Not One Stone

And let's continue our Jesus journey. If you are just joining us this weekend, it's great to have you here. This Jesus journey series, 40 Days in the Footsteps of Christ, dovetails with a book that we wrote called Jesus Journey. You can pick that up in the lobby. It's all about diving head first into the life and times of Jesus Christ, discovering what you could call the lost history of the Bible.

And this morning, I'm very excited because I want to take you to one of the coolest spots that I have ever been in Israel. You want to know what this place is? Sometimes people ask me, René, we talk about walking in the footsteps of Christ kind of metaphorically, but is there a place you can go where you can say, "Actually, I am walking in the literal steps of Jesus Christ?" Is there some place in Israel where you can say that not just like, "Yeah, he was on that lake, you know, he was in this area, he was in this city," but he actually stepped here?

Yes, there is one place, only one that I can think of, and it's this place. They call these the southern steps. And let me orient you. Here's an aerial view of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. You see that whole crowd of people there? That's what they call the Western Wall or the Wailing Wall. That is actually a wall, one of the retaining walls of the massive temple platform from the time of Christ.

And up on that giant flat platform, which was built in Jesus' day, there are Islamic buildings now, but in the time of Jesus, approximately where that golden dome of the Dome of the Rock stands stood the temple. And I look at this, and I think this flat piece of ground in Jerusalem right there is I think the single most contested piece of land on earth in history, right? But in the time of Christ, how would you get up to the platform that the temple was on? Well, for common people to get up to this platform, you took these steps right at the bottom of the screen, right there, the southern steps, and they were thought to have been destroyed in one of the many wars that raged around Jerusalem and lost forever.

But, turns out, they were merely buried under rubble until the 1980s, when archaeologists found them. And you can go there today. There's not even any like protective barrier or anything. You can walk right on them today. These are the very steps that Jesus and His disciples walked on to get up to the temple. These very steps are the steps that Joseph and Mary walked on when they took Jesus up to the temple to get dedicated when He was a baby.

Not steps like these, not steps in this general area. These aren't replicas of the steps. These are the exact ones. I mean, that's kind of trippy, isn't it? I was tripping out on this so much, in fact, when I was there, I actually went from tripping out to literally tripping because I was taking pictures of my feet going up and down the steps, right?

Well, and this is even cooler. Then, in the 1990s, I mean, you're talking about very recent archaeological discoveries here. Just around the corner, archaeologists made another amazing discovery from the time of Christ. An entire street from the first century buried in debris with massive stones that had been thrown down onto the street from the top of the temple mount. You can see where the stones were thrown from the temple platform and they just whomped the street pavement, buckled it, and these stones were just left there when they cracked the pavement.

And what's so cool is this exact moment, frozen for us in time, is a fulfillment of a specific prophecy made by Jesus Christ that we're going to look at today. And I want to look at this because this prediction of Christ, if you understand its meaning, it could change your life. I mean, it could really set you free. Listen, if you feel distant from God today, if you feel like your relationship with God has been dry, if you ever wonder if God really loves you, or if you feel guilty, ashamed before God sometimes, understanding what we talk about today could change everything.

Check this out. This is where I want to land. Mark 13:1–2. The Bible says, "As Jesus was leaving the temple that day, the disciples said to him, 'Teacher, look at these magnificent buildings. Look at the massive, impressive stones in the walls.' And Jesus replied, 'Yes, look at these great buildings, but they will be completely demolished. Not one stone will be left on top of another.'" In my opinion, these are the most important verses regarding Jesus and the temple system in all of the Gospels.

This saying's so important, it's also in Luke, it's also in Matthew. And yet, you and I today in the 21st century can absolutely miss the shocking, the stunning, the radical nature of this statement because we don't know the context. So this morning, as best as I can, I want to try to open this up for you. And I think at least it's going to revolutionize your understanding of communion, which we're going to take at the end of this message.

Here's the historical timeline for this. The day before Jesus says this, a week before he is crucified, he is hailed as king as he comes into Jerusalem for the triumphal entry. The most massive crowds in his ministry are cheering him on as their new king. And I talk about all the hidden meanings of that episode in the small group video for next week. And then, in rapid succession, he cleanses the temple, drives out the money changers from the temple, says the temple's a den of thieves, calls the leadership of the temple a brood of snakes, just skewers them.

