After six years given to the impartial investigation of Christianity as to its truth or falsity, I have come to the deliberate conclusion that Jesus Christ is the Messiah of the Jews, the Savior of the world, and my personal Savior.”

These were the words of Lew Wallace, Governor of New Mexico, over a century ago. He had started out to write a book against Jesus Christ and in the process was converted to Christianity. He told a friend how it happened:

I had always been an agnostic and denied Christianity. Robert C. Ingersoll, a famous agnostic, was one of my most intimate friends. He once suggested, “See here, Wallace, you are a learned man and a thinker. Why don’t you gather material and write a book to prove the falsity concerning Jesus Christ, that no such man has ever lived, much less the author of the teachings found in the New Testament. Such a book would make you famous. It would be a masterpiece, and a way of putting an end to the foolishness about the so-called Christ.”

The thought made a deep impression on me, and we discussed the possibility of such a book. I went to Indianapolis, my home, and told my wife what I intended. She was a member of the Methodist Church and naturally did not like my plan. But I decided to do it and began to collect material in libraries here and in the Old World. I gathered everything over that period in which Jesus Christ, according to legend, should have lived.

Several years were spent in this work. I had written nearly four chapters when it became clear to me that Jesus Christ was just as real a personality as Socrates, Plato, or Caesar. The conviction became a certainty. I knew that Jesus Christ had lived because of the facts connected with the period in which he lived.

I was in an uncomfortable position. I had begun to write a book to prove that Jesus Christ had never lived on earth. Now I was face-to-face with the fact that he was just as historic a personage as Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, Virgil, Dante, and a host of other men who had lived in olden days. I asked myself candidly, “If he was a real person (and there was no doubt), was he not then also the Son of God and the Savior of the world?” Gradually the consciousness grew that, since Jesus Christ was a real person, he probably was the one he claimed to be.

I fell on my knees to pray for the first time in my life, and I asked God to reveal himself to me, forgive my sins, and help me to become a follower of Christ. Towards morning the light broke into my soul. I went into my bedroom, woke my wife, and told her that I had received Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.

“O Lew,” she said, “I have prayed for this ever since you told me of your purpose to write this book, that you would find him while you wrote it!”

Lew Wallace did write a very famous book. It was a masterpiece and the crowning glory of his life’s work. He changed the book he was originally writing and used all his research to write another book.

Now every time I watch the epic film made from that book and see Charlton Heston racing those four magnificent white horses in that amazing chariot race, I wonder how many who have seen Ben Hur, with its moving references to Jesus, know it was written by a man who wanted to disprove that Jesus ever existed, and instead became convinced that he was the greatest man who ever lived! Citation: David Holdaway, The Life of Jesus (Sovereign World, 1997), pp. 42–43

John 2:13–25

“When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple courts he found men selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple area, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves he said, ‘Get these out of here! How dare you turn my Father’s house into a market!’

His disciples remembered that it is written: ‘Zeal for your house will consume me.’ Then the Jews demanded of him, ‘What miraculous sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?’ Jesus answered them, ‘Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.’ The Jews replied, ‘It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?’ But the temple he had spoken of was his body.

After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the Scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken. Now while he was in Jerusalem at the Passover Feast, many people saw the miraculous signs he was doing and believed in his name. But Jesus would not entrust himself to them, for he knew all men. He did not need man’s testimony about man, for he knew what was in a man.”

Jesus himself is the ultimate meeting place between God and his people. That’s what the temple was. The temple was the meeting place, under the terms of the old covenant, where God met with his people. If Jesus now claims to be that temple, then he is claiming to be the ultimate meeting place between God and his people. It’s an astonishing claim.

The Temple

It’s very difficult for most of us in the Western world to appreciate how important temples were in the ancient world. This importance was almost as mighty in paganism as in Judaism. So much so that throughout the Roman Empire, desecration of a temple, any temple, was a capital offense.

