From Same Storms’s new exhaustive treatise on the Amillennial perspective, Kingdom Come:
First, Jesus is the Temple.
The glory which once shined in the tent/tabernacle/temple of old, veiled in the mysterious cloud, was simply a fore-glow, a mere anticipatory flicker, if you will, of that exceedingly excelling glory now embodied in the incarnate Word, Jesus Christ (cf. Col. 1:19) (beside this sentence in my book, I penciled in all caps, “AMEN”).
God no longer lives in a tent or tabernacle built by human hands, nor will he ever. God’s glorious manifest presence is not to be found in an ornate temple of marble, gold, and precious stones, but rather in Jesus. Jesus is the glory of God in human flesh, the one in whom God has finally and fully pitched his tent.
The point is that the temple of the Old Covenant was a type or foreshadowing of the glory of Christ.
“Divine space is now no longer located in a place but in a person,” says Gary Burge.
It would be an egregious expression of the word imaginable redemptive regression to suggest that God would ever sanction the rebuilding of the temple (p. 18-21)
Second, Jesus fulfills the Feasts.
Simply, yet profoundly, put, Jesus was saying: ”This feast is all about me! The water that flowed from the rock in the wilderness symbolized me! The sacrifice on the altar is about me! The water in the golden pitcher points to me! The promise of refreshing waters of salvation refers to me! The water that I offer is better than that which flowed from the rock, better than that which falls from heaven to nourish your crops, better than that just taken from the pool of Siloam. I am the water that gives eternal life, eternal refreshment, and eternal joy! No longer do you need to go to the temple. No longer do you need to celebrate the feast. Celebrate me! Come and drink me!” (p. 22).
Third, Jesus is our Sabbath.
We Paul says that this Sabbath was a shadow, of which Christ is the substance, he means that the physical rest provided by the Older Testament Sabbath finds its fulfillment in the spiritual rest provided by Jesus. We cease from our labors, not by resting physically one day in seven, but resting spiritually every day and forever in Christ by faith alone. We experience God’s true Sabbath rest, not by taking off from work one day seven, but y placing our faith in the saving work of Jesus. To experience God’s Sabbath rest, therefore, is to cease from those works of righteousness by which we were seeking to be justified. The New Testament fulfillment of the Old Testament Sabbath is not one day in seven of physical rest, but an eternity of spiritual rest through faith in the work of Christ (24).
Fourth, Jesus is the True Vine.
As Gary Burge points out, “the crux for John 15 is that Jesus is changing the place of rootedness for Israel. The commonplace prophetic metaphor (the land as vineyard, the people of Israel as vines) now undergoes a dramatic shift. God’s vineyard, the land of Israel, now has only one vine: Jesus. The people of Israel cannot claim to be planted as vines in the land; they cannot be rooted in the vineyard unless first they are grafted into Jesus.”
God, the vinedresser, “now has one vine growing in his vineyard. And the only means of attachment to the land is through this one vine, Jesus Christ.”
That, my friends, is good stuff, is it not???!!!
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