Day 3706 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

John 2:19 NIV

Temples made of human hands.

It’s truly sad just how important, impactful, influential we so often feel ourselves to be. Now I understand the gist in that we just want to feel as if we matter, as if our lives have measure, some sort of merit by which we can make them out to be something worth living, loving, following even. Indeed, we all want to accomplish these outcomes, these projects, these projections of our personally-proven potential so as to prove both that we are here, were here and that we mattered whilst in the process of proving it.

But friends, when it reaches the point that we completely miss the messages we’re being told and the truths we’re offered to see within them, then something has to be done to reset the mix.

Because the simple truth is that we’ve managed only to blend entirely too much arrogance with then eternally too much boasting. We’ve become of the mind that not only should we matter, but that therefore all we make matters so much that nothing else can. We build ourselves into temples of human praise and applause as loved for the awe and wonder won within others looking unto us as celebrity or superstar in terms of what is simply a life that we’re all living in whatever way we alone are living it.

It’s still the same life in the same place. Literally the only things that set us apart are what we do with the opportunities and abilities we’ve been given, and more importantly, why we do whatever we do with the abilities and opportunities we’re given.

That’s it!

The rest is truly nothing but time and chance, just like we talked about a day or so ago. For such is this life. It’s but a momentary existence within a place sadly too often caught by the substance of things seen and the many assumptions we delight to build into them. Indeed, it’s as if we’re all construction contractors constantly bidding ourselves out to those who offer us either the biggest commissions or simply the boldest confusions.

The confusions being often our own, as garnered from those around us who too are pouring themselves into the concreted molds of a culture crumbling to the very same ruins we assume still that Christ is so often talking about in regard to the destruction of the Temple.

But no, we only respond to His every leading in such a way because still we see only that He’s always threatening to destroy what we’ve built. “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?” Or 37. Or 22. Or 78. Or whatever date or age we so seek to place upon what is a life we feel as if we’ve alone been left alone to construct of the plans and preferences and opinions and opportunities that we’ve too come to see as a result of our own workings and winnings.

Yes, we see all of life as we’ve loved it lived as if nothing but a masterpiece of our own making. And thus whenever anyone speaks to the destruction of anything we’ve done, wanted or won, we think only to take it personal. After all, it was our work, our effort, our intentions and attentions that accomplished this grand gloating that we just can’t help but to continue going after, growing after, glowing after. Indeed, all we do in life is unto us a creation all our own.

And how dare anyone say they’ll both destroy it and rebuild something else, even something better, within three measly days?

No, it’s poppycock, balderdash, complete rubbish this talk of ruin and how it’s such the inevitability anyway. We don’t want to hear about our many works and workings being left to crumbling and maybe even the very stumbling of whomever may have put any of their tightly-held hope within them too. At that we feel we’ve a job to do, not only the continuing to build ourselves up into temples of our triumphs, but also then the protection of those people who taken what we’ve taught and bought every lie of it within the building of their own ruins.

For that’s all that all of this is. We talked about that yesterday, and probably dozens of times before within these 3,700+ posts. It’s the reality that all of what we see and most of what we’ve done will be left to ruin. It’s going to be left behind, this every temple or treasure that we see ourselves as the measure of our life’s meaning and merit. It’s all going to stay here when life proves we can’t.

Who’s gonna take care of it then?

Who will keep dusted our rusted reminders of things we’ve accomplished as if by ourselves? Who will give their time to trying to refine the things that we ourselves have long claimed already perfect proof of a life we’ve lived as if not ours to lose? Yes, who will lead vacationers through these mini museums of our personal treasures of masterpieces as made of human minds by human hands when we’re forced to leave them in the hands of whomever they’ll fall to when we fade away?

Heaping up wealth without knowing whose it will finally be.

Because we daren’t seek to see such of life’s finality. Because we stand still afraid of it. Because we think ourselves safe inside the castles of our accomplishments and accolades, free here from any harm or hardship. Yes, we’ve built not only our own little kingdoms but thus too us into kings who sit upon the thrones that Christ is both promising to throw down and yet raise again within a weekend.

Who can do what we have done within a life in which it’s taken us years, decades even to even know what we’re doing? Who can do it so much better as to do it so much faster? How can anyone build a temple in three days when it’s taken us a lifetime to build ourselves into these apparent images of human potential perfected? Again, it’s ludicrous. Ridiculous.

Problem is He ain’t talking about a building!

Nor then what we’ve built. Rather He’s talking about what we’ve become. He’s talking about these beliefs we’ve believed as to the importance of anything and everything our hands have made. He’s referring to the spiritual retardation that has become our every vocation as vacated of reliance upon He being both the Giver and the Guide. He’s talking about tearing down our trying to keep Him housed in a place of pride that was meant instead to be used as a place of prayer that we’ve instead all used as “a den of thieves.”

Indeed, all our lives we’ve lived robbing Him of the reverence and respect that He alone is due. And we do it in the worst possible way too! That being taking it for ourselves. For that’s exactly what boasting is all about. It’s just us placing our trust into the proving that we’re doing so well in life that everyone else should stand in awe-struck appreciation for our being the very best example of mere human potential.

But friends, who gives us that potential?

Who gives us our every opportunity? Who helps us grow by watering us with fire and frustration? Who leads us to the becoming something better as believed for by all whilst seldom found by most? Who offers to not only help us into humility but Himself beat us to the grave in which it stays? Who can take what we’ve built and become and help us believe in something bigger and better than we can be?

