From Paradise Lost to Paradise Restored

The House of the Lord Unfiltered communion with Jesus is what makes our future the paradise that it will be. There is a theme expressing this fellowship, a whole-Bible theme running from Eden in the first two chapters of the Bible to the New Jerusalem in the final two chapters of the Bible. That theme is the house of the Lord: in other words, the temple. A temple is a place where humans meet with God. Even more specifically than that, it is where impure humanity meets with pure divinity. It is where the divine and the human, otherwise alienated from one another, meet; where the sacred and the profane intersect once more. All of humanity knows itself to somehow be outside. A temple is where, briefly, we can be brought back in. Temple Buildings What was Eden? A garden, yes. But more deeply, the first temple. It didn’t have walls; but it was a place where the divine and the human met, where the immortal and the mortal intersected. God and man enjoyed unbroken fellowship. Indeed, God put Adam in the garden and told him to “work it and keep it”—innocuous-sounding En­glish verbs, but in fact the very two verbs with which the priest was instructed to care for the tabernacle, working it an...