I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth will have been bound in heaven, and whatever you release on earth will have been released in heaven. – Matthew 16:19 (NET)
When we read of earth and heaven, especially within the pages of the Gospels, we must stubbornly resist the urge to retreat into an unhelpful, Platonic-form-derived, enlightenment-driven, separation of earth from heaven. Instead, we must ensconce ourselves within the notion that the disciples of Jesus and the community of believers that sprung from their sharing of the testimony of Jesus in the days, weeks, months, and years following His Resurrection, operated from the point of view that the purpose of the Creator God, the God of Israel, was to bring heaven to earth---to cause the overlap of His realm of existence with the realm of existence occupied by the creatures that He had created and empowered to bear His image.
Accordingly then, the place that was said to be occupied by that God, which would be the Temple (the house of God), would be the primary locus of that overlapping activity. With that said, it then greatly behooves us to realize that reference to “heaven and earth,” when made by members of the house of Israel such as Jesus, are generally references to the Temple, both specifically and in general. As an aside, the fact that the words of our Scriptural thrust text, with their talk of earth and heaven, are directed to Peter, helps us to make sense of the fact the letters of the New Testament that are attributed to Peter also make mention of heaven and earth (especially chapter three of first Peter).
Yes, the Temple was the place of the coming together of heaven and earth. Any reference to “heaven and earth,” especially if it is in the context of talk of the Temple, is a reference to the Temple itself. Since we are in Matthew, this talk of heaven, earth, and Temple prompts us to look briefly at Matthew twenty-four. There, we hear Jesus saying, as He answers the question about when the Temple will be cast down with not one stone left upon another (with an allusion to the oft-referenced-by-Jesus-in-Matthew prophecy of Isaiah), “the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of heaven will be shaken” (24:29). Though Jesus’ allusion to Isaiah ends there, Isaiah continued on to eventually write “So I will shake the heavens, and the earth will shake loose from its foundation” (13:13a). Isaiah was referring to Jerusalem and the Temple being overcome by Babylon, using apocalyptic language of heaven and earth that reaches beyond mere symbolism and drama, conveying Jewish opinion concerning the Temple---the place where heaven and earth came together.
The tradition of such thinking concerning the house of God reached all the way back to Jacob, as it is when he is in Bethel (translation: the house of God), that he has the dream in which a ladder reached from earth to heaven, with the angels of God ascending and descending upon said ladder. Yes, the house of God (Bethel) is where and heaven and earth came together, by the instrumentation of this ladder. Not to get too far afield, and though we do not interpret Matthew by John, it is little wonder then, that the Gospel of John, in its portrayal of Jesus that reflected the development of Christian understanding about Jesus and a better grasp, in the late first century in the time period after the fall of the Temple, of Jesus’ sayings about Himself, has Jesus telling Nathanael and the other men that had been called to be His disciples, that they “will see heavens opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man” (1:51b).
Yes, the early church clearly understood that Jesus was the true Temple. He was the house of God. He was the place where heaven and earth came together. By the gifting of His Spirit, His church would carry out His mission as the Temple, becoming the extension of His faithfulness. Naturally, if talk about the church as the Temple of the Holy Spirit is taken seriously (as we can see in the pre-Matthean letters of the Apostle Paul, though Paul would have drawn from the Jesus traditions eventually concretized by Matthew and the other Gospel writers, while also having a hand in the theological shaping of those Jesus-centered narratives), in both a communal sense and in accord with the responsibility of the individuals members that compose the body of Christ, this informs the Christian as to his or her responsibilities in association with a life lived in response to the Gospel claim that Jesus is Lord. The Christian is to be the place where and heaven earth come together---bringing heaven to earth as a singular purpose. The church, as the collection of individual elected ones (Christians), carries out this purpose in community.
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