Your third skill in reading Scripture as Art watching ideas grow and change across the whole Bible. Sometimes this is called tracing themes.
At a big-picture scale, we’ve seen how recovering the Jewish shape of the Hebrew Bible invites us to read the Scriptures as a unified story. At small-picture scale, we’ve seen how following intertextual clues (Easter Eggs and cameos) help us see connections between stories so that we start to perceive a larger story. A third skill that we can use to appreciate how the Scriptures tell a unified story is tracing a theme from beginning to end, Genesis to Revelation. This method pays special attention to how ideas are introduced and then elaborated upon down the line, like watching a time-lapse photo of a seed gradually grow into a mighty tree over the course of time. Themes are not static: themes reveal a story which, like a melody in a symphony, develop and grow into something larger than how they were initially presented. Let’s use the theme of “Temple” as our case study. After you watch me do this, you’ll have an idea of how you can do something similar for yourself with other themes. Now let’s watch the theme of temple grow.
Garden as Temple
There’s a lot of Scriptures we could visit, but we’ll limit ourselves just a few key texts. The temple theme begins with the creation story and the garden of Eden. That might surprise you, but remember it works like a seed that grows over time. For example, Adam is said to “work and take care of the garden” (2:15), the same language used of priests later on (Numbers 3:7–8; 8:26). The art within the temple recalls garden imagery like vines, animals, and fruit, as well as the seven days of creation through use of seven candles (Exodus 25:31–37; 1 Kings 6:18, 29). Cherubim guard the way to the tree of life (3:24), just like there are cherubim in the most holy space (Exodus 25:18–22; 1 Kings 6:23–28). There are many more examples that point to the same basic insight—namely, that the garden is a temple-like sacred space. A temple, then, is fundamentally where the fullness of God’s presence resides. It’s the meeting place between God and humans, heaven and earth.
Tabernacle as Mobile Temple
From this point, the temple theme continues to grow like a tree, or get developed like the melody of a symphony. In Exodus, the climax of the book comes after God instructs Moses how to build a tabernacle, which is a portable tent or a mobile temple. “Then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle” (30:34). The dramatic moment comes when God descends upon the tabernacle, permanently making a home with his people. This tent is the dangerous space where the life of Eden lives on. The tabernacle is where God has chosen to meet with human beings. The tabernacle is where God has chosen to place his heavenly feet upon earthly soil. After Eden, we were not sure such a space was possible. But now God brings Eden back among his people in a powerful yet guarded way.
Dynasty Connected with Temple
Another significant stage of development happens in 2 Samuel 7. This is one of those passages that’s so dense it’s hard to summarize, but I’ll try. Up to this point, God has traveled in a tabernacle, a portable tent. So David resolves to build God a temple. But God says to David, that he won’t build a house (i.e., a temple), instead God will build David a house (i.e., a dynasty).
The Lord declares to you that the Lord himself will establish a house for you: When your days are over and you rest with your ancestors, I will raise up your offspring to succeed you, your own flesh and blood, and I will establish his kingdom. He is the one who will build a house for my Name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be his father, and he will be my son. When he does wrong, I will punish him with a rod wielded by men, with floggings inflicted by human hands. But my love will never be taken away from him, as I took it away from Saul, whom I removed from before you. Your house and your kingdom will endure forever before me; your throne will be established forever. (vv. 11-16)
In this chapter, God essentially adopts David (and his descendants) as his son, saying that the Jerusalem throne will always have a son of David on it. It’s this unexpected reversal: David wants to build God a house, but God says he will build David a house. What’s the relationship between a son of David building a temple and God blessing the son of David with an everlasting throne? Well, in its immediate context, it’s about Solomon building a temple and his kingdom being firmly established. But the eventual destruction of the temple and absence of a son of David on Jerusalem’s throne beg for a deeper fulfillment—a temple that cannot be destroyed, and a king who reigns with an indestructible life.
Jesus’s Body as Temple
The theme of temple gets directly picked up by Jesus in the NT. In John 2, Jesus makes a whip of cords and destroyed the shops of the people selling animals. When religious leaders ask him about it, Jesus responds, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (v. 19). The people who heard him thought he was talking about the building in Jerusalem, but John tells us that Jesus was talking about his body (v. 21). That is to say, Jesus is where God’s Eden-like, temple presence fully manifests itself to us. He is the meeting place between God and humans, between heaven and earth. And as the son of David, he has the right to judge the temple and erect another temple that will last forever. That’s why he could talk about his body being the temple.
