Exploring the Temples’ Meaning for Christians in the New Testament with Nick Moore

In this episode of Exploring the Language of Scripture, Daniel Mikkelsen and New Testament scholar Nick Moore (Warden of Cranmer Hall, Durham) delve into the significance of the temple in early Christian thought as presented in the New Testament. Together, they discuss the temple's importance in the ancient world and to early Christians, exploring how passages from Paul, Hebrews, 1 Peter, and John’s gospel transform our understanding of worship, God’s presence, and believers’ identity as God’s temple.

Nick reveals how Greek language insights clarify key terms like "naos" (temple) and "aion" (age), shedding light on how early Christians understood themselves as God’s dwelling place. The conversation also highlights the connection between temple imagery and Jesus' role as high priest, as well as what it means to live as “living stones” today.

For those interested in Nick's book, Open Sanctuary, you can find it here: Open Sanctuary on Amazon.

Disclaimer: I may receive a copy of Nick's book, Open Sanctuary, but I do not receive any financial benefit from it.

Don’t miss the next episode: In the upcoming episode, we’ll be joined by pastor-scholar Tim Murry for an engaging discussion on his perspectives as a pastor and biblical scholar. 

Music Credits: 
Music from #Uppbeat
https://uppbeat.io/t/all-good-folks/aspire

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Podcast Keywords:
biblical languages, New Testament, Old Testament, Christ, bible study,  Relationship with God, learn biblical languages, Biblical Theology, Christianity, Covenants, New covenant, old covenant, language acquisition, Biblical Greek, Biblical Hebrew.

Transcript

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The idea that heaven is a temple is actually quite widespread. find it... in Jesus says in John 4 that time is coming and has now come when you will no longer worship on this mountain or that mountain but actually true worshippers will worship in spirit and truth. The spirit is there, it's fundamental as a way of enabling worship and access to God. At the same time I think place still matters but... Temples were a common feature of everyday life as was sacrifice. as were priestly personnel and the priestly function overlaps with the civic function. So you begin to realise that for a modern, quote unquote, secular, Western person, it's quite hard for us to envisage really how integrated that was into social life. And what that means is that temples are not... You never stop learning a language, you go on learning it. And I think anyone can learn another language. And I think British people in particular are often bad at it, you know, we think we can't do it, but actually anyone can, you learnt your mother tongue before you learnt almost anything else. It's like learning to play an instrument... Where is that interest in temple or temples sort of originated? I was... Hey there and welcome back to another episode of Exploring the Language of Scripture. My name is Daniel Mikkelsen and I'm your host. And if you don't know who I am, I'm the founder of NT Greek Tutoring, an online Greek tutoring program that also hosts this podcast. Apart from that, I'm a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh in New Testament and Christian Origins. I also study New Testament in Cambridge, as well as theology at the University of Copenhagen at Fjellhaug International University College. And this podcast exists to make gems accessible from biblical studies to everyday Christians, as well as showing how the language, the biblical languages in particular opens up scripture. And today I'm joined by Nicolas Moore, or just Nick Moore, who has a DPhil in New Testament from University of Oxford, where he worked on Hebrews with Markus Bockmuehl And he is now... the Warden of Cranmer Hall in Durham. You've several books on Hebrews, on Temple, and your most recent book, which has just been published, is called Open Sanctuary. We might talk a little bit more about what that book is about. Is there anything else you want to add about yourself? Yeah, that's all right. I'm a child of God. I'm married to Becca we have a couple of children and I am also ordained in the Church of England and was in ministry before I started at Cranmer Hall. Very good. And then let's just dive into the first question. So how did you get into learning Greek or the Biblical languages in particular? So my background is actually as a linguist. I did a little bit of German, Latin, Spanish at school, but my real love was French. and I ended up studying French at university and I lived in Paris for a year as part of that and became fluent in French and French literature and so forth. So that was my first love. I then, after discerning a call to ministry, ended up at theological college and there I just embraced the chance to learn more languages with both hands. So Hebrew a bit, but you know, dived into learning Greek. and have been learning it ever since. You never stop learning a language, you go on learning it. And I think my, you know, anyone can learn another language. And I think British people in particular are often bad at, you know, we