And then he says, not only all this, but the temple will be destroyed. And this just rocks everyone's world. In fact, this statement was even used as evidence against Jesus Christ at his trial. This statement really changed Christians' understanding of their relationship with God. You see implications of this statement, if you understand it accurately, rippling all through the New Testament. But this statement has lost so much of its meaning today.

But when you understand it, I mean, you're going to go, of course, you might be like, what's the big deal? And I don't understand what you're talking about, René. So he said a building would be demolished. So what? Well, for the Jews in Jesus' day, the temple was so much more than a building. It was like the Statue of Liberty and the American flag and the White House all rolled into one. And for somebody to say that this place is going to be destroyed would just have been hugely offensive.

In fact, to try to give you some idea of what the temple signified for the people that Jesus was talking to, I want you to jot this down. Here's the role it played in their lives. First, the temple represented the place of God's presence. Literally the place of God's presence. If you want to be close to God, you didn't just pray wherever you were. You came to the temple. That's where the presence of God was. It was literally God's house.

Even though you couldn't get that close to God there, because first of all, to even get up to the temple mount, you couldn't be disabled, physically marred in any way. And then once you were up on the temple mount, the temple had four courts, each with tighter restrictions. First, there was the court of the Gentiles, which was open to non-Jewish believers in God. But then there was a barrier that they could not go past if they were not ethnically Jewish. Then came the court of women. And this was as far as Jewish women could go.

Next, the court of men. No women, only Israelite men could go there. And then the court of the priests, only male priests could get this close to God. And finally, only the high priest, dressed in his high priestly garments, and then only once a year could enter the Holy of Holies, the sanctuary where God's presence was manifest and a thick veil hung down and a giant bronze door was locked and kept the Holy of Holies from the rest of the world.

It was mysterious and dark and off limits to anyone but that one high priest once a year. Now, they were very serious about all this separation. And if you went up there and you tried to sneak past a barrier to get into a region where you didn't belong, it was literally, it could have gotten you killed. In fact, I want you to look at this. They've actually found two warning signs that were up there on the temple mount in the time of Christ. This one is in the court of the Gentiles. And it reads, "No foreigner is to enter within the barrier around the sanctuary. Whoever is caught will have himself to blame for his death which follows." Wow.

So it was all about separation. In fact, the very idea of holiness came to mean, keep separate. And by the way, each of these sections was literally a step up. You ascended the temple steps from the outside up to the temple platform. And then once you were up there, you ascended a step more to get to the court of the Gentiles, more to get to the court of women, more to get to the court of Israelite men, more to get to the court of the priests, and more to get up into the holy of holies.

The whole idea was very symbolic. We're down there, God's up here, hidden in the mysterious place of the holy of holies. It was the place of God's presence. And it was even more than this. The temple also represented the means of atonement. The means of atonement—the way that you would get right with God, the way that your sins could be forgiven. Because at the altar of the temple, the priests would sacrifice unblemished lambs to atone for the sins of the people if you wanted to be forgiven. This was the only way.

Now many sacrifices were made here every year. I mean, thousands upon thousands. At Yom Kippur was the main one, the day of atonement. But all throughout the years, lambs were sacrificed there. One of the times was Passover, the Seder. Once a year in the time of Christ, a million or more Jews from all over the world would make a pilgrimage to this temple and have the priests sacrifice lambs at this altar and then go and eat the lambs at family meals together and remember that their deliverance came only by the blood of the lamb.

And because of all these sacrifices and all this tradition, it was also the center of community life. The center of community life. And this went way, way back. In fact, about a thousand years before Jesus Christ, on that very spot, King Solomon built the first temple and it was stunning. And then the Babylonian army destroys that temple. The people are humiliated. They try to rebuild a second temple 70 years later. But the people who see it literally weep because it's so pathetic compared to the first one.