The Jews who inherited Old Testament revelation had far stronger reasons for revering the temple of Yahweh in Jerusalem than even the pagans. This was the temple, Zion was the hill, Jerusalem was the city, where God had chosen to make himself known from the time of King David on.

From their point of view, it was not only their sacred history, it was the place where God himself came down every year on the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, and when the high priest went into the Most Holy Place, carrying the blood of animals, and made atonement for the sins of the people, they expected God to come down. Whether in manifest glory or simply something accepted by faith, they expected this to be the meeting place with God.

It’s hard for us to understand this today, partly because we don’t think of temples in the same way, and partly for us today the Jews gather in synagogues. They don’t have a temple. They don’t have a sacrificial system. They don’t have a high priestly service anymore. So contemporary Judaism is streets away from the Judaism of the first century.

But for those Jews, the temple brought to mind the exodus, Moses and the Law, the tabernacle, all the specific commands of how the temple should be built, David in Jerusalem, the glory of Solomon.

The temple was the place where God chose to meet his people. Every day, there was a morning sacrifice and an evening sacrifice. Three times a year, there were the great festivals to which thousands and thousands of Jews went up from all around the world. Thus, the temple had come to represent for the Jews far more than any church building could mean for us today.

At Jesus’ trial in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, there are some renegades who come forward trying to get Jesus in trouble, saying, “Hey, we heard that this man said he would destroy this temple.” That was, in principle, a capital charge:

The temple must be cleansed.

The worship of God must not be devoured by forms.

At one level, the moneychangers and the people who had cattle were doing a service.
Originally, these people had set up shop across the valley on the lower slopes of the Mount of Olives.

Then there had been a place for them in a lower part of the temple complex right out of the way, but as their business expanded and they wanted a little higher profile, they had moved into the court of the Gentiles, and now the business had so taken over that worship anywhere there wasn’t possible anymore.

The forms had so taken over that any meaningful sense of worship was entirely gone.

They had gotten the formal details right, but they forgot that God is to be worshiped.

The time is going to come, Jesus says, when neither at Jerusalem nor in Samaria will there be worship, but those who worship must worship the Father in spirit and truth. God’s worship is not going to be localized in a temple.

It’s possible in our corporate worship so to pull down the condemnation of God himself that our meetings are doing more damage than good. That’s what the text says. Jesus treated the corporate worship of the temple that way in the first century. Paul warns about this in a particular church in Corinth, and we inevitably have to ask ourselves, “Where do we fall?”

Under the old covenant, worship was inevitably tied up with the cultus, with the sacrificial system, with the offering of animals, with sheep and goats, with the temple clergy, with priests, and so on, but in the New Testament, under the new covenant, that all changes.

In the new covenant, when you look at worship language, it’s tied in another way. Romans 12:1–2: “I beseech you, brothers, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice.” That’s sacrificial language, that you offer something as a living sacrifice. “Don’t be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, which is your spiritual worship.”

not only have we restricted worship to the service; we’ve restricted it to one part of the service. Remarkable.

the most important part about that direct object is who it is. We worship God. Under the terms of the new covenant, worship is not a cultic act. Worship is supposed to embrace all of life

God is not interested in the forms; he’s interested in the reality.

The disciples remembered this word. Later on we’re told they didn’t really understand it until later, but they remembered this word: “Zeal for my house will consume me

The temple must be destroyed and must be raised again.

“The Jews demanded of him, ‘What miraculous sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?’ ” At one level, these Jews, temple authorities, had the right, indeed the obligation, to challenge the credentials of someone who would act like this. Of course. On the other hand, there were plenty of laws on the books to handle cheap hooligans.

They already were witnessing some of his authority. This was a man with a moral integrity that you couldn’t just dismiss as some cheap hooligan. So inevitably, they have to raise the question.

They want to stand in judgment of him.

If he is genuinely the Messiah from God, then finally he will stand in judgment of us.