think we can't do it, but actually anyone can. You learnt your mother tongue before you learnt almost anything else, you know, simply by being there and so forth. But a time like... being in a theological college or a university is a particularly privileged time in which you might have particularly the resources and encouragement, the impetus, as well as the space and time and structure to be able to learn it well. So if you ever have that opportunity, I'd encourage you to take it with both hands. Yeah. And that's also what we in NT Greek Tutoring try to help people who doesn't have that opportunity to give them that structure and the opportunity because, as I said, maybe a bit of a hobby horse of mine now is that that learning a language is not a subject, it's a skill. It's like learning to play an instrument, or playing football or learning that. It's not something that you do in order to attain other things, it's a skill. So if you want to play music, you learn how to play an instrument as well as you learn a language in order to acquire knowledge in that language. because Greek is what the New Testament is written in, it was written in Greek originally, then... learning that skill enables us to dive deeper into that. So yeah, so I really appreciate that. And how are you experiencing Greek in a way of opening up the Word of God? Yeah, well I think Greek, knowing the Greek does a number of things. One is that it actually kind of clarifies things or sometimes excludes possibilities. So let me give you an example from 2 Timothy 4.10 where it talks about Demas has abandoned Paul because he loved the world. And I remember being in a Bible study where someone said, well, maybe that's a good thing. know, God loved the world. He loved it so much in John's Gospel we read. So is it the case that Demas actually has such a love for the world that he's gone off and is doing other missionary work? elsewhere from Paul. Interesting idea, go and look at the Greek, you'll see that... for John's Gospel the world is κόσμος (cosmos), it's the world in rebellion, resistance to God that God nevertheless loves. In 2 Timothy 4.10 it's the αἰών (aion) and it's the νῦν (nun) αἰών (aion), so it's the present age and so we're talking about the two ages and the point is that Demas loves this age and he doesn't love the age to come. So in that sense it clarifies very clearly for you, it settles that question. This is not Demas imitating God, it is Demas working in opposition to the purposes of God because he loves the present age too much that he can't see or work for or love the age that has come that has broken in in the ministry of Christ. So in some ways, know, Greek will just give you that kind of clarification as you can go back and see what the original language is. But much more broadly, I think Greek opens up questions and possibilities. So actually, as people, as I learned Greek, but as my students now learn Greek, what I hope is that as they're sitting in church or they're doing some Bible study or preparing a sermon or whatever it is, they start to think, I wonder what the Greek is. I wonder what's behind this. Because the Greek then enables you to ask better questions of the text and to see what the possibilities is. And sometimes, that resolves issues like the example I've just given. Sometimes it doesn't or it opens up new ambiguities or possibilities. But all of that is about helping us to better inhabit the text, to better understand it, to work with it in a more faithful way. Yeah, that's helpful. Do we have another example where you felt like that opened up or gave clarity or you got some new questions? Yes, thank you. I mean, another example would be from Hebrews, which I did my doctoral work on, and Hebrews 4, 12 and 13, which says, you know, the word of God is living and active, it's sharper than a two-edged sword, and no creature is hidden before God's sight, but exposed to the one to whom we must give an account. It's a well-known verse, often quoted, or paravverses. But what's interesting, when you look at the Greek, you'll see that the word of God at the beginning and the account at the end, are both λόγος (logos). They're both this sort of simple word for word. And what that gives you is a number of things. It partly gives you a literary inclusion. So you can see that these two verses do form a unit because they start with λόγος (logos) and they end with λόγος (logos). So it's partly a literary thing that's helping you to see, yes, this is a sort of a little item. mean, it forms a conclusion to the section that's gone before, but it's a kind of item on its own. But what it also gives you is something of a... sense of the theological reality that the Word of God comes to us first and it demands from us a response. So we receive a word from God and in response we must give a word which I guess in other places will be a word of praise or confession. In this case it's a word of giving an account to God. The Word of God comes and lays bare the reality of our being and we give an account of ourselves back to God. It's a little example, it's a simple example, but it's something that shows you both a kind of literary and a theological unlocking that we get from the Greek. And