And to add insult to injury over the next few centuries, every single invading army desecrates the second temple, humiliating the people. But then, a few years before Jesus is born, the infamous Herod the Great decides he's going to do something. He's going to build a wonder of the ancient world. He is going to remodel the temple. And by all accounts, he did a great job. He was quite a builder. And when Jesus spoke, the words we're looking at this morning, the construction was almost done.

And here's how amazing this place was. The first century historian Josephus saw it before it was destroyed and wrote, "The temple wall was the greatest ever heard of, in some places, a hundred cubits high." That's about 150 feet. "The temple was covered all over with gold and at the sunrise reflected back a very fiery splendor and made those who looked upon it to turn their eyes away." Now, just to give you some idea of its scale, in Jerusalem, you can go down into a newly opened tunnel. Our group went down there in April. And it goes down to what in Jesus' day was ground level.

Now, this is underground, but this would have been eye level. And it's part of the retaining wall for the temple mount. Jesus would have seen this. And it's made of giant blocks, bigger than railroad boxcars. In fact, this block you see here is the largest block of stone in any ancient building ever found. This is bigger than any of the blocks, even in the pyramids. And nobody's really sure how Herod's engineers even built this thing. And this was just the retaining wall. The temple itself was even more amazing.

That's why the disciples said to Jesus, "Did you notice in that quote from Mark, 'Look how impressive its building blocks are,'" because they really were impressive. So the point is at last these poor downtrodden people have something they can have immense national pride in again. In fact, we really only know what this looked like because there's carvings of Herod's temple in ancient synagogues in Israel. There's mosaics of Herod's temple in old buildings. They put pictures of the temple on their money. I mean, they loved this place because they may not have had a king, but they had their temple.

They may not have had their independence, but they had their temple. And so they sang songs about the temple. They told stories about the temple. They made pilgrimages to the temple. You know, grandpa would tell you about the first time he ever went to the temple. It was all an experience central to the community. And finally, even more, it represented the promise of better things. The promise of better things. They believed that one day God would establish his kingdom on earth and ground zero for that occurrence would be the temple.

They believed that the temple was literally holy ground and kind of God's rain would radiate out from this because of some of these promises that one day God would build something amazing. Look at Jeremiah 31, for example. "The time is coming," declares the Lord, "when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel. It won't be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt. This is the covenant I will make after that time. I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God and they will be my people. I will forgive their wickedness and remember their sins no more."

There were all kinds of these rumors in the prophets of the Hebrew scriptures, what we call the Old Testament, that one day God's gonna do something amazing. One day the Messiah will be here and one day through the Messiah his kingdom will come and they thought he would inaugurate all that at the temple. Oh, in God's wrath the whole earth might be destroyed but not this temple. This is holy ground. God's gonna protect this. This is the start of heaven coming to earth. This is like a foretaste of heaven itself. So the temple was huge to them. The temple was everything. They couldn't imagine life without the temple. Do you get the picture?

And then Jesus says this. Yeah, beautiful buildings. So what? It's doomed. It's all gonna be wiped out. Not one stone will be left. Not one stone. And by the way this was precisely fulfilled 40 years after Christ said this. Christ said this in about 30 AD. In 70 AD the Roman army comes in to suppress a Jewish rebellion. And Josephus says that although the Roman general did not give the order, the soldiers went into a frenzy of destruction and thinking that there was hidden treasure inside the temple, they pried apart all the blocks of the temple literally block by block and stone by stone and threw them all off the temple mount in their frenzy to get at treasure that they never found up there.

And Josephus says they literally scraped the top of the temple mount to bare rock and tossed all the rocks over the walls. And that is this moment frozen in time. The stones were thrown down into the street exactly as Jesus foretells. And then Jerusalem was abandoned for a while. Romans remade it into a Roman city. A debris field covered this and I think where I'm coming from is God had an unbelieving generation rediscover this in the 1990s to say look what Jesus foretold came literally true and the temple never was rebuilt.

So it's an amazing confirmation of this prophecy of Jesus Christ. But if you think that all Jesus was foretelling was the destruction of the temple, again there's more meaning behind this because Jesus wasn't just foretelling destruction, he was foretelling replacement. He was saying there will be a new covenant that God has with his people and in the new covenant there's going to be a better temple. There's going to be a more glorious temple. There's going to be a temple that covers the whole earth which will be full of his glory and what will that new temple be?