Here’s the twist, though: given what the OT says about God purifying Israel, it’s not a surprise that God through Jesus weeds out corruption, even with a whip. Jesus, as God’s agent on earth, did this because the temple had become a corrupt practice (2:16) that excluded the poor and foreigners from (Mark 11:17). To make sense of this, John even quotes David’s psalm, “Zeal for your house [the temple] has consumed me” (2:17), which is connecting David’s passion for the temple with his son Jesus’s passion for the temple. So that’s not a surprise. What is a surprise is that the passion that drove Jesus to use a whip to make God’s presence freely accessible was the same passion that drove him to submit to the whip while he walked to the cross. It’s the same passion. John explicitly connects the passion of Jesus’ actions with his death. In both instances, it was passion for the presence of his Father to be available to all peoples on earth.
Community of the Spirit as Temple
I always get a little teary-eyed thinking about that surprising twist. But the temple theme doesn’t stop with Jesus, it continues growing into the church—communally and individually. In the book of Acts, after the Holy Spirit comes upon the disciples, we read about a tale of two temples. The Jerusalem temple was supposed to be the place that the poor were cared for (Deuteronomy 14-15), but Acts tells us that it was the disciples who kept meeting in homes who cared for the poor (Acts 3-5). Additionally, it was the Jerusalem temple where people were supposed to encounter God’s healing presence, but it is in the new community of the Spirit where healings happen. God’s Spirit is empowering the new community of Jesus followers to fulfill what the Jerusalem temple was always supposed to be.
Our Bodies as Temples
If there is a communal aspect to being a temple of God’s presence, there is also a personal aspect to it. We individually are temples of God’s Spirit, and it has implications for how we use our bodies.
Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body. Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies. (1 Corinthians 6:18-20; cf. vv. 12-20)
Paul has to remind the Corinthians what the body is for. He says bodies are temple spaces, which means they are the places of union. Just like the garden of Eden or the Jerusalem temple were unique places of union between heaven and earth, so our bodies are unique places of union between God and this world. In passing, he points out that there is a kind of insanity to sexual immorality because unlike, for example, stealing (which harms others), when we sin sexually we harm our own person. It harms us because we are united—body and soul—with darkness.
But Paul presses even further by saying that sexual sin does much more than harm ourselves; it tragically contradicts who we are. Paul says that because our sexuality unites us body and soul with another person, to unite ourselves with prostitutes creates an anti-temple. It creates a space of rivalry between God’s Spirit and spiritual darkness. The most poignant part of the passage is that Paul says our bodies are not ours to do with as we please because they were bought with a price. He’s essentially saying, “Your body is the place God unites himself to earth. If you use your body for union with darkness, it’s a failure of vocation. Don’t you know how much it cost God to claim your body as his home? You’re a temple. Act like it. Be who you are.”
New Creation as Temple
Finally, in the book of Revelation, we read, “I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple” (21:22). Two contradictory things are said together as a kind of paradoxical way of saying the same thing. There was no temple; God and the Lamb are its temple. In other words, when God restores all things, there is unhindered access to God and Jesus. When that happens, everything will be like God envisioned that it should be from the beginning. Eden has spread to the entire cosmos.
Payoff of the Temple Theme
With the language of temple, we see the same basic story emerge: an anointed ruler who passes through death into resurrection life so that God’s presence can be freely given to all people beginning at Jerusalem. Isn’t that beautiful? The first time I saw a theme unfolded like this, I was deeply moved. It feels like you’re watching the history of the world, Christ, and your own story unfold before you in a matter of minutes.
Tracing a Theme for Yourself
If you use this methodology of tracing themes, over time, you’ll be able to articulate the same basic storyline in dozens of ways—temple, exodus, Passover, covenant, exile, new creation, and so on. It’s always the same basic personality, just wearing different clothes, as it were. Tracing themes requires a lot of intertextual work. Thankfully, the Scripture itself does it for you. You just have to have someone point out where to look in order to get you started on your lifelong meditation journey. A lot of times, with a good concordance or word search, you can get a good start. Also, sometimes it’s easier to go backward (i.e., trace how the NT quotes the OT). But if you develop the skill of noticing repeated words, eventually you can get to anywhere from anywhere. With time, you can trace themes for yourself.
Closing
I hope that the three tools I just gave you will be of use to you on your spiritual and artistic walk. Seeing the interconnected story of Scripture has given me inspiration as an artist and tools for understanding the world around me. These three skills (the others from previous posts) have made the Scriptures a profound joy. What used to be far away facts of history have suddenly felt relevant to my understanding of Jesus and my place in his story.