what do you mean by account in this case? Yeah, well, mean, that's part of the question. So this is where knowledge of the Greek is both clarifying something and showing up an ambiguity in a sense. I guess the account here is a sense of the one to whom we are accountable. So we we do have to give an account to God of our lives and the way we lived it and our intentions and so forth. And the Word of God is laying that bare to us, but we also bear responsibility for it. So there's a kind of divine and human participation. Yeah. So in a way you're saying that the Word of God function in the sort of it makes us react to it and you cannot stay neutral to the Word of God. Yes. Yes, that's right. But also it means that we're not purely passive actors in that, because it's not just the Word of God comes and like the sword, it's kind of the images perhaps of wrestling and a sort of short two-headed bladed dagger, and that the Word of God kind of almost gets us in its grasp and sort of lays us bare in that kind of way. And that's quite a stark image. But it's not just that we're passively kind of held by this word, but actually we ourselves have some agency in giving an account of ourselves to God. Yeah, so both wielding and being subdued by the sword. Yeah. like that. both... It's very beautiful picture in many ways. It shows how the world of has changed me and now I'll go and change other people. Or it will change other people through me. Obviously it's God that's changing people, not us. But we become like God's... using us as participants for his word, for his ministry of saving the world. Thank you very much for that wonderful example. So, as already mentioned, you have a very keen interest in temples, especially in the New Testament. Where has that interest in temple or temples originated? So it originated really with my doctoral work on Hebrews, which talks about sacrifice and sort of cultic imagery quite extensively. And I think I was interested in that partly because today this is a very strange thing for us and it feels quite alien. And I was just attracted to something that I didn't know or understand. I didn't chime with my experience. So I found it intriguing. I got into it there. And I think the interesting thing about temples is precisely that difference between the ancient world and the modern world. That in the ancient world... temples were everywhere, with the exception of the Jewish people, for whom there was only one temple in Jerusalem. you know, temples were a common feature of everyday life, as was sacrifice, as were priestly personnel, and the priestly function overlaps with the civic function. So if you read Cicero, you'll see that in Rome, people are taking on political office and... and sort of sacrificial priestly offices and they're the same thing sometimes, you know. So you begin to realise that for a modern, quote unquote, secular Western person, it's quite hard for us to sort of envisage really how integrated that was into social life. And what that means is that temples are not... only a religious phenomenon, they're also political and economic and social phenomena. I mean, in Jerusalem, the expanded temple complex under Herod is the obvious place to come and meet and discuss. And we see that taking place all the time, but it's also where you transact business. It's also where records of debts are held. So it's just that you see how fundamental this was to ancient life. And so that's been part of the fascination for me. Yeah. And that's also why Jesus goes there to talk to the people. He gets angry with people because they are... doing things that they shouldn't do in the house of God. But there's also, I suppose it's, how to put it, it's maybe the way that the temple was so integrated in life also illustrates why when Christians didn't want to go to temple as well, I was thinking about that as well. that then they were ostracized in society because of it. And that's certainly the case in the early church. So the fascinating thing and hard for us to understand at first is that in the Roman Empire, Christians are called atheists. And you think, well, hang on, how can they be atheists? They believe in God. But the reality is because they stopped participating in the civic sacrifices, they're taken to be traitors to the wider culture and society. And you read this in the second century apologists, if anything goes wrong, then they target the Christians. It must be because the Christians aren't participating in the sacrifices. That's why this disaster has happened. Yeah, which was very common practice and widely across the empire. Yeah, so I've been working a little bit on this δεισιδαιμονία (deisidaimonia) which is the word that sometimes translates as superstition or fear of God. And it's interesting that fear of God is the basic meaning of the word. And then these philosophers, we might get a little bit sidetracked with just short point. That this idea of superstition is actually a critique of traditional religion, really. Wanting to, what is the best way to say, basically to transform it, make it better or more modernized, in a sense. And that's where... So in reality, what these people, are criticizing is actually what people did. Yes, absolutely. But