Jewish support and all the other political things that

are going around in our day.

And I won't speak to it completely. I don't need to, I don't want to,

but I will at least say this.

Beloved, if you find yourself thinking theologically that you hope for the rebuilding

of the temple, technical foul, okay? That's just right there, technical foul.

You gotta step out of the game here. You need to sit on the sidelines and think about this one.

Whatever you may or may not think about the future role for Jewish ethnic Israel,

that's a quite different question.

But if you find yourself teaching and believing a theology where you want another

temple to be built, you need to rethink your theology and you need to rethink

it on the basis of what we're hearing by the teachings and preachings of the apostles.

They called false witnesses because they had reported that Stephen was saying,

Jesus will destroy this temple because that's exactly what Jesus said.

And Peter said it and Stephen says it and on and on.

They accused him of something that in fact was partially true,

but he also wasn't going to try to burn it down himself.

It's not like he was trying to, they caught him striking matches,

you know, in the corner to try to start the temple on fire.

No, Stephen was just bringing out the truth of Jesus Christ and who he was and what it meant.

And he would eventually be the martyr for this. The word witness is the same word for martyr.

We'll go over that more and more as we see Stephen is teaching that people,

that the coming of Jesus would change everything.

The temple, if I could summarize it, at this point in history,

the temple was Israel, and Israel was the temple.

This is like without a temple, there is no Israel. And so when someone comes

along and says, you see this building that we keep going in and out of?

It's useless It's worthless Because what it points to Is the one who actually

is Dwelling with us now And that is Jesus Christ Yes And similar to the charge

That was leveled against Jesus Before he was murdered Right.

Jesus was taken before This same Sanhedrin And charged falsely with blasphemy

On several occasions He had spoken about The end of the temple,

The end of the temple. He was terribly misunderstood, wasn't he?

But he did speak against the temple. There's no doubt about that.

Jesus has said that he was the true temple of God and that when he was destroyed,

he would be raised up in three days.

In Matthew 24, Jesus clearly taught that the temple in Jerusalem was going to be destroyed.

Then Jesus went out and departed from the temple and his disciples came up to

show him the buildings of the temple. And Jesus said to them,

do you see all these things?

It's like if there's cars out there in the parking lot of the temple You see

those cars out there? See that? He's just there teaching his disciples.

Assuredly, I say to you, not one stone shall be left on another that shall not be thrown down.

And he goes on to say, and these things will take place in this generation.

Jesus is teaching that there's a coming destruction of the temple.

And they taught that and they distorted that to mean that somehow Jesus was

the one who was going to destroy the temple.

Stephen was teaching that Jesus as Messiah offered the last sacrifice needed.

In his death, in his resurrection. So guess what, guys? As he's saying sort

of same thing, Jesus, you see this big building? It's no longer useful.

It no longer serves the purpose for which it was pointing, because the purpose

for which it was pointing is not just some purpose. It's Jesus Christ himself.

That's why the temple became such a big deal. Even when Jesus was dying on the

cross, Matthew 27, it says, those who passed by blasphemed him,

wagging their heads, saying, you who destroy the temple and build it up in three

days. They were mocking him by his own words.

What was the focus? The temple, the temple, the temple, the temple.

Because it was the focus of Jerusalem. It was the focus of all the covenant

promises of God, which is why it's so important that Jesus has now fulfilled all those promises.

Jesus is the new great high priest.

His coming did destroy the temple in its purpose, and his rejection would provoke

the literal destruction and judgment of that temple, literally.

Jesus saw the temple as a symbol of their superior statue. The Jews did before all the nations.

What would the Jewish religion be without the temple?

What would it be? Which provokes another question that I think rattles around

in our minds sometimes about Judaism.

Sometimes in a class on religion, you'll hear that religions are grouped together

that are really close together.

And usually you hear like Christianity and Judaism and Islam.

Why? Because they're all monotheistic. They all believe in one God.

So they're over here together.

And then all the way over here, maybe Hinduism or all these other polytheistic

religions with many gods.

That scale is not true.

There's only the one true religion

and all other religions are on the complete opposite side as false.

And that includes Judaism today.

Judaism today is a false religion. The Jews aren't just this close.

They need a little bit of Jesus. No, it's not like mixing a drink.

I shouldn't use that illustration, but it's not like mixing food together.

Spices. How about that? Spices. It's not like putting a little spice in and

say, oh, the Jews are this close. Just add a little turmeric and they'll be Christians. No.

The entire point of their religion is Jesus.

It's the focus of everything. To reject him is to reject everything.

They're not this close. they're the same as a Hindu or a Buddhist or a Muslim. There is no difference.

And again, I don't say that to say, let's criticize Jews. I have no interest in that.

But getting our thinking straight, what's happening in Acts is that the Jewish

people are saying, wait a minute, and they got this folks. Listen, they got it.

Wait a minute, if what you're saying is true.

Our religion, our nation, our history, as we understood it and understand it,

is finished. And Stephen's like, yes, it is.

