Revelation 21:22

“I did not see a temple in the city because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.”

John lived in Israel when the newly constructed temple, built during Herods’ rule, became the focus of all Jewish interests. It stood glistening, proud and tall in the early sunrise. It replaced the temple that Ezra repaired after the Babylonian exile four centuries earlier.  It actually appear that the Sons of Abraham were, at long last, going to be a self-standing nation.

As John remembered it, the priesthood was in place, animals were sacrificed by the thousands – the temple was fully operational. That temple represented the hopes and dreams that the Jews are, or should be, a nation. Mind you, it was only a hope, a dream because Palestine was so strategic to Rome as a buffer against the Persians to the East, that Rome was in no mood to allow the Jews to think that they may might some day become independent.  So, while the great, new temple promised hope, thirty miles or so away, the Roman garrison at Caesarea, on the coast, told the real story.  The nation of Israel exists only in the imagination. They are under the Roman arm.

Returning to our story, I find it hard to grasp that in AD 70, thirty some years after Jesus ascended into glory, the Romans who built that temple destroyed it – completely.

It is now twenty or so years after that –  John, on Patmos, in a dramatic revelation from God, saw a new Jerusalem descend from on high, “coming down out of heaven from God.”  v 10  Its brilliance is described in pictorial detail in Rev. 21.

Then John saw something that moved him powerfully.  This New Jerusalem had no temple!  The Temple had not only dominated Jerusalem’s landscape, but it was the most sacred spot in the history and religion of the Jews.

John looked in vain for the Temple.  At last he understood, “I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.”  (My bold)

John’s vision caught up with reality.  He saw that the city had twelve gates, always open, representing the twelve tribes of Israel, acknowledging the importance of the Jewish people in God’s redemptive plan. But the center of it all was something entirely new – God’s city without the Jewish Temple. I must ponder that until the next installment.