2 Chronicles 3–4

The building begins, and the Chronicler fixes the spot with care: Solomon began to build the house of Yahweh at Jerusalem in mount Moriah, where Yahweh appeared unto David his father, in the place that David had prepared in the threshingfloor of Ornan the Jebusite. Moriah is the place of the appearing of Yah — the mount where Abraham was told Yahweh-Yireh, Yahweh will provide, where he bound Isaac and received him back as from the dead (Heb 11:17–19), and where the angel’s sword was stayed at David’s altar. The temple rises on the exact ground of the provided lamb and the halted judgment; the whole month’s thread of the threshingfloor lands on the foundation stone.

The workforce is worth counting: seventy thousand bearers, eighty thousand hewers in the mountains, three thousand six hundred overseers — a hundred and fifty-three thousand six hundred strangers in the land, set to quarry and carry the house of Yahweh. The number is the net’s own (Jn 21:11), and a possible reading takes it for the figure it looks like: the full haul of the nations dragged to shore, every one counted, laboring on a house they were not born into. The stone is dressed at the quarry and comes up the hill finished, so that the house rises without the noise of a tool.

The house is fitted out with the holy of holies, the two great cherubim with outstretched wings filling the inner room, and the veil of blue, and purple, and crimson, and fine linen, and wrought cherubims upon it. The veil is the screen between the holy and the most holy — the barrier that Hebrews reads as the flesh of Christ, the new and living way through the veil, that is to say, his flesh. The way into the presence runs through a torn veil; the colors of heaven and royalty and blood are woven across the only door.

Before the porch stand the two pillars, Jachin and Boaz — he shall establish and in it is strength. They are freestanding, bearing no roof, named rather than functional: standing witnesses at the threshold that the house, and the kingdom it serves, are established and upheld by Yahweh’s own act. The worshipper passes between two pillars whose names are a confession — the establishing and the strength are His.

The court is filled with the vessels of cleansing and light. The molten sea rests on twelve oxen facing the four quarters, a great basin for the priests’ washing — the laver of the word and of cleansing, borne up by the twelve as the apostolic foundation will bear up the washing of the ecclesia. Ten lavers, ten candlesticks, ten tables, the altar of brass: everything ordered, numbered, doubled and tenfold, a house of cleansing and light arranged for the service of the great God.

The house rises on Moriah, the mount of the provided lamb; the way in runs through a veil that is the flesh of Christ, between pillars that confess Yahweh establishes and upholds, past the sea of cleansing borne on the twelve.

Ezekiel 40

Twenty-five years into the exile the prophet is carried in the visions of God into the land of Israel, and set upon a very high mountain — the mountain of Yahweh’s house that Isaiah and Micah saw exalted above the hills. There he is met by a man whose appearance was like the appearance of brass, with a line of flax in his hand, and a measuring reed, and the long vision of the future temple begins. The God who once gave David a pattern now shows Ezekiel a whole house, measured cubit by cubit before a stone is laid.

The date carries its own claim. The vision comes in the twenty-fifth year of the captivity, the fourteenth after the city fell — and reckoned from the jubilee-cycle that Josiah’s great Passover marks, the day Ezekiel is set on the mountain is itself a jubilee: the year of release, when every man returns to his possession and the land goes back to its owner. A possible reading carries the count forward and looks for the house of prayer to be inaugurated in the fiftieth year reckoned from the King’s appearing. Either way the measuring of the inheritance begins on the day inheritance is restored.

And the charge to the prophet is the charge to everyone who reads these chapters: behold with thine eyes, and hear with thine ears, and set thine heart upon all that I shall shew thee… declare all that thou seest to the house of Israel. Eyes, ears, heart, then mouth. The vision is not given to be admired; it is given to be told.

The chapter is almost entirely measurement — the east gate, its threshold, its chambers and posts and arches, the outer court, the thirty chambers, the inner gates, all reckoned with the reed. The relentless precision is the meaning: the house of the age to come is no vague hope but a defined reality, drawn to exact dimension in the mind of Yahweh long before its day. To measure a thing is to claim it and to fix it; the measuring reed says this house will surely be.

This is the temple of the kingdom-age — the sanctuary of the restored people, set on the high mountain, the centre of worship for Israel and the nations when the King reigns. It belongs to the far end of the prophetic flow, the era when the law goes forth from Zion and the house is filled with the homage of the earth. The vision answers the longing of the whole month: a house that does not fall, measured and certain, standing at the centre of a healed world.

The east gate opens the vision, and its place matters — for it is by the east gate that the glory of Yahweh will return to fill the house, as it had departed by the east. The measuring begins where the glory will re-enter; the surveyor lays out the path by which the presence comes home. The reed runs first along the road the glory will travel.

The prophet is set on the high mountain and shown the house of the age to come, measured cubit by cubit — a certain and exact reality, its east gate laid out for the returning glory.

John 6

The fourth sign opens the chapter — the feeding of the five thousand — five loaves and two fishes multiplied until they were filled, twelve baskets of fragments gathered up. The crowd, fed once, wants a king who will keep the bread coming; Jesus withdraws — and the fifth sign follows on the water, the King who would not be seized and crowned walking over the sea that stands for the nations he will yet rule; he comes to the disciples on the waves, and the next day presses past the loaves to the thing they signify: labour not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life. The shepherd who feeds the flock is teaching them to hunger for a deeper bread.

The provision is deliberately poor. The boy — paidarion, a child or a servant lad — carries five barley loaves and two small fishes, and barley is the cheap grain, the bread of the poor, the meanest wage a man can be bought for (Ezek 13:19; Rev 6:6). Elisha fed a hundred men with twenty barley loaves and had bread left over (2 Kgs 4:42–44); here five loaves feed five thousand. And the count of the meal is seven — five and two, the covenant-number laid on the grass — a complete provision from the hand of the One who feeds the whole seven-millennial day of mortal man.

He names himself the true manna: I am the bread of life… I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever. The phrase came down from heaven is the manna’s own language — for the manna was bread from heaven, Yahweh’s provision sent down to a hungry people, not a person who had lived in the sky. So Christ is the bread of God, of divine origin — begotten by the Spirit, given by the Father, sent into the world as Yahweh’s own provision for its life — the antitype of the manna, not a pre-existent being descending. The Father gives the bread; the Son is the bread given.

The bread is given for the life of the world, and the gift is his flesh: the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world. To live by him is to feed on the offering — except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you — the deepest participation in his death and life, the sustenance of the saint who is joined to him. This is no figure of cannibalism but of communion: the believer lives by taking the crucified and risen Lord as his food.

The saying is hard, and many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him. The bread that satisfies the hungry crowd offends them the moment it asks to be eaten as flesh given in death. But Peter speaks for the remnant: Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life. The fourfold promise hangs on the end — I will raise him up at the last day — the life the bread gives is sealed not now but at the awakening, the resurrection still ahead.

Christ is the true manna — the bread of divine origin given by the Father for the life of the world — and to live by him is to feed on the offering, raised up at the last day.