Christ the Lord of All | Holy Week DevotionalUzorak

When God created the world, he built it as a home. God marked out “the foundations of the earth” (Psa. 8:29). The visible heavens with sun, moon, and stars is described as having a vaulted ceiling, with the firmament as the barrier between our cosmos and his heavenly dwelling (Job 22:14). The cosmos was created to be the place where God and man would dwell together, and God would walk with his people in the garden.

But, as we’ve said before this week, the glory of God becomes deadly as the presence of sin and death spreads in the world. As a result of the fall, God did not dwell with humanity any longer. Throughout the biblical narrative, God was working in the lives of his people to restore the world, making it again a place where he and his people could again dwell together.

The tabernacle and temple were new houses of God for a new priestly people in the land God promised to give them. God is said to have walked in the garden, and God walks in their midst in the holy of holies (Gen. 3:8, Lev. 26:12, 2 Sam. 7:6). Adam was the first priest, charged to “work and keep” the garden, and the priests of God are anointed to “work” and “keep” the tabernacle and temple (Num 3:7–8; 8:25–26). The heavens and the earth are a temple, and the temple made by God’s people reflects that reality.

Although God would meet with his people at the temple, these structures were limited. Solomon acknowledged how futile it is to build a house made of wood and gold for God, “Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you; much less this house that I have built” (1 Kgs. 8:27). God would hear every prayer offered toward the temple, but he would hear those prayers from a distance “in heaven [his] dwelling place” (2 Kgs. 8:38-39, 41-43). As glorious as the temple was, the separation between God and man remained.

In our passage today, Ezekiel sees a vision of a temple that was yet in his future. It is a temple far more glorious than any before. Out of this temple flowed rivers that stream throughout the whole world. These are waters with the power of resurrection. Ezekiel says that “everything will live where the river goes,” causing dead seas to team with life and salt water to become fresh (Ez. 47:8-9). The trees that grow by the river of life will be evergreen, with fruit every month and “leaves for healing” (Ez. 47:12). These images call our minds back to Eden, with its river flowing through the garden and out into the world and trees good for food (Gen. 2:9-14). Ezekiel’s vision is an image of Eden restored and glorified, bringing life to the whole world. But where is this temple? No such temple has ever been built, at least not by any human hands. No such rivers ever flowed out of the temple in Jerusalem. The Dead Sea remains dead. Engedi is still an oasis among deserts.

One of Christ’s most startling claims, which was used against him at trial (Matt. 26:61, 27:40), was that he was the true temple: “Jesus answered them, ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up…But he was speaking about the temple of his body’” (John 2:19-21). If the temple is the place where God meets with man, Christ is the fullest realization of that definition. He is true God and true man, united in one person. In Christ, human nature became the tabernacle of God. Jesus came to fulfill everything that the tabernacle and temple merely symbolized.

Jesus bridges the ultimate separation between God and man. Adam was a failed priest who led humanity into the grips of death. Christ goes to the place of the dead to destroy sin and the power of death altogether. When Christ was crucified, the true temple was destroyed, the sun went dark, and the earth began to quake. With the true temple destroyed, the symbolic temple in Jerusalem began to collapse. With Christ’s flesh being torn, the temple curtain was torn in two.

By his death, Jesus “opened a new and living way through the curtain, that is, through his flesh” into God’s presence (Heb. 10:20). Christ “entered, not into holy places made with hands, [but] into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf” (Heb. 10:23). Moses sprinkled blood to purify the tabernacle, its furniture, and all the ceremonial tools, making them fit for God’s presence. Because Christ was crucified and conquered death itself, Jesus has now sprinkled his people with “his own blood” in heaven itself, securing “eternal redemption” (Heb. 9:12). In Christ, “you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (1 Pet. 2:5). The one who tabernacled among us has made us fit to become the living house of God.

God is “the fountain of living waters” (Jer. 17:13). God is the one who caused mist to water Eden and the land to “drink water by the rain from heaven” (Deut. 11:11). Jesus says, “Whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:14). Even more, Jesus says that “rivers of living water” will flow out of the heart of anyone who believes in him (John 7:38).

The “river of the water of life” that Ezekiel sees flows “bright as crystal” from “the throne of God and of the Lamb” (Rev. 22:1). Because Christ lives within us by his Spirit, the rivers of life that brings life to the world flows from you and me.

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