to stay on topic, we might want to... So you've written a book on this topic, which has just been released 26th of September, called The Open Sanctuary Access to God and the Heavenly Temple in the New Testament. There'll be a link in description to this book. if you are more interested after the talk. But then, why did you write this book? So this has been a project for the past four years or so. It came from the interest in Hebrews, which talks about a heavenly tabernacle, and from there I've gone on to explore this in other texts. The idea that heaven is a temple is actually quite widespread. You find it in ancient Near Eastern creation epics. You find it in various places in the Old Testament. you find it quite extensively in some of the Second Temple Jewish literature. And you also find it in the New Testament, but it's often been neglected... a theme within New Testament biblical scholarship. And so in a sense, this book is an attempt to correct that. I think it's the first sort of full length study of the heavenly temple in the New Testament. And I'm showing that it's not just Hebrews where it's very clearly there, heavenly tabernacle. It's not just Revelation where again, you have quite clear language of a temple in heaven. It's also there in the Gospels in different ways, in Acts, in Ephesians. So it's actually quite an important idea across the whole of the New Testament. and it was very important to people in the ancient world, as we've already discussed. So that makes sense. So how are the Temple of Jerusalem understood by early Christians? Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. And the picture is mixed in a sense. So Jesus predicts the destruction of the temple, okay, in his ministry. That seems absolutely clear. He does that. And it's one of the critical factors in his trial and his death. Okay, he is executed in large part because of the temple clearing action, which I would read as a prophetic enactment of the forthcoming destruction. But I think that for Jesus, this is a kind of prophecy or a prediction. He's not saying, I'm going to destroy the temple. And that's the false testimony at his trial, is that Jesus said he was going to destroy it. But I don't think that's true. And think that's why that testimony is false. So you have that whole strand of a critique of something of the kind of idolatry of the temple when you forget what God is really about or where God really is or something like that, or you feel like you've got some kind of control over or purchase on him or the corruption of it in terms of it's not being run in the way it should be. That's plenty of other Jews in the first century saying that Qumran but others as well. So you've got that strand, but you've also got this positive sort of aspect on the Jerusalem temple. Take Luke, he's the one writer in the New Testament who's possibly a Gentile. But he has a really strong interest in the temple and he really has taken time to get to know temple, you know, how it functioned and so forth. And as you read Luke and Acts, you see that people meet in the temple, as we've already described, Paul sacrifices in the temple. where he is later on in Acts, Acts 21, I think, he actually undertakes a vow and pays for sacrifices of others. And there's a sense in which actually the simplistic picture in which the moment Jesus had died and risen, Christians thought, we withdraw from the temple, is actually wrong. know, the ascension in Luke, they go out, the end of Luke 24, Jesus is taken up into heaven. And what do they do next? Well, they go back to the temple and they meet and they pray, because it's the obvious place to go. And then we still find them in Acts 3, going up to the temple at the hour of prayer. So the sense in which there is a much more nuanced or complex picture of how Christians, both in the time of Jesus and in the sort of early days of the church, engaged with the Jerusalem temple. And we see all of that come through across the New Testament. Interesting. Sorry to interrupt the episode, but if you're enjoying the content, please consider subscribing and leaving a like. It really helps the algorithm and helps the podcast grow. Thank you for your support and now back to the episode. And exactly considering that idea of temple in the ancient world and its place in worship and access to God, maybe seeing the temple as a vexing point to meeting the divine. What does it change that Paul, on a few occasions, refers to believers in the plural, which sometimes does not actually come across in the translations in English, because of... and then says that they are the temple in singular of God. Yes. Yeah, thank you. So this is another way in which the Jerusalem temple has massive influence for the early Christians in the New Testament, is that the language is picked up and is used in all kinds of ways. Paul talks about believers as the temple of God in the Corinthian correspondence. So in 1 Corinthians 3, you collectively are a temple and there he's emphasizing the unity of the church. There is one temple and so there should be one church over against the factions that are in evidence. In 1 Corinthians 6 it could be distributive, so could be the body of each one of you