Daily Word

"From that time Jesus began to show to His disciples that He must go to Jerusalem, and suffer many

things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised the third day."

Matthew 16:18,21

"Jesus said, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up."  

"He was speaking of the temple of His body."

John 2:19, 21

Both of these important Bible passages speak about two things: the death and resurrection of Jesus and the creation of the Church – and the two are inseparably linked to each other.

We have made the death and resurrection of Jesus deal only with our individual salvation as sinners, but that is a very limited understanding of why Jesus died and rose again. Something incredibly much greater was in view: the establishment of the most powerful force on earth, the Church of Jesus Christ that would shake "the gates of Hades"!

In Matthew 16 Peter receives the decisive revelation of  whoJesus Christ, the Son of Man is. Immediately Jesus gives a revelation intimately connected to that: "I will build my Church" – and instantly goes on to say how it would happen: through His sufferings in death and His triumphant resurrection.

The passage in John 2 first deals with Jesus cleansing the temple in Jerusalem, fulfilling the prophecy in Psalm 69, "Zeal for your house will consume Me" – but it was His zeal for a totally different kind of temple of God that consumed Him on the Cross: "the temple of His body".

His physical body had to be "destroyed" in order for the raising of a spiritual body, that would

manifest Him and perform the"greater works" that He prophesied about in John 14:12.

The Church born on the day of Pentecost was all that the Lord intended the Church to be and shook its contemporary World, but too soon the Church was institutionalised and fossilized.  

Maybe it´s time for a new revelation of what the Church is really intended to be!