Well Jesus gives the temple leadership a clue a few minutes before this in Mark 12:10–11 when he says the stone that the builders rejected has now become the cornerstone. This is the Lord's doing and it is wonderful to see. And early Christians came to understand that what Jesus meant was in him. In Jesus Christ, don't miss this because what Jesus did on the cross we now have everything the temple represented.

Flip your notes over to page two and I'll show you what I talk about. Everything that I just went over that the temple represented to the people we have in spades in Jesus Christ. Think about it because of Christ's sacrifice on the cross. Number one, I have God's presence. I have God's presence with me. Jesus Christ lives in me.

Look at what happens when Jesus is crucified. I'm fast forwarding the story just a little bit but I want you to notice some of the many details here now that you know a little bit more about the temple. From the sixth hour until the ninth hour, remember those details, darkness came over all the land and when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice he gave up his spirit. At that moment, the curtain of the temple. Now hang on just a second. We talked about the curtain of the temple. Where was the curtain of the temple? Where did that hang? In front of the Holy of Holies.

The curtain of the temple was torn into from top to bottom the earth shook and the rocks split. Josephus had an inside line on this. He knew a priest who served in the temple and that priest told him that the curtain was 60 feet high, 30 feet wide, and as thick as a man's hand. In fact, it was so heavy that he says 300 priests were needed to hang the curtains. That's how heavy these curtains are and yet it gets ripped into how? From top to bottom. Ripped from God to us. God saying, "Boom!" Not, he wasn't just saying, "You can now come into the Holy of Holies." He was saying, "Here I come! Here I come out to the downtrodden. Here I come to everybody's been separated. Here I come past the veil and past the doors and past every barrier that the priests have put up to be with you."

Now you gotta wonder if this really happened. A, how did people know? Because the veil was in the Holy of Holies and it was blocked off by a big door. And secondly, I mean, did people mention this in any sources outside the Bible? Well, it's interesting. I've never seen this before. I started doing research for the Jesus journey but the Jewish Talmud actually records that in 30 AD on Passover, quote, "40 years before the temple was destroyed," so this is 40 years before 70 AD, 30 AD, "the gates of the Hekel," that's the Hebrew name for the holy place, "opened by themselves."

Now this is not a Christian source and the historian Josephus gives us even more details about this which fascinate me. He's talking about something that happened in 30 AD on Passover. This is not a Christian. "When the people were come in great crowds to the feast of unleavened bread," that's another word for Passover, "on the eighth day of the month, Nisan, and at the ninth hour," where have I heard that before? That's when Jesus Christ died, right? "The door of the inner court of the temple, which was of brass and vastly heavy and had been with difficulty shut by 20 men and rested upon a basis armed with iron and had bolts fastened very deep into the firm floor, was seen to be opened of its own accord." Now those that kept watching the temple came running to the captain of the temple and told him of it and then he came up there and not without great difficulty was able to shut the gate again.

"This appeared to the commoners to be a very happy sign as if God did thereby open them the gate of happiness, but the learned men understood it to mean the security of their holy house was dissolved." Isn't that a fascinating detail? Something weird happened on Passover of 30 AD. The Holy of Holies burst open from the inside out because a holy God came out to the sinful world to be with us.

Now how is that possible? Because I thought a holy God couldn't dwell with sinners. Well, it's possible because in Jesus number two I have atonement for my sins. I have atonement. Remember I said that they would make pilgrimages to sacrifice lambs for Passover, right? Or the Feast of Unleavened Bread. Well it was Passover the night before Jesus is betrayed and he and his disciples are eating the Passover meal and the Bible says as they were eating Jesus took some bread and blessed it and he broke it in pieces and gave it to the disciples saying "take it for this is my body."

And the disciples are going "what did he just say? What was that?" Because the Passover meal was to remember how by the blood of the lamb they were passed over by the angel of death and delivered from Egypt and Jesus is saying "yeah well this is my body and they're getting perplexed." And then he took a cup of wine, this was a cup made for them to remember that their redemption was brought by the blood of the lamb, and gave thanks to God for it. He gave it to them and they all drank from it and he said to them "this is my blood." What? This is supposed to represent the blood of the lamb. This is my blood which confirms the covenant between God and his people. What's he talking about?