is a temple, but as you say, generally speaking the pronouns are plural, you all, yous, and then the temple is singular, now a single temple. So yeah, I mean we can do that in English as well, can't we? know, lift up your hearts, but also... your heart is set on. You could say that both of those to a plural group, could use the plural or singular of heart, hearts there. So it's partly just the flexibility of language. But yes, possibly there it's more your body is a temple. And then the point is about purity. For Paul that is, you know, particularly sexual purity in 1 Corinthians 6. It's striking that that is, you your body is a temple. It's something that has this whole kind of free-floating secular life in our contemporary society that would be associated with the kind of January detox or the sort of you know, very healthy lifestyle is your body is the temple but not of the Holy Spirit as Paul would have it. But that's just quite an interesting thing that I picked up. And then in 2 Corinthians 6, again just very briefly Paul makes that connection there I think it's about the distinctiveness of the Church as the body of Christ. But in every case what Paul's saying is If you as the church, as Christians, are the place where God's Spirit dwells, that means you are a temple or you are like a temple. And he's just drawing out several different implications of that. Yeah. But, and that might be a little bit complex, like if you're the first time you've been thinking about temples. So, how to, someone who has not thought very much about temples or read much about... temple practices in the ancient world. how should they think about this when reading Paul, for example? Yeah, so Paul uses that word ναός (naos) and that works both for the Jerusalem temple and for Greco-Roman pagan temples. It's the same word in Greek is applied to them. And there's a sense in which for this kind of gentile background audience in Corinth, The language works, the ideas work. To what extent they've been fully enculturated into the Jewish scriptures and the Christian faith, I don't know. Enough for it to make sense that way, but also probably still make sense from that pagan background. So I think the basic ideas of purity and holiness, of separation and distinctiveness, of perhaps unity or singularity. Those are relatively easy to get your head around. But yeah, the more you can get into what we know about the temple in the Old Testament, the way you spot it in the New, it also doesn't take a lot to go and find the temple elsewhere. Robert Haywood wrote a book called The Jewish Temple, a non-biblical source book, and he just collects a number of mostly second temple period texts about the Jewish temple. in a really helpful reader. you could go, if you wanted to explore more, you could go and read that. Or Ramsay MacMullen's book on paganism and Christianity. also explained some of these practices. So those two books, if people are interested in more detailed study of the pagan-like view on this. Shifting from Paul into 1 Peter. So Peter calls the believers living stones and how does that fit with the idea of a temple and how is temple understood in scripture of and the world of scripture. So 1 Peter 2 is one of those extraordinary passages which I think is probably the richest in terms of the way it works with temple imagery because 1 Peter 2 brings all of these different images and possible uses of the temple idea together. We have Christ as the cornerstone. We have believers as living stones built onto or into Christ. We have the royal priesthood. Interestingly, because that's been a passage that's been important for this doctrine of the priesthood of all believers in Protestantism. you know, absolutely, I sort go with that. But it's interesting that the Greek in 1 Peter 2 is word for word, it's the Greek from Exodus. Okay, so the Greek translation of the Old Testament in Exodus talks about the whole of the people of Israel as a royal priesthood. And so he's just picking that up and saying, so in that sense, you can't read quite such a radical disjunction between Old Covenant and New Covenant just from the language of Peter as much as people have tried. so believers are living stones, part of the temple, we're a royal priesthood, so we're priests, but we're also offering sacrifices. So all three of the elements of a sacrificial system, the holy place, the temple, the holy people of the priests and the holy processes of the sacrifices are all there in 1 Peter 2, which makes it such a beautiful passage. And why do you think he says that we are the living stones? Maybe in comparison to Paul, but also just in the text itself. So why does he say we're living stones? Why are we the building? Yeah, he's drawing out more in more detail what Paul just says as a collective, you you are the temple of God. Well, if you're going to break that down, what does it mean? Well, maybe it means you're a stone in the temple. And that's an idea we can then begin to work with because there are many stones, but they're all cemented together or whatever ancient building techniques are being used. So that's that's an obvious step to take. I think it's a little bit like Paul in Romans 12 talks about present yourselves