Introductory comment by WRF International Director, Dr. Samuel Logan: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is scheduled to speak to a joint session of the U. S. Congress on March 13, 2015, and many evangelical Christians are responding to this planned event citing Scripture, especially the Old Testament. 

But how exactly should Christians in the 21st century read and interpret the Old Testament?  This is a critically important question and the application of the answer to present political matters is one of the LESS important applications.  More important are issues relating to the relationship of the Old Testament to the New Testament and to the totality of our lives as Christians in the post-New Testament period.  While referencing some of the political issues involved, Professor Taylor primarily addresses these broader questions in his discussion below.

Israel and the Temple: Gasping with Ezekiel

by   WRF Member Steve TaylorThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

 

 Ezekiel’s Temple-Shaped Hope

In chapters 40-48, Ezekiel, under the guidance of an angelic intermediary, gives an elaborate description of a future, eschatological temple: its layout and dimensions, its priestly and Levitical staff, and its sanctifying and healing role in a restored nation of Israel.

Chapter 47 in particular seems to indicate that the eschatological Temple will serve as the agent—or at least the nexus—of “new creation”: the prophet envisions living waters cascading from below the temple entrance into the Dead Sea, making everything in its path alive.

On the banks, on both sides of the river, there will grow all kinds of trees for food. Their leaves will not wither nor their fruit fail, but they will bear fresh fruit every month, because the water for them flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for healing (Ezek 47:12).

On the strength of this chapter, many Christian readers have spiritualized Ezekiel’s expectations: Ezekiel was knowingly using an elaborate national and institutional metaphor to talk about matters of the heart and of future individual salvation. Ezekiel was speaking about eternal Christian truths.

But Ezekiel’s focus in the prior seven chapters hardly allows for that. In those chapters Ezekiel fixes his gaze — with obvious fascination! — on

The exacting details of the new temple structure, including all the ancillary rooms necessary for executing worship not in some future spiritual way but in the way prescribed by Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy (Ezek 40-43).

A number of purity laws and how they will regulate the conduct of priests, Levites, and worshipers in the new temple (the bulk of chapters 44-46).The exclusion from the temple precincts of foreigners, namely, those who are “uncircumcised in heart and in flesh” (44:6-9).Supremely, because it is reiterated four times (40:46, 43:18-19, 44:15-16, 48:11-12), the absolute requirement that, among all the clans of the sons of Levi and Aaron, only “the descendants of Zadok,” be allowed to minister in the renewed temple.

If we read Ezekiel honestly, it hardly seems likely that he was proposing an elaborate allegory of timeless Christian truths. Rather, it seems that Ezekiel, himself a priest from the line of Zadok, understood God’s future redemption of Israel in terms of the Temple (Tabernacle) and priesthood laws spelled out in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy. For Ezekiel, God’s renewal of the world could only happen when the framework and structures spelled out in the priestly sections of the Law finally became dominant realities.

In the face of these exegetical realities other godly Christians have posited that one of the key events signalling the last day will be the building of Ezekiel’s temple, so that all the practices and rites and persons so keenly anticipated by the prophet can have their God-ordained venue.

So how are we to understand and apply Ezekiel? This question gets at the heart of how Christians should read and apply the Old Testament in connection with the tragic history of the Palestinian Arabs (both Christian and Muslim) and the modern Israeli state. Are we, for example, called to pray for the destruction of the Dome of the Rock and to set aside funds for the prophesied construction of Ezekiel’s temple, supporting every policy of the Israeli government toward that end? Or are we to take Ezekiel as an allegorist speaking about eternal and internal spiritual truths? Or was Ezekiel, perhaps, simply wrong? Are these the only options?

