2 Chronicles 5–6

The house is finished, and the ark is carried up into the most holy place under the wings of the cherubim. As the singers and trumpeters lift one sound to make one sound to be heard in praising and thanking Yahweh — for he is good; for his mercy endureth for ever — the glory fills the house: the cloud filled the house of Yahweh, so that the priests could not stand to minister by reason of the cloud: for the glory of Yahweh had filled the house. The whole month’s labor reaches its end here. The presence comes home; the house built for Yahweh is filled with Yahweh.

Two details of the carrying up are worth stopping over. The staves are drawn out — the poles that carried the ark through forty years of wilderness and every camp since are pulled from the rings and left, because the journey is done and the ark will not travel again. And when the priests look inside, there was nothing in the ark save the two tables — the Law alone, at the heart of the finished house. The wandering is over and the word remains: the same word that will stand at the centre of the greater house when the Word made flesh is the glory in it.

And the date is not incidental. The dedication falls in the seventh month, in the feast — Tabernacles, the booth-feast of the ingathering, when Israel remembered the wilderness and looked toward the rest. The ark comes out of its tent and into its house at the very feast that celebrates dwelling in tents, and Zechariah says all nations will keep that same feast when the King reigns. The house is opened on the kingdom’s own festival.

Solomon blesses the people and rehearses the covenant — the promise to David fulfilled, the son on the throne, the house built for the Name. The dedication prayer (chapter 6) rises from the bronze scaffold with spread hands, and at its heart is the question the whole temple poses: But will God in very deed dwell with men on the earth? behold, heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house which I have built! The wonder of it is that the uncontainable One should consent to dwell with men at all — a question the gospel will finally answer when the Word dwelt among us and Revelation announces the tabernacle of God is with men.

Watch the king turn. He faces the house and spreads his hands toward heaven as the people’s representative, pleading their cause before Yahweh; then the king turned his face, and blessed all the congregation, standing now for Yahweh toward the people. Two directions, one man — the priestly office in a gesture, and the shape of the Mediator who speaks for men to God and for God to men.

The prayer turns the house into a place of answered prayer and returning. Whatever the trouble — defeat, drought, famine, plague — what prayer or what supplication soever shall be made… when every one shall know his own sore and his own grief, and shall spread forth his hands toward this house: then hear thou from heaven. The temple becomes the fixed point toward which a scattered, sinning people turn to find mercy; its whole function is to be the direction of repentance, the address to which a returning heart may send its prayer.

And the prayer makes room for the stranger. Concerning the stranger, which is not of thy people Israel, but is come from a far country for thy great name’s sake… when he shall come and pray toward this house; then hear thou from heaven… that all people of the earth may know thy name. The house was never meant for Israel alone; from its dedication it reaches toward the far country, toward the Gentile who comes for the great Name — the nations gathered to the house of prayer.

The glory fills the finished house, and the wonder is that the uncontainable God consents to dwell with men — the house set as the direction of returning prayer, with room from the first for the stranger from far.

Ezekiel 41

The measuring man brings the prophet into the temple proper and measures the holy place and then the inner room — this is the most holy place — the sanctuary of the age-to-come house drawn to exact dimension, as the certain centre of a healed world. The walls, the side chambers in their three storeys, the thickness and the breadth are all reckoned with the reed; the precision of yesterday’s gates now reaches the holy of holies. The house where the glory will dwell is fixed to the cubit.

The walls themselves are carved, and the pattern repeats around the whole house: cherubim and palm trees, a palm tree between a cherub and a cherub, the figures covering the sanctuary from floor to above the door. The palm tree is the canon’s emblem of the righteous — the righteous shall flourish like the palm tree — and the cherubim are the bearers of the glory, the manifestation of Yahweh in his redeemed. Carved alternating around the walls, they are the redeemed built into the house: the glorified saints and the flourishing righteous together forming the very fabric of the sanctuary, a living temple in figure long before Ephesians names it in fact.

A possible reading takes the foliage further than carving. The palms swarm up the walls of the whole house from floor to above the door, and the sanctuary is described as an overgrown thing — the beams of our house are cedar, and our rafters of fir (Song 1:16–17). Read that way the temple is itself an arboreal booth: when all nations come up to keep the feast of tabernacles (Zech 14:16), no one need go out to gather boughs, for the house of Yahweh is already roofed with them. The dwelling and the booth are one structure.

Each cherub bears two faces — the face of a man toward the palm tree on the one side, and the face of a young lion toward the palm tree on the other side. The man and the lion are two of the four cherubic faces, the same faces borne by the living creatures of the throne; the redeemed in the wall carry the likeness of the One whose glory they bear. The house is not bare stone but a wall of cherubim and palms — the multitude of the saved patterned into the dwelling of Yahweh.

At the close stands a plain wooden altar, three cubits high, and the man says, This is the table that is before Yahweh. The table before the presence — the place of communion, the bread set out before the face of Yahweh — stands within the carved house of cherubim and palms. The measured sanctuary, walled with the redeemed, has at its heart a table before the Lord.

The most holy place is measured to the cubit and walled with cherubim and palm trees — the redeemed and the righteous built into the house — with a table of communion standing before Yahweh.

John 7

It is the feast of tabernacles, the autumn ingathering when Israel dwelt in booths and the priest each day poured water drawn from Siloam at the altar — and into that water-rite Jesus cries his great invitation: If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water. John adds the meaning: this spake he of the Spirit. The living water of the well in John 4 becomes a river flowing out of the believer — the Spirit not only received but poured through, the temple-river of Ezekiel beginning to run from the One who is the true house.

The feast itself declares it. Tabernacles was the feast of the kingdom — the great ingathering of the harvest, the booths recalling the wilderness and looking to the rest, the feast that Zechariah says all nations will keep when the King reigns. To stand at tabernacles and cry come and drink is to announce that the ingathering has its fountain here: the rivers that will flow from the millennial sanctuary already flow from Christ, and through those who believe.

The chapter is full of division over him — some said, He is a good man: others said, Nay; but he deceiveth the people — the city split between those drawn and those offended. The officers sent to arrest him come back empty-handed with the only report they can give: Never man spake like this man. The word that offers living water cannot be seized by those sent to silence it; it disarms its own arresting officers.

Nicodemus, who came by night, now speaks for due process — doth our law judge any man, before it hear him? — and is sneered down. The same hardness that searched the Scriptures and missed their subject now refuses to hear the man the Scriptures foretold. But the invitation stands over the whole feast: the thirst of the ingathering is answered at one fountain, and the river that will fill the age to come is already offered to anyone who will come… and drink.

At the feast of ingathering Christ cries come and drink — and the Spirit becomes a river flowing out of the believer, the temple-river of the kingdom already running from the true house.