Who are we to ask questions of He who we know now only came to save us from living our lives giving our every hope to something made of human hands?

He’s not talking about a building but rather our becoming of the opinion that the building is God rather than just a place in which we were supposed to gather for prayer and petition, worship and the willingness to work at it as if our lives depend on it.

And again, I’m not talking about a building either!

For just as Christ is here referring to Himself, so too are we, as God’s creation, God’s children, so too are we temples now of the Holy Spirit. And thus are we meant to be the places of prayer, the places of worship, the houses of hope as housed inside the Holy of Holies that is a humbled heart entrusted to store up the Word of God within so that we might not continue to sin against Him!

And yet we balk when such a belief asks that we agree to the destruction of what we’ve made.

But friends, what have we made other than ourselves confused, confined, confiscated in fact? Indeed, we’ve lost so much sight of what has long been right that we know not how to be what He simply made us to remain. For now all we want to stay is what and who and where we are for the simple sake of this seeming, feeling the place in which we can best show those looking that we’re the ones living the best example of what every life should be.

Thus missing still, completely, the entirety of His message.

That being that it’s not our hands that can build His house, but that His intention was to show us the destruction we’d built by becoming sin for us so as to show us the destruction we deserve in light of what we’ve built belief to be. For it was never meant to be about us believing in ourselves, nor thus the importance or magnificence of whatever we think we’ve done all by ourselves. No, belief is rather a gift that’s meant to lead us beyond ourselves into the better that we cannot become on our own.

Belief is meant to lead us to loving Christ instead of us.

Thus He came to leave to dust the death we’ve delighted to design inside a human mind so filled with ideas as to our own ideals that we’ve rarely left room to love anything other than ourselves. And that all because of what we’ve built and how impressive a few others have told us it seems to be. Yes, we are daily elated whenever someone else speaks to their approval of our accomplishments. Even more grateful for those few who give us the glory of saying they seek to replicate our rebellions within their own story.

All because we want to be God, and that simply because we’ve long thought we were. But friends, it’s taken us “46 years to build this temple”. Or more personally, it’s taken me 37. For that’s how old I am, and thus how long I’ve been trying this all my way. And having given so much time and effort to a life going my way, I too struggle to believe in both the need of it being now simply destroyed, and that He could have actually overcome such a demise in the span of just three day’s time.

It makes no sense sometimes, simply because still I see the plans I’m working on. I still feel the hopes I have of those goals I’ve made. I still recognize the pride I feel whenever someone else takes notice of something I still think I’ve done of my own accord. I still enjoy the applause I hear, even if it’s just my own hands patting myself on the back. Why? Because we’re fallen humans who think that everything we’re doing is more important than everything that’s already been done by anyone else.

We alone are all that’s ever been allowed to matter!

And we’re now so far gone that we don’t see that He is the Temple being talked about.

Because we don’t want to see it. We don’t want to witness a man torn to shreds because of the things we’ve done. We don’t want to witness the brutality of His being beaten to death by the things we’ve become. We don’t want to admit that the things we’ve done to become what we’ve been were the very same things that should have held us to that cross. Only with nails rather than love.

No, we can’t bear to believe in that eternal need of a temple destroyed so that a lasting replacement can be built. Doesn’t even have anything to do with the amount of time in which He said He’d do it. We just don’t understand why everything we’ve built has to be broken and left behind. And we’re so worried about it that we, like they, still live as if His work was to be completed against us. No, no friends! His victory over death was for us, it only seems so often against us because it was dealt in light of the things we’ve delighted to design.

And that’s why it all had to come crumbling down. Every plan, every preference, every pretense! It all has to meet the ruin it will inevitably be. Not because we want to live as if nothing we do matters, no, but rather simply because if we’re to live then we have to understand that nothing we do matters more than what He already did in those three days! Nothing we can ever do can ever possibly outdo the fact that He’s won the victory over the deaths we deserve for all we’ve done.

Deaths because each and every sin deserves one, and thus we deserve a whole lot of death as proven within every single brick of doubt and disbelief that we’ve built into what are lives lived as if temples of blaspheme!

Thankfully He did come to tear our every attempt at trying this on our own for our own glory to the ground from which it all came and to which it will all return.

And He did it so that we’d turn and return to He who is our Father who in love sent His Son to die for our sins, and in doing so, give us a new Temple with a new promise of life everlasting.

What then are still so busy building? Is any of what we’re doing still being done as if all that matters is that made under the sun? Or have we had our fill of trying in vain to a live a life in the same, only to there continue to fail to find any possible way to do better than He did in those three days?

Friends, we celebrate Easter this weekend, and for many it’s not much more than hunting eggs with the kids and some pastel decorations strewn around the house to celebrate warmer temperatures. Is that all it is? Is that all there is? Is that all we are? Or are we rather ready to seek the meaning, the reason, the purpose of His coming to demolish the sinful flesh for us so that we’d not have to live in fear of losing our lives but rather come into a share of His delight to lay down the flesh for the good of the soul often starved within?

It’s not the building. Rather it’s about the body, both that of Christ and thus too we who are now the body of Christ! He is the Spirit and He died to live inside so as to from in there guide us unto the building of a faith that’s finally placed where it was always meant to be.

In the Father. Not what we’ve tried to make to make Him seem easier or closer or safer.

God does not live in temples made by human hands. And so why are we still so often so worried about all our hands are working to do?

No, such is likely what He came to lay down His life to save us from. If only we could learn that as quickly as He accomplished it.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold