When Jesus came upon the stage of history, the temple in Jerusalem was not the temple that God had ordered to be built. Rather, it was the temple that had been built under the direction of Cyrus, the king of the Persian empire. It was not the place where the glory of God was reflected into the world, and indeed, Jesus would deride the temple authorities as having turned the temple into a den of robbers, where theft and oppression and injustice took place on a regular basis. He would speak of Himself as the true Temple. In doing so, He would speak of Himself as the place in which the glory of God now resided (according to the belief that the Messiah would be the physical embodiment of Israel’s God), thereby making a physical temple irrelevant and redundant.
If He was the Son of God, and if He did understand that role of Son within the historical tradition that we have attempted to explore, then it seems likely that Jesus would have understood a part of His role to be the rebuilding and restoration of the Temple in which God had originally desired to be the place of His dwelling, that being His once very good creation. Yes, He would be for Israel what Solomon had been intended to be. He would be for the nations what Israel had been intended to be. He would be for the whole of creation what Adam had been intended to be. If the revelation of Jesus as the Son of God was yet another demonstration of God’s love for His world, and if the manifestation of His glory, in Christ, was for the purpose of causing people to believe in Him (to acknowledge and worship Him as Creator) so that eternal life (an entrance into the purpose that God had always intended for those that He had created to bear His image) could be experienced (rather than the continual perishing under the reign of death that had been brought into the world and exacerbated by His sons), then the idea of being “in Christ” if of extreme importance.
Those that are in union with Christ are said to be brought into that union, with such being demonstrated through the confession of Jesus as Lord of all, by the power of the Gospel. This power of the Gospel is transmitted by the Holy Spirit, as a manifestation of the power that raised Jesus up from the dead, and which is still at work in this world, according to the plan and purpose of God. Those that are in union with Christ are said to have been crucified and resurrected with Him, to be kings and priests to the Most High God. Indeed, those that are in union with Christ are said to be sons of God. Those in union with Christ are those that make up His church, and are citizens of the kingdom of God, a renewed people of God (a new creation), charged with reflecting the glory of God into the world. Effectively, it could be said that those that are in union with Christ are called to be Solomon’s, Israel’s, and Adam’s for the world, doing so with the power of the resurrection at their backs, as they speak and live the message of the Gospel, orienting their thoughts and their lives around the fact that Jesus is Lord.
This means that Christians are called to live a life that is set apart, demonstrably different in their engagement with the world. This does not mean that Christians hide away, buried underneath the weight of a fruitless asceticism, withdrawn and distant from the world in a vain and conceited striving for a pseudo-holiness that is nothing more than a self-serving and selfish attempt to shrink back from the awesome responsibilities that attend this glorious union and its weighty demands. Christians, as sons of God, are to live with hands outstretched to the world, in sympathy and compassion, desiring to share its pains and its burdens, doing so through the life-animating and life-giving Gospel that turns hearers into believers and believers into doers. It is through this group of kingdom people, who, through their manifestation of the power of the Gospel as they live the lives of sons, the kingdom of heaven (the power of the age to come which had been demonstrated by the Resurrection of Jesus) breaks into the present age, and God works to reverse the condemnation and cursing that had been brought into this creation and unfortunately extended by His sons that had come before. Yes, God works in and through us to bring restoration to His Temple by being His Temple.
If we understand this rightly, and comprehend that we are sons of God in union with Christ when we confess the Gospel (by the power of the Holy Spirit), then we further understand that it this church of Christ (operating with a living, breathing hope of resurrection and restoration and renewal) that “is the way God loved the world.” Yes, a church, which are those that take part in the kingdom of God that was inaugurated with the Resurrection of Israel’s Messiah, because it is the body of Christ and is the Temple of God, that is tasked to be “His one and only Son” in this world. Why? “So that everyone who believes in Him”---with that believing acknowledgment of the Creator and of His glory and of short-fallings in the light of that glory---“will not perish but have eternal life.” This eternal life, of course, is not an escape from this world, but an exodus from a life and condition of exile, within the hope of a resurrection to come in a renewed and regenerated world that has been set right by its Creator. To that point, history had seen God send His sons into the world, with each one seemingly wreaking more havoc than the one before. However, “God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world should be saved through Him” (3:17).
As sons, we are called to be the embodiment of God’s love for the good world that He had created and in which He desired (and still desires) to dwell. As sons, He sends us out, on a daily basis, under the call of the Lordship of Jesus, to show forth His glory through a compassionate and sensitive love that is aware of the world’s condemnation, to cause heaven to come to earth whenever and wherever the Gospel is preached and lived, so as to bring more sons into His kingdom through a complicit trust in Him and His promises. We are to be ambassadors for the hope of resurrection and restoration, which is the promise of eternal life to be enjoyed and experienced at every moment, as we look forward, with great expectation, to that blessed hope.
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