Why is there no temple in the New Jerusalem?

Question 10124.

There is no temple in the New Jerusalem because the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb are its temple, and once you grasp what a temple was for, that sentence stops being a puzzle and becomes the point of the whole Bible. John gives us the reason in the same breath as the observation.

For a Jewish reader this would have been the most startling detail in the entire vision. A city with no temple was not a city with a gap in its architecture. It was a contradiction in terms.

What a temple was for

The tabernacle and then the temple existed to solve one problem: how can a holy God live among an unholy people without destroying them? The answer was a system of graded access. Outer court, holy place, Most Holy Place, one man, one day a year, and never without blood.

Every curtain was a closed door. Every regulation said, so far and no further. The building was not principally a place of meeting; it was a carefully managed arrangement for keeping a distance while still granting nearness, and its very existence advertised the gap it bridged.

So a city with no temple is a city where the problem has been solved. Not ignored, not downgraded, solved. There is no need for a structure whose purpose was to regulate access when access is total.

The sentence John writes

Revelation 21:22 reads that John saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. The Greek naos refers to the inner sanctuary rather than the whole complex, which sharpens the point considerably.

It is not that the courtyards have been cleared away and a shrine remains. The Most Holy Place itself is gone, because the presence that filled it is now unmediated and everywhere in the city. Notice too that the Lamb stands alongside the Almighty in that clause, which is one of the quiet, immovable statements of the deity of Jesus in the New Testament.

John says no temple, and then in the same sentence names two persons as the temple. The building has been replaced by a relationship, and that is the direction the whole of Scripture has been travelling since Eden.

The shape of the city

Revelation 21:16 gives the dimensions, and the city is a cube. Its length and width and height are equal. There is only one other cube in Scripture, and that is the Most Holy Place, which was twenty cubits in each direction in Solomon’s temple.

Read the two together and the answer arrives without argument. There is no temple in the New Jerusalem because the city is the Most Holy Place. Everyone lives where only the high priest could go, and they live there permanently rather than for a few trembling minutes once a year.

That also explains the absence of a veil, an altar, a laver and a lampstand in John’s description. Every item of temple furniture addressed a barrier, and the barriers have gone. What is left is the glory that all the furniture was arranged around.

The tearing of the curtain pointed here

When Jesus died, the curtain of the temple was torn from top to bottom. The direction of the tear was the sermon. No human hand did it, and nothing was ever the same afterwards.

Hebrews takes that event and builds a whole argument on it, telling us we now have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way that He opened through the curtain. What believers enjoy by faith in this age, the city enjoys by sight in the age to come.

So the fact that there is no temple in the eternal city is not a novelty introduced in Revelation 21. It is the finished form of something that started at Calvary and is already true of every believer.

But what about the millennial temple?

This is where readers sometimes feel a tension. Ezekiel 40 to 48 describes a temple in enormous detail, with sacrifices and priests and measurements, and I take that as a literal building in the millennial kingdom. So how can there be a temple then and no temple later?

Because they belong to different periods. The Millennium is the final phase of history on this present earth, with unbelief still possible and mortal populations still present. The New Jerusalem belongs to the eternal state, after the Great White Throne, when sin has been finally removed. A temple makes sense in the first and is unthinkable in the second.

I have set out the relationship between those two periods in my article on the millennium and the eternal state, and on the memorial character of Ezekiel’s offerings in the article on millennial worship.

No temple, but not no worship

It would be a serious misreading to conclude that worship ends because the building does. Revelation is the noisiest book in the Bible where praise is concerned, full of falling down, singing, crying out and casting crowns, and none of that stops in the last two chapters.

His servants will worship him, John says, and they will see his face. What ends is the machinery of approach, not the adoration. Worship becomes continuous rather than scheduled, and direct rather than mediated by furniture.

If anything, the removal of the temple intensifies worship. Nobody has to go anywhere to find God. There is no queue, no season, no set hour and no qualified representative standing in for you.

The story running underneath

Trace the presence of God through Scripture and you see the arc. He walks in the garden, then He is behind a curtain, then He walks among us in a body, then He indwells the church, and finally He fills a city where there is no temple at all.

Every stage is a step closer, and every stage cost something. The last step cost the Lamb, which is why He is named as the temple alongside the Almighty. The scars are part of the architecture.

The light that makes lamps unnecessary

The verse immediately after tells us the city has no need of sun or moon, because the glory of God gives it light and its lamp is the Lamb. That is the same logic applied to a second thing. Where the source is present, the instruments become redundant.

The golden lampstand stood in the holy place and had to be tended daily by the priests. Its light was borrowed and its oil ran out. In the New Jerusalem there is no temple and there are no lamps, not because the city is dim but because it is lit from within by the presence itself.

John also notes that the gates are never shut, since there is no night there. Gates exist for defence and darkness exists for concealment, and neither has any function in a world where God is unhidden and no enemy remains. Read Revelation 21:23-25 and you will see how carefully John piles up these absences.

What the absences add up to

Count them. No temple, no sun, no moon, no night, no sea, no death, no mourning, no crying, no pain, no curse, and nothing unclean entering. John describes eternity largely by telling us what will not be there, which is an unusual way to sell a destination.

He does it because our imaginations are formed here. We do not have categories for unmediated glory, so the honest way to describe it is to name the things it makes unnecessary. Every absence is the shadow cast by a presence too large to draw.

A city that is itself a sanctuary

Put the pieces together and a picture emerges. The city is cubic like the Most Holy Place, its dimensions are given in multiples of twelve, its foundations are precious stones and its street is gold. Those are sanctuary materials, not municipal ones.

The high priest’s breastpiece carried twelve stones bearing the names of the tribes, and the foundations of the city carry twelve stones bearing the names of the apostles. John is describing a place built out of the vocabulary of worship.

So there is no temple because the whole city has become one, and the redeemed live inside it. My article on the New Jerusalem works through the description in more detail.

So, now what?

If the destination is a city with no temple, then the point of the Christian life is not a building either. Church buildings are useful and I am glad of ours, but nobody is ever going to be closer to God because of a roof. Paul told the Corinthians that they themselves were the temple of God, and he was not being poetic.

So ask yourself what you are actually longing for when you long for heaven. A place, a reunion, a rest from trouble? All of those are promised. But the reason there is no temple in that city is that the presence of God has become the whole environment, and if that prospect leaves you cold it is worth asking why.

“And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb.” (Revelation 21:22)