John tells us that the temple Jesus had spoken of was his body. The Jews don’t understand this at first. They think he’s talking about this physical temple. John comments, But the temple he had spoken of was his body.

Jesus himself is the ultimate meeting place between God and his people. That’s what the temple was. The temple was the meeting place, under the terms of the old covenant, where God met with his people. If Jesus now claims to be that temple, then he is claiming to be the ultimate meeting place between God and his people. It’s an astonishing claim.

You meet with God simply because of me. If you know me, you know God.

That is on a par with the kinds of claims Jesus is making again and again and again in the Gospels, and it is part of a whole way of reading the Old Testament. In John’s gospel, Jesus is presented as the Lamb of God.

If the old covenant Scriptures themselves announce, in principle, the obsolescence of the old covenant priesthood, how dare you still cling to it today when the priest in the order of Melchizedek has already arrived?” You find the same sort of argument in Hebrews, chapter 8, about the covenant.

It is, in particular, Jesus’ death and resurrection that establish him as the ultimate meeting point between God and his people.

Jesus says, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.” Not, “I am the temple.” He says, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.”

John 1:14, The Word became flesh and “tabernacled” for a while among us. He tented for a while among us.

Then you can put some of them together. He is the temple, yes, the meeting place with God and man, but this temple is destroyed, and that’s why he becomes the meeting place. He must be himself sacrificed. This is preparing for a whole string of themes in John’s gospel.

In John, chapter 11, the priest, not knowing what he’s saying, says, “It’s better for this one man to die than for the whole nation to die.” John comments wryly, “He didn’t say this on his own. Being priest that year, he was actually uttering a prophecy. For Jesus did die, and not for this nation only but also for all the children of God who would come.”

In other words, the ultimate meeting place with God does not turn just on the incarnation but on Jesus’ death on our behalf, the destruction of his body, and his resurrection again to new life, or else the entire account makes no sense. That is why in all four gospels the plotline, the storyline, is heading toward the cross and the resurrection.

If you find some form of the gospel where Jesus is presented endlessly as a model, as a spiritual mentor, as a guru, as a teacher of fine ethical systems, but not finally as a temple who is destroyed and built again, it is simply not the biblical Jesus.

Jesus’ death and resurrection establish his authority.

Look at the logic between verse 18 and verse 19. “The Jews demanded of him, ‘What miraculous sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?’ Jesus answered them, ‘Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.’ ” Jesus is not changing the subject.

He’s not saying, “I don’t like that topic, thank you,” like most politicians, and simply introducing his own. He is answering their subject exactly.

“What authority do you have to handle the temple structures that now exist with such wanton disregard for tradition and civil law?” Jesus says, in effect, “The ultimate authority vested in me is demonstrated beyond cavil in an empty tomb.” In other words, Jesus dares to rest some measure of his authority on the death and resurrection, witnessed by hundreds, that was still to take place. “Destroy this body, and I will raise it again.”

At the end of the day, it is important to remember constantly that the disclosure of God in Christ Jesus is not an abstract system of thought like Buddhism; it is something that takes place in history. There were witnesses, real people who wrote things down, who were willing to die for their witness. Biblical Christianity thus does not put itself forward as one possible opinion amongst many.

It puts itself forward as the disclosure of God in real history that was witnessed, and you cannot simply take it or leave it. You can run from it. You can deny it. You can slander it. You can advance reasons for disallowing it, but you cannot simply say, “It’s all very nice, and I’ll buy this part of the system and not that part of the system. I’ll choose this little bit, but not that little bit.” It won’t let you do that.

It is not an abstract system where you can afford to be eclectic. It is the disclosure of God himself in the God-man Jesus Christ, attested finally by resurrection from the dead, massively witnessed.

You cannot escape the history of the resurrection. If you come to that point, then you have to ascribe to Jesus certain authority in consequence of that fantastic event, and then a whole lot of things begin to follow. What do you do with someone who claims to be God and then comes back from the dead to prove it with witnesses?