The “temple” and the presence of God

When we think about the temple in the Bible, we usually start with Solomon — or with Moses, if we go back to the tabernacle — and end with its destruction by the Romans in AD 70, or perhaps the deportation to Babel in 587 BC.

But the real story begins in Genesis and runs all the way to Revelation, and it’s much broader than that.

The garden of Eden as a place of fellowship with God

It begins in the Garden of Eden. God creates man and woman and lives in fellowship with them, giving them a garden to tend and meeting with them there regularly.

After the fall, both have to leave the garden. The ground itself is cursed, and things only get worse when Cain kills Abel.

The weight of that is too much for Cain to bear, and God shows him mercy, placing a protective sign on him. But Cain looks for his own security instead and builds a city, and his successors carry that further, building their own security and provision through culture and progress.

Cain’s line ends with Lamech, who mocks the protection God gave Cain. Cities, in other words, become man’s own substitute refuge. Adam then has another son, and from that point on, people begin again to call on the name of the Lord. Yet the city remains a significant feature of the story, and it eventually leads to disaster at the tower of Babel.

The builders at Babel wanted to make a name for themselves, but instead God chooses to make a name for Abraham, from whom Israel eventually comes.

God comes to the town

God still longed to be in relationship with people. So when he brought Israel out of Egypt (Exodus 1–14), he chose to live with them on their own terms, joining them first in a tent and later in a house — the temple.

The temple was covered with imagery borrowed from the Garden of Eden, reflecting a simple logic: since man could no longer have fellowship with God in the garden, God would instead have fellowship with man in the temple. And the temple was intended from the start to allow non-Israelites to take part as well.

The innermost part of the temple was the Holy of Holies, which only the High Priest could enter, and only once a year, on the Day of Atonement. This was where God’s presence dwelt; in the tabernacle before it, God had spoken with Moses from above the ark (Exod 25:22).

Even so, God ultimately left that dwelling — but with a promise to one day reunite the images of city and garden. When Israel broke the covenant, his presence left the temple, but later in the same book, the return of God is promised, entering again through the East Gate.

In the context of those chapters, a new image appears that fuses the temple with the garden: a vision of a stream flowing out from the altar in the temple, becoming a river that makes everything grow and flourish wherever it reaches. That vision finds its fulfillment in the New Jerusalem — though at this point in the story, there is still a long way to go before we get there.

The temple in the New Testament

In the New Testament, Jesus himself is the temple. When he died, the veil in front of the Holy of Holies was torn in two, showing that access to God was now open to everyone.

With his death, the temple becomes the church, since the church is the body of Christ.

In Revelation

Revelation brings the whole line to its end. The church appears as the Bride of Christ, who is also the new Jerusalem, and the city is a cube. Only one other space in the Bible has that shape: the Holy of Holies, the room where God lived and where one man could enter once a year.¹ Now the whole city is that room, and all God’s people live in it.

That is why John sees no temple there: “the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb are its temple”. A river runs from the throne, and the tree of life grows beside it. Eden, the temple and the city have become one place, and the fellowship between God and his people is at last undisturbed.

Dig deeper

Beale, Kim: God dwells among us

Sources