We already had the covenant confirmed 1400 years before this by Moses. This is the new covenant that Jeremiah talked about. It is now poured out, he says, as a sacrifice for many. He's doing something totally new. He's saying all the earlier sacrifices, they were all pointing to me. This is my body, this is my blood. Jesus is the Passover lamb. He's saying you don't need the old system anymore. You don't need the old sacrifices anymore. You don't need the old temple anymore, not one stone of it. All you need is Christ the cornerstone.

Do you see how huge this is? This was a totally radical development on the world stage. Never before had there been a faith that didn't have a temple. Never, never before had there been a faith that didn't have an altar where sacrifices were made. Never before had there been a faith without an idol or a statue or a building or something to go to. And now Jesus is saying all those earlier sacrifices, they were all pointing to me and now the temple's going to be destroyed because I'm greater than the temple. You don't need a temple anymore. My presence is with you wherever you go. My atonement has covered all of your sins. I mean, it's mind-blowing and it affects you personally.

You know, maybe you really still wrestle with guilt. Maybe you've been struggling with it your whole life just feeling the weight of it and you try to be better and you make sacrifices and you make promises to God, but still you feel guilty. Wouldn't you love to know that that load of guilt is released? I love this scene from the movie, The Mission. In this film, a Spanish conquistador, ashamed for his horrible past, is literally carrying weights, armor that represent his sin. And he returns to some of the very people he oppressed to try and atone for his sins. Watch this.

Do you ever just have moments where when you take communion, you just start to cry tears of joy when you realize what it is that Jesus has done for you? I do. I mean, communion never fails to touch me, but sometimes it's literally tears that roll down my cheeks because I think that Jesus Christ, because of the sacrifice that he made on the cross once and for all, has cut off the weight of my sin. And some of you are still in the middle of the night sometimes. You still have these, the weight of guilt and shame and regret for something you did 20 years ago or 10 years ago or last week.

But in Jesus, God has taken the weight of that sin and has thrown it into the deepest ocean. And you don't have to keep crucifying yourself for that sin. You don't have to keep going up to some mental temple and sacrificing on that altar because Jesus Christ did it all. It's wiped away. And that means that in Christ, I also have the center for community life. Remember I said the temple was the center of their community life? Well, this is so beautiful. Jesus says, "Do this, the communion, in remembrance of me." As I said, we're going to take communion today, and this is where we find our community centered as believers.

You know, I will never forget crashing through the jungles of Guatemala with Steve Reed, one of our missionaries here. And it seemed like this was all we could see from the windows of our Jeep. And I'm thinking, "Why are we even out here?" You know, what's Steve doing? Well, Steve knew this pastor working in a very remote Mayan Indian village. I mean, thatched roofs way off the grid, everything you imagine a village in the jungle to be no roads. And we arrived just in time to have communion, outdoors, wooden benches in their outdoor open air chapel around a fire. And there was probably two or 300 villagers there in their little village church.

Now, to understand the story, you got to know Steve is the whitest guy I know. He's about 6'3". He has this thick Western American accent. I mean, we could not have stood out more like sore thumbs in that village if we had tried. Yet in that moment at communion, a Mayan passes me the bread and passes me the cup and doesn't look at me like, "What a weirdo, what are you doing here?" Just looks at me and smiles. And we were all one, all united because of our faith in Jesus. And talk about crying at communion, both Steve and I were just bawling, right?

It was one of the most profound experiences of my whole life because we had nothing else in common. We didn't speak the same language. We didn't eat the same kind of foods. We didn't live in the same kind of houses. But we did all speak the same language, didn't we? We all spoke the language of the cross. And this is so important, church. Listen, especially in divisive times like this, we need to remember that as Christians, we have different cultures, different politics, different ethnicities, different gender languages.

Some of us today are male, some are female, some are Democrats, some are Republican. Yes, both here in the same building. You know, some are baseball fans, some are football fans, some are Niner fans, some inexplicably are Raider fans, but we're united. We're united when we remember what Jesus did here. That is the center of our community, not anything else. No matter what people try to tell you, nothing else unites us. It's the cross of Christ. And this is so huge.

