Mark 13

When heaven and earth are connected, the whole place is a temple. Since the fall of mankind in Adam there has been a tremendous breach God and man, and between heaven and earth. This is what Christ came to repair. When He returns in glory, heaven and earth will be together again. Until that time, the Lord has appointed the worship of the church itself, in Christ, as His special "place" where He is to be worshiped.

This was not always the case. When God gave the Law to Moses, He appointed that Israel would build a Tabernacle, and within that Tabernacle there was a special place of His presence. Later in the Old Covenant period, the Lord authorized the building of a tabernacle-like building called the temple on Mount Zion in Jerusalem. The latest version of that structure was destroyed in AD 70 by the Romans. With the destruction of the temple, it was no longer possible to do Judaism in the way that God commanded in the Old Testament. It was this destruction of the temple that Jesus spoke about to His disciples before He died on the cross.

The breach between heaven and earth could never have been fixed through the temple in Jerusalem. The whole of the ceremonial law in Israel was given by God in preparation for the coming of His Son, who would build a new temple of worshiping people in Him throughout the world. The temple system in Jerusalem ultimately had to come to an end in order to make clear the fact that God would now dwell by His Spirit with His worshipping people. The way of life would not be through the shadow of ceremonies, but through the reality of the presence of the Holy Spirit.

The disciples may not have understood this. They did seem to understand that the temple would soon be gone, but they may have expected that this would mean the end of this age and the immediate resurrection of the dead. Jesus speaks here of what would have to be a long period of deceptive false Messiahs, political upheaval, natural disasters, and religious persecution of those who have come to believe in the good news of Christ's saving work for us. All of these things would take place during this currant period that we call the gospel age, and would not be signs of the immediate return of Christ.

The times of a more imminent transition would be connected to something called here "the abomination of desolation." When God is rejected by those who claim to serve Him, and the enemy of God demands and receives worship from those who claim to worship the Lord, this is a horrible abomination in God's eyes, an abomination that can only bring desolation in His temple.

The place of God's presence has always been a dangerous place for sinners. This danger is critical when those who are called by God's Name serve His adversary in the midst of their worship. Whether this was the defiling of the temple prior to the days of Christ, or the persecution of the church by the Jews in the decades after the resurrection of Jesus, or even the final perversion of the church at a great falling away from Christ and the faith prior to our Lord's return, all of these things are rightly seen as defiling abominations, and they all bring desolation. The first of these happened long before Christ was born in Bethlehem. The second took place in AD 70, and the final one is yet to come. Through these times of cataclysmic judgment, the Lord knows how to help His people, and to cut short the duration of the desolation, that we who would be alive during such a moment might be faithful to the end.

The final desolation will not be missed by anyone, so there is no need to believe someone who suggests that such a thing has secretly come upon us. The coming of Christ will be unmistakable. It will involve cataclysmic signs and the arrival of a heavenly host as one might anticipate from an event that would permanently reunite heaven and earth again. The only signs that we might expect in immediate preparation for that combination of desolation and salvation connected with our Lord's return will be the existence of a world-wide abomination in the church, where a figure that is against the real Christ and against what could rightly be called faith and obedience, is accepted in God's church, and even worshipped.

The gospel generation (or better, "age") will not pass away until all of these things happen. Early on in the gospel age, the temple was destroyed. Throughout the centuries of the church, nations have come and gone, there have been many natural disasters, and the faithful have been persecuted over and over again. There have even been remarkably bad periods of apostasy that could rightly be termed an abomination. Yet the end has not yet come. We are not told when it will come. We are told that the Father knows when all these things will take place, and that should be enough for us.

We have a pretty good idea that we will not live forever in our current mortal condition. Each of us has to deal with the fact that our days will come to an end. Until that time, we are to be serving the One who gave His blood for sinners. He knows how to roll up this gospel age in the renewing fullness of the coming resurrection. Until that time, we should be alert and awake, for there is much for us to do. Like the disciples in any era, we feel the weakness of our flesh, but we also know that the Lord who loves us, and died to repair the divide between heaven and earth, will not secretly steal away without us. We will be a part of the blessings of the resurrection age in Christ. We will be there in the heaven and earth temple of the Lord, for the whole place will be a new temple in Jesus Christ.