Reading Ezekiel in the Light of Christ

Not if we follow the New Testament writers. Let’s take, as a specific and manageable example, Ezekiel’s insistence that the eschatological priesthood in the perfected temple would be drawn exclusively from the line of Zadok. Zadok was one of a pair of high priests—both descended from Aaron (Ex 40)—during the reign of David; he was made sole high priest when Solomon ascended to the throne (1 Chron 29:22). From that time on, down to the reign of the early Hasmoneans (160s B.C.E.), every high priest on record was a “Zadokite,” a member of this line.

Ezekiel was clearly holding to an ancient tradition with strong biblical roots. Moreover, this tradition was still maintained by at least one community within Judaism in the time of Jesus, as evidenced by the Dead Sea Scrolls (Rule of the Community V, 1 -VI, 23). The Zadokite claim would have been common knowledge among thoughtful Jews of the first century.

The only New Testament writer to address the issue of the priesthood and temple service head-on is the author of Hebrews. What does this writer, who is consciously writing under the conviction that he is living in the last days (Heb 1:1-2, 9:26), do with the Ezekiel’s venerable Zadokite claim? Very simple: He advances the bold and surprising counter-claim that Jesus is the final and perfect High Priest (4:14, 5:4-10) who has direct and constant access not to the inner chamber of an earthly building but to the very presence of God!

The writer is not ignorant of the tension this creates in the story. He doesn’t soft-pedal it. He confronts it head on:

For the one of whom these things are spoken [Jesus] belonged to another tribe [not to the tribe of Levi and of Zadok], from which no one has ever served at the altar. 14 For it is evident that our Lord was descended from Judah, and in connection with that tribe Moses [not to mention Ezekiel!] said nothing about priests [Zadokite or otherwise]. (Hebrews 7:13-14)

The author of Hebrews is in essence jumping out of a dark corner and saying “surprise!”; yet he is still sticking close to the fundamental interpretive assumption announced at the very beginning of his letter:

Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers via prophets, 2 but in these last days he has spoken to us via Son, . . . 3 who is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact imprint of his nature . . . . (Hebrews 1:1-3)

Jesus is climactic in the story  

He is the goal of the story and of its major elements. For this writer, it is not so much that Jesus directly clarifies the meaning of Ezekiel’s words, but rather that he fills up the meaning of the social and religious realities that structured Ezekiel’s world—social and religious realities that God used in his revelation to Ezekiel.

Ezekiel yearned for God to once again dwell with his people. Using Ezekiel’s language and concepts, God assuaged Ezekiel’s ache with a vision of a final temple in which God’s glory would once again have a local address. From that sanctuary, holiness would radiate to the surrounding tribes of Israel (chapter 48). Gentile impurity would no longer threaten the sanctuary; it would be served and guarded by a perfect priesthood.

But God had in mind something much more intimate and costly, much more permanent and cosmic than Ezekiel could comprehend or appreciate without further realities falling into place. God meant to establish the very realities to which the Temple pointed: God’s immediate and unvarnished dwelling among his people. What God had in mind would even include those “uncircumcised in heart and in flesh” and in the process obviate the Aaronic/Zadokite priesthood altogether.

In Christ, God proved faithful to Ezekiel’s vision, but not in a penny-pinching, perfectly predictable and parsimonious way. This is what another building on the ruins of the Dome of the Rock would represent! No! The hallmark of God’s faithfulness on full display in Christ is creativity and extravagant surprise. Yahweh hyper-fulfills. He’s creatively faithful!

The writer of Hebrews and Paul are of the same mind (see the prior post). And Ezekiel would have GASPED at the fulfillment of his vision.

But some of us cough and gag.  Why?

Presumably, if God promised $100 in the Bible, he would prove himself unfaithful and the Bible false if he actually delivered $100,000,000. Many Christians are so fixated on prophetic schemes based on questionable interpretations of the Bible, that they miss God’s announced determination to “sum up all things in the Messiah”(Eph 1:10) and in the process “neglect the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith” (Matt 23:23).

Shouldn’t we be reading with Paul and the author of Hebrews—and gasping with Ezekiel— in ALL of our applications of the teachings of Scripture?