as living sacrifices. So he's saying, normally speaking, a sacrifice, an animal sacrifice is killed, the blood is extracted, the blood is then manipulated in the ritual process. But he's saying, think of yourselves as living sacrifices. You've still got your blood, your life essence within you, but you present yourselves as wholly devoted to God. Peter's perhaps doing something similar. You're a living stone. You are a part of the temple, a constituent part. but a living, growing, one. yeah, that's helpful. It's helpful in the I think on several levels that also in the contrast, also with the Holy Spirit living in the believer whereas as I understand it, and you might want to correct me if that's not the case, but as I understand it that because the believers has now been infused with the Spirit, gotten the Spirit of... God by becoming Christians, then they become temples. And in that sense, the vexing point of meeting the God is no longer a place you have to go, which is quite a radical idea within that society because everybody needed to go. So just to give an example, that you needed to go to the shrine in order to... So pagans might go to this particular shrine that they thought had particular healing abilities, and they will go there and they will maybe sleep there overnight because they thought that that would help them, because then they will be closer to the god than if they were staying at home. But it seems like the New Testament is saying that things are actually different with God. Yeah, and that seems to be the thrust of what Jesus says in John 4, that you know, The time is coming and has now come when you will no longer worship on this mountain or that mountain, but actually true worshipers will worship in spirit and truth. the spirit is there, it is fundamental as the way of enabling worship and access to God. At the same time, I think place still matters, but... yeah, how you develop that perhaps becomes slightly different. Yeah. What do you mean by place still matters? Well, so my work on the heavenly temple is partly about saying, you know, the notion of heaven as a temple is talking about a real place that is part of this created order, that is where the presence of God is particularly concentrated and to which we can't normally go but Jesus has gone and we hope to go. So there is a sense in which heaven models for us what the universe, what reality is like. So in sense maybe a past, present and future are... presence with God through his spirit and then that is just having his spirit now is a down payment to use a word that's used for a future reality. Yeah, I mean, certainly a future reality. This is an eschatological reality. We see that very clearly at the end of Revelation. At the same time, I think a present reality and we can make sense of that in spatial terms that actually the spirit who lives in us is the one who gives us access to the heavenly temple, in his dwelling place. And so that might be something, I think you can make sense of Pentecost in that way. Greg Beale has a couple of articles on the descent of the spirit at Pentecost as a kind of divine presence coming from heaven, as it did into the temple, coming into the church and enabling access to the Father. Yeah, fascinating. And now we're going to... your doctoral book, if we can put it that way. So in Hebrews, we probably have the strongest imagery of temple as you already touched on and the link to salvation and the work of Jesus Christ. What changed this Jesus role as a high priest and the sacrifice he makes to our conception of the temple in relationship to God? Hebrews is hugely important within the canon. because it gives us the only explicit case of Jesus being the high priest. And we often focus on that. So he is a priest in the order of Melchizedek rather than in the order of Levi, but he's still a priest. He's a real priest. He's a high priest. He's the high priest. And in his priesthood, he has indestructible life. He is sinless. And so he therefore doesn't have the shortcomings of human priests. We also, of course, have a very clear sense of Jesus as this perfect day of atonement sacrifice. That's another slightly different perspective from most of the New Testament, which wants to talk about Jesus as the Passover lamb. In Hebrews, it's the day of atonement sacrifice. This is the one day when the Priest enters the Most Holy Place and makes this offering, which atones for the sins of the people. So we have Jesus as a perfect High Priest and as a once-for-all, perpetually effective sacrifice for sins and Hebrews says there is no longer a sin offering now that this has been been offered. What I think is then missed is that so Jesus transforms priesthood, he transforms sacrifice, he also I think transforms temple or tabernacle, heavenly tabernacle as is in Hebrew's language, because he brings about a kind of structural change whereby the veil, which is mentioned a couple of times, it's also mentioned in the Synoptic crucifixion accounts, in the synoptics it's torn. In Hebrews, I think the veil is effectively parted or drawn aside, and Jesus has created this opening for us into the tabernacle, which of course was not possible under the Old Covenant, except for the High