But everything now is beginning anew in Jesus Christ.

It's interesting, even later in Stephen's address, he will say this about the temple.

Chapter 7, verse 47, it was Solomon who built a house for him.

Yet the Most High does not dwell in houses made by hands, as the prophet says.

Heaven is my throne and earth is my footstool. What kind of house will you build

for me, says the Lord? or what is the place of my rest?

Did not my hand make all these things?

Paul will talk about this when he speaks to the Greeks as well.

Jerusalem and a symbol of her power was pulverized under the judgment of God. And they got it.

They understood that. That's why I said, this guy keeps saying things against

the temple and against Moses.

And it's no mistake, by the way, get that reference to Moses.

There's no mistake that at the end of the passage, his face is shining like what?

Like Moses' face shined when he came down from the mountain after confronting

with the Shekinah, the glory cloud of God just barely passing by.

Moses' face was veiled because behind it was the shining glory of God.

So now Stephen, as he presents this people again with an opportunity to come

to Messiah, his face is glowing like an angel as well.

Now in Christ, there were two or three gathered together in my name,

there I am in the midst of them. Jesus is greater than the temple.

I just want to go through, I just talked about not preaching a long sermon,

so I want to go through towards the end and just summarize and encourage us

to think about this as we move into Stephen's sermon or address next week and

the week after and his martyrdom.

The glory of what it means, again, as Protestants, we just say,

yes, the church is the temple of God.

And all the little children, Jesus loves a little red and yellow,

a little black and white, right? We're just all, it's very easy to think about the church.

But boy, for a Jew in these days to say that God doesn't need that temple in Jerusalem is war.

And so that's why Jesus, when he came, said now, and he said it, we read it already.

Listen, Matthew chapter 12, where have you not read in the law how the Sabbath,

Matthew 12 · chapter mention

the priests and the temple profane the Sabbath and are guiltless?

I tell you something greater than the temple is here.

Jesus himself says this, something greater.

And that's why he can go about referring to the Sabbath laws as having reference

to being fulfilled in him.

It's not as if he does away with the Sabbath laws. The Sabbath laws find their fulfillment in him.

It's not as if he destroys the temple for nothing. the temple finds its purpose in him.

All of those promises and all of those covenants are finding their fulfillment in Jesus Christ.

Jesus is the greater temple, and it makes a big difference for us.

If you want interesting Sunday afternoon reading, and I'm sure you do.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon preached a sermon from Matthew 12, a beautiful sermon

in 1876, a metropolitan tabernacle, where he just goes over a handful of the

glorious truths that are connected to the fact that Jesus is greater than the temple.

Jesus is greater than the temple signifies that Jesus embodies God's presence

more fully and uniquely than any physical thing in Jerusalem ever did, any temple ever could.

Serving as the ultimate place where God dwells with his people and offering

greater access, mercy and fulfillment of all the Old Testament prophecies and all for God's glory.

This declaration emphasizes divine authorities. Virgin says this,

after all, the temple was but a symbol "'and Jesus is the substance.

"'It was but the shadow of which he is the reality, "'albeit that every Hebrew

heart leaped for joy "'when they thought of the tabernacles "'of the Lord of

hosts, "'and that this day every Jewish spirit "'laments the departed glories of Zion.

"'Yet was the holy and beautiful house "'a figure of good things to come "'and

not the very image of the covenant blessings. "'It was Jesus.

"'It was not essential to the world's well-being, "'for lo, his disappearance

has brought light "'and life to the Gentiles.'",

Praise God, the temple is gone. Amen?

But the true temple to whom we're appointed in Christ is with us now.

We worship him in spirit and in truth, but our Lord Jesus is truth and is the substance.

He is essential to our light and life, and he could be taken from us,

and could he be taken from us?

Earth's hope are quenched forever. Never, because his name is Emmanuel, which means God with us.

Jesus is greater than the temple, which means that he's the embodiment of God's

presence, the Shekinah glory of God.

That's why I remember in Acts when he went away, when he disappeared,

he didn't go up on a cute little cloud among the blue sky.

It was the glory cloud, Shekinah glory presence of God, the watchers,

those magnificent angelic beings of some sort that swept him up in their presence

in smoke and fire and wonder.

Jesus is the embodiment of the presence of God. When we have seen him,

we have seen the Father and we have seen his glory.

The presence of God in the temple and the tabernacle was known by the shining

of the bright light called the Shekinah, says Spurgeon, between the wings of

the cherubim over the Ark of the Covenant.

We often forget that the presence of God in the most holy place was a matter

of faith to all but the high priest.

Once in the year, the high priest went into that awful veil,

but we do not know that even if he ever dared to look upon the blaze of splendor.

God dwells in light and that no man can approach him.

The smoke of the incense of the priest censer was needed partly to veil the

exceeding glory of the divine presence, lest even those chosen eyes should suffer blindness.

No one else went into the hallowed shrine and he only once a year.