And finally, in Jesus, I have the promise of better things, just like people saw in the temple. I have the promise of better things. Check this out. Jesus says, "I tell you the truth. I will not drink wine again until the day I drink it new in the kingdom of God." Now, don't miss this. Again, this sentence here has a meaning that we can miss. Because in those days when somebody would say, "I won't eat again. I won't drink again until I do whatever," this wording meant something very specific. They were making an oath, a solemn promise that was taken very seriously. It was like signing a contract.

Well, when Jesus says this, he is saying, "I promise I'm going to bring you to the feast of the king." You know, he often compares God's kingdom to a feast, to a party. And he says here, "I vow to you. You may have tough times. You may be going through really tough times, but he's saying, 'I promise one day you'll be at that party with me in my father's house. You have my word on it. I vow to bring you home.'" I mean, isn't that awesome? And look what we can expect there in the new heaven and the new earth. Revelation says, "I saw no temple in the city." This is the new Jerusalem. This is heaven. "For the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple."

No more need for a temple ever again because Jesus is our temple. Man, I think we Christians still don't get this, don't understand how radical and revolutionary this was because let me ask you to be honest. What is the image you have in your mind when you think of how to have a relationship with God? Honestly, is it something like this, the floor plan of the temple, inner circles within inner circles that you probably aren't quite worthy to enter? And in the middle of it, there's the holy voice, there's the presence of God and sometimes you feel it, but most of the time it's not with you. Is that your mental map, really, of your relationship with God? Jesus says, "That's abolished."

Let your mental map be this, what Jesus Christ finished on the cross. Let me put it this way. What barriers do you see between yourself and God? What's your barrier? What separates you from the holy of holies? Some of you, it's your shame and guilt. I'm not good enough. Or listen, maybe you think, "I'm just not Bible smart enough. All these people around me, they know a lot more about the Bible. I don't know a lot about the Bible. I don't know enough to have like a really good relationship with God." Or maybe past negative experiences with a church have even made church a barrier. Or maybe something has power over you, some addiction or your own pride.

Well listen, Jesus leaps over those barriers and says, "I've abolished them. Now I am with you." In fact, you could summarize it all like this. In Jesus, God is with us perfectly. No more need for a temple because Jesus Christ who lives in you, if you just take that offer, he is now the holy of holies. The presence of God is with you. It's holy ground everywhere you walk with him. It's awesome.

You know, I started this message on those steps that Christ walked on, and I said that Jesus used these to go up to the temple. That's pretty amazing. But in Christ, God also walked all the way down these steps, all the way from the holy of holies, all the way down the temple mount, and all the way across the ocean, and all the way into this room. And in Christ, he blasts through the holy of holies, tears open the veil, opens the gates, pours over the walls, and runs all the way down the steps to get to all the people who were kept out by that system, all of us.

Why? Because God wants a relationship with you, and a building can't love you. That's why God didn't come in a building. He came in a body. Some of you are not sure anyone's ever loved you, not really. Imagine how your life can be altered when you realize Jesus loves you. And he's right here at the bottom step. He's come all the way from there, all the way from heaven to this step right here, right in your pew next to you. And he's extending his hand to you, saying, "This is my body. This is my blood. Take it." And the only question is, will you?

Let's pray together. Would you bow your head with me? Oh, Lord Jesus, thank you so much for being God with us. Thank you that you really are greater. You're greater than the temple. You're greater than the sacrifices. You're greater than the high priest. You're the greatest of all. And Jesus, it's really remarkable to think that the whole Bible is really the story of you and how you came past all those barriers, abolishing any dividing wall that separated us.

And now we just want to rush into your loving arms and remember your sacrifice. Lord, especially if there's somebody here today who has imagined that coming to you means going up through the barriers of the temple. That's been their mental map of what a relationship with you means. Help them to see that you've blasted through all those barriers and flowed down all the steps and you're here now extending your nail scarred hand. And I pray that people would just receive that today, even as we take communion. We pray this in your name. Amen.