Priest, except on that one day, only with the Yom Kippur sacrifice. So I think that for me is the really significant thing, the sense of openness. And that's partly the title of the book is the open sanctuary because Hebrews certainly also Revelation, also the Synoptics, I think are emphasizing that sense of access and openness in the temple, which the temple originally had, of course, but under restricted circumstances and conditions, whereas now there's a definitive openness. And that's due to like God's holiness, uniqueness and... and we as sinners not being able to go into his presence without dying. As he says to Moses, you cannot see my face. But then maybe he actually does. may be reference to Jesus or a foregripping of what is to come in the new covenant. Any other sort of significant things we could draw out from Hebrews in this regard? I think one interesting feature of Hebrews is the way in which the Old Covenant sacrifices are evidently typological for Jesus' sacrifice, but I also think they have significance for the life of the Church. And the way that that works is that there's this rhythm, this Greek term, διαπαντός(diapantos), which you could translate constantly or continuously. But if you look at the Greek Old Testament, it's usually used in a sacrificial cultic context, it's usually used to mean regularly, i.e. twice daily, it's the morning and evening sacrifice. OK, what in Hebrew is called the תָּמִיד (tamid) in Greek is the διαπαντός (diapantos), it's the regular sacrifice. And so when you reach the end of in Hebrews 13, it talks about, us therefore, through Christ, offer a sacrifice of praise. Let us offer it, διαπαντός (diapnatos) let's offer it regularly. Now, in one sense, that's very convenient for me as an Anglican in a church which has a twice daily office of morning prayer and evening prayer, but there's a sense in which this is very long heritage through the whole history of the church and back into Judaism, diaspora Judaism, of you try to... pray twice a day because you're keeping rhythm with the structure of the universe. You pray at sun up, you pray at sun down. It's that kind of idea, just as the angels are also praying at those times. And this sense that we keep a rhythm of prayer. And in Acts, that's exactly what Cornelius is doing in Acts 10. He's praying at the time of the evening sacrifice and an angel shows up. And I just think I encourage people, if we're going to pray regularly. and make a discipline of that, actually very often God will show up. Yeah, amen to that. having your, maybe starting the day with the prayer and ending the day with the prayer, which is also a good way of thinking that my life is a location for God. That whatever I do, I do it to glorify God. And that's what we created to be. So as we draw to a close, we'll probably talk a lot more about this very interesting topic. As a tradition on this podcast, we also want to see what kind of application for the everyday life of a Christian who listens to or sees this podcast. What application do you think or do you say that a Christian can take from a chat about temples today? Yeah. I think so the problem of sin and of impurity is a problem in many ways of alienation and of separation from God. The temple speaks really eloquently of God's irrepressible desire to... dwell with his people and to make it possible for his people to dwell with him, to overcome that barrier of sin and to provide a means. for people to come into relationship with him and to continue in relationship with him. And I think a lot of what we see said about Jesus has also already been said in some way through the means of the temple. And that's why John in his prologue picks this up and says, word became flesh and dwelt among us, tabernacled among us. It's the tent tabernacle word as a verb that he's using there. So... Yeah, so a lot of what we see in Jesus we've already seen in the temple, it prepares the way for that. And therefore I think I'd encourage people to read about the temple, to see it as a way of understanding this desire of God to be with us. And you can do that, you know, Hebrews, Revelation, great places to go, look for it elsewhere in the New Testament, go and read the second half of Exodus, go and read Leviticus, you know, get into this and understand it, all as part of this wider picture of God's desire to get him back. being with people as he was before the fall and will be. Wanting to reconcile with his enemies as Paul puts it. exactly. Yeah, sorry for being Pauline Scholar. Well thank you very much for that and I think that's a very beautiful place to end that God wants to be with us despite we didn't actually want to be with him. Thank you really much for joining me the podcast and see you out there. If you are more interested in reading Nick's book, the link will be in the description. Otherwise, I'll see you in the next one. But before you go, if you enjoyed this episode and want to keep it ad- free please consider joining our supporter program. It helps us grow, improve our content, and bring more guests on. But it also gives you great benefits in return. Check it out in the link the description below. Thank you, have a great day, and I'll see you in the next one