Mike Parsons
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The Old Covenant System
We’re looking at a perspective where the old covenant operated in a way that they had a system in which they needed a temple which reflected a heavenly picture of a holy of holies, an inner court and outer court and that sort of thing. And I do not understand personally why David would have desired to do that, when he had the presence of God in the Tabernacle of David, which represented our day in which the gospel would be open to all people, not just a limited people. But they had a religious system and, according to their religious system, they needed somewhere where God’s presence would be, where they could offer their sacrifices and offerings and their day of atonement and all that.
So according to that system, I can understand why that was important to them; and God worked within their system. But did he intend there to be these things made out of stone, when we are the temple that he always desired to dwell within and with? So we have got to look at it from their perspective. Under their religious system, a temple made sense.
Jesus came to completely destroy that temple. That is what he said. “Not one stone will be left standing on this temple,” which was the representation of the old covenant system of law, when the new covenant would be a system of grace, not law. So Jesus said that this system was coming to an end. It would happen within a generation. It happened within a generation.
So we have got to be careful not to read into what happened in the old covenant as anything that we should be looking for to happen in the new covenant. So God certainly allowed them to have their belief system and he operated within it for them, but he did not condone it because he said, “Sacrifices and offerings I desired not.” You know, “You wanted to do this, I went along with it, but I never wanted it.” And even in Hebrews it says sacrifices and offerings God did not want.
So why did they do it? Because they operated in their own system of belief that they created to enable them, in their view, to have a relationship with God. But they never had a relationship with God that was personal and intimate. They had a relationship with religion and a system that they thought was keeping their nation safe from God’s wrath and judgment and punishment.
Grace Rather Than Law
The day of atonement is where an offering was made for the sin of the nation, whereas Jesus is the sin offering for the world. So we do not need any physical temples anymore. We are the temple of the Holy Spirit. God dwells in us. We are the tabernacle, and corporately God dwells in our midst as well as dwelling within us individually. There is a corporate dynamic to that.
But definitely I do not believe that we should be looking to rebuild or have temples which are physical things. Now, I do not mind going into wonderful cathedrals and things like that where they have been built often out of respect and honour for God, and you can tell that people put their heart and soul into it. And they can be places where you can find peace and I have often been in them. But I do not believe in the religious system of denominations occupying them.
They did not have any church buildings for the first few hundred years, until Constantine decided that Christianity would be the Roman religion. Therefore they had a lot of temples which were now redundant, so they might as well use them for Christian things. The same with priests, a lot of redundant priests. So, let’s have a priesthood (rather than the priesthood of all believers, which is what it is).
All of us have access into the holy places of God in the realms of heaven.
Reading the Bible With Perspective
Part of the problem with a lot of these things is we read what the Old Testament says and we think that must be true, the total truth. A lot of it is their interpretation of the truth from their understanding. It does not make it true. It makes it true from their perspective, under their religious system.
We have got to be so careful we do not just accept the Bible must be totally true because it says so. The Bible, you have got to understand, is a collection of books written by loads and loads of people. Some poetry, some wisdom, proverbs and things like that. Some are history, some prophetic books. They are all books written from someone’s perspective who wrote them. It does not make them right.
403. So you think the ‘Word of God’ is the Bible? Think again!
Just because they said that God said, “You need to wipe out this group of people,” does not make it right that he said it. They just used that because that was their view of God. God was going to wipe out their enemies, because that is how they saw it. That does not make it true. God was never going to wipe out his enemies in the way that they thought. God can turn enemies into friends. That is what it says, turn his enemies into his footstool, the place of worship, not destroy them and wipe them out.
Sons of Issachar 