That symbolic pavilion of Jehovah is not for a moment to be compared with our

Lord Jesus Christ, who is the dwelling place of God forever.

For in him dwells all the fullness of the Godhood bodily. Amen.

Everything that the temple represented in every way, from every angle and everything

beautiful about it, the power, the presence, the glory of God,

the hope of salvation, the hope of the forgiveness of sins, all embodied in

that temple, all pointing to our savior, Jesus Christ.

He's a superior authority to that temple. He's Lord over the Sabbath and all

the religious rules demonstrating that all those rules were never intended to

be rules in and of themselves.

That's why he chose to heal someone on the Sabbath. Are you kidding me?

He heals a man with a hand that's deformed on the Sabbath. Of course,

that's what the Sabbath was for.

Rest from the weariness of this cursed world.

And all the Pharisees could do is say, you did this and you did that.

Jesus said, this is what the Sabbath was all about, rest in me.

In the person of Jesus, we see the exceeding riches of divine grace and see

by faith the inexhaustible treasures of the covenant. This is Spurgeon.

In Jesus, we see at once our kinsmen and our God.

In the presence of Christ, we read the infinite eternal love of God towards

his own redeemed ones and the

intimate intercourse which this love has established between God and man.

Glimpses of this temple may perhaps have been given, for it did intimate that

the Lord would dwell among his people.

But only the eyes anointed seven times with the eye salve would have seen the mysterious doctrines.

The fundamental truths of the everlasting gospel are now seen by every wayfairy

man everywhere who looks to Jesus.

And the more he has studied, the more plainly does he see the matchless truth

shine forth in our Savior revealed in his Son.

All the prophecies fulfilled and fulfilled in greater measures,

the temple every one of the golden vessels every little lesson that they taught

about the holiness of God about the power of God about the love of God about

the forgiveness of God about God's rejection of sin and the need to be holy

every single angle every vessel every temple every every sensor in that temple

was pointing us to Jesus Christ.

And the blood of bulls and goats did not forgive sins ultimately.

It was the blood of Jesus Christ that we'll be celebrating in a moment.

Access to God shifts from the temple sacrifices and the priesthood to direct

access through Jesus Christ, who is our mediator. Amen.

That's where the temple veil tore from top to bottom. It wasn't as if somebody

was tearing it from the bottom upwards.

The hands of God from heaven came down and rented the veil of the temple,

open it up to male and female, to Jew, to Greek, to all who would believe and

come in Jesus Christ, our great high priest.

His sacrifice, his love, everything's better. You can see why,

by the way, these guys were so ticked off at Stephen.

This is not some small thing, and it should not be for us either.

Forget the temple for a moment. When you see all that Christ represents as he

fulfills the promises of the temple, it rocks your world. He is to be your everything.

He is to be the center, the before, the behind, the after, the above,

all around. It is to be Christ, our sacrifice, our atonement,

the new definition of who we are as the people of God and who we are as individuals.

We no longer belong to ourselves. We belong to this Savior, Jesus Christ,

who is making us into his new holy temple as spiritual stones that he lays for us in Zion.

And when we come to worship, you know that I'm excited about worship.

I would make you read my book again if I could, but I'm that excited about worship.

But when we come to worship, we come to the new temple. We come to a new place

that Hebrews describes, and I'll read this, and then we'll close and move to the Lord's Supper.

But Hebrews describes it as a glorious shift or transition from the old to the new.

Hebrews 12.22 says, But you have come to Mount Zion, and to the city of the

living God, the heavenly Jerusalem,

to an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly of God and the

church of the firstborn who are registered in heaven, to God the judge of all,

to the spirits of just men made perfect, to Jesus,

the mediator of this new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling that speaks

better things than that of Abel.

See that you do not refuse him who speaks, for if they did not escape who refused

him who spoke on earth, how much more shall we not escape if we turn away from

him who speaks from heaven, whose voice then shook the earth.

But now he has promised saying, yet once more I will not only shake earth and heaven.

Now this yet once more indicates the removal of those things that could have

been shaken as of the things that are made, that the things which cannot be shaken may remain.

Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom which cannot be shaken,

let us have grace by which we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly

fear for our God is a consuming fire. Let's pray.

Oh Lord, our God, we know there's so much more that could be said about Christ

as the one who is greater than the temple.

May we unfold it carefully as we study the book of Acts. May we understand it

ourselves as individuals.

May it change us, oh Lord, as we think about who we are under Christ and in Christ.

May Christ be the center of everything, Lord, our thoughts, our words,

our deeds, our motives, our resources, our time, our everything.

For he would otherwise, like that temple that's useless, would also destroy us.

So we come to you now, O Lord Jesus, in the name of our Savior,

coming by the power of your spirit to your body and your blood to remind us

of how much you love us and care for us.

And that even now we're reminded that this new temple, this church that you're

building in Christ is a temple in which your spirit dwells with us.

And you dwell with us primarily by unifying us in the message of the forgiveness of sins.

We thank you for that in Jesus' name, amen.