In John 2:22… (which always makes me imagine John in two of his very pink and frilly tutus 😉 Jesus posted a facebook brag which brought a few negative comments from his friends.
Here’s Jesus’s original post:
Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.
And here’s the first comment on his post from the Jews:
These temple building blocks weren’t little Lego pieces. Just one of the stones was more than twice as tall as Jesus and much, much wider and thicker. If one person tried to do it on their own … it might take them that long just to shift one of the gigantic stones. Because you’d have to hire an architect and a builder and at least a dozen different tradies and…. everyone knows it’s impossible to build a whole temple in three days!
It’s ridiculous, right? How can any one young person do something in three days that took vast teams of thousands of the King’s servants more than his lifetime to build? It would have seemed at best disrespectful to the temple builders, probably complete blasphemy and definitely impossible!
BUT …. it wasn’t impossible.
21 But He was speaking of the temple of His body.
Jesus had changed the game. He wasn’t talking about old school external bricks and mortar. He was talking about total disruption – like wearable tech – a personal temple of the Holy Spirit. He was talking about mobile, personal, virtual, invisible, voice-activated technology. He was talking about always on connection technology that was beyond our intelligence, infinitely customisable and completely scalable.
When you’ve untethered your outcomes from the physical and plugged in to virtual, you don’t need a whole team of professionals who know how to build the old … you can build the new on your own. You don’t need ANY budget. And you can do things at the speed of … well, let’s just say you save a LOT of time – about 45 years, 362 days worth of saved time… for person one. And ALL of their time, for each person after that.
The thing is that no-one had any clue what Jesus meant at the time or how he was going to do it, it was beyond what they could ask, think or even imagine …. until after he’d done it.
22 Therefore, when He had risen from the dead, His disciples remembered that He had said this to them;[c] and they believed the Scripture and the word which Jesus had said.
Some things only make sense when you look back on them. I’m not talking about the kind of looking back with regret that Lot’s wife did, or the looking back with longing and loss that the children of Israel did in the wilderness, or the lazy looking back after you’ve started ploughing that Jesus criticised. I’m talking about the kind of looking back that comes after you’ve tried looking forward.
Imagine if you were Noah and you’d never seen rain, and your whole community thought you were an idiot, but you built an innovative technology that didn’t solve any existing problem at all …. until the world changed and your technology was the one thing that lifted up righteous people more and more the worst things got in the world.
I’m especially talking about the kind of looking back that happens when something precious, almost sacred, has been destroyed, and you find it painful if not almost impossible to look forward. Like the night my ex-husband said he wanted a divorce but God told my broken heart and shattered dreams that divorce wasn’t going to alter any of His promises to me.
I’m talking about when you’re focused on the future and you’re trying to work out how what God has said will happen is going to happen. I’m talking about achieving a vision on your own when you’re pretty sure you actually need the king to lend you thousands of highly-skilled helpers. I’m talking about when you’re trying to co-operate with God’s pace of doing things in three days when you’re pretty sure it’s surely going to need at least 46 years.
Millenials won’t understand this, because these days you have GPS, Navman, Google Maps, Siri etc so you don’t have to plot out a course to your destination. You just have to follow the next instruction. And even if you miss the next turn, you just follow the new route with the next instruction.
But back in the old days, you practically had to have a prophetic gift. You’d get a map book out and you had to FIRST identify where you wanted to end up.
You had to know the end from the beginning.
Then you could plot the path back to where you were before you ever hit the accelerator.
Sometimes following Jesus is a bit like that. The path only makes sense once you know the end and you look back to remember the beginning.
I believe Jesus wanted His temple to no longer be only a place that people had to come to, but also be a place that had home delivery – to go where the people already were. Just like He didn’t stay in heaven, but mobilised Himself and came to earth. Jesus wanted His Church…social.
And I believe Jesus wants to materially change His Church again.
I believe God wants the individuals in His Church to jump on the accelerator and achieve things in days, that used to take decades – things that will so radically change the way the church looks and feels that we will look back and can’t imagine the old school way we do it now.
Get used to looking back prophetically. Get used to seeing the end from the beginning. See yourself achieving everything God has said and doing it quicker and easier than you ever thought possible.
We also might have to get used to not having a clue what He is talking about right now, but if we’ll just follow the next instruction anyway, we might just end up at a destination that frees us from a lot of wasted time and turn our decades of hard work into days of supernatural accelerated results.
Don’t believe me? That’s okay for now. But feel free to look back on this post after it happens and say “Ohhhh THAT’s what she meant!” I’ll just be here meditating on John’s pink frilly two tutus 😉
Shaz Jones 