Acts 3:1: "But Peter and John were going up into the Temple for the hour of prayer, the ninth hour."
So often through the years, Christianity has been presented as a total break with
Judaism, a completely different religion that has nothing in common with the
ancient religion of the Jewish people.
Instead Christianity has been presented as a philosophical faith
that has more in common with Greek philosophy than with the Bible. But if that's true, why were Peter and John
coming here, to the Temple, to pray, after the resurrection and ascension of
Jesus? (Jesus ascended to heaven in Acts
chapter 1, this is chapter 3.)
This is one of many places in the book of Acts that show that the disciples of Jesus continued to worship as Jews, though now, of course, as Jews who believed that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah, the fulfillment of everything the Jewish religion was all about.
So here they
are, going up with hundreds of fellow Jews to pray in the Temple, just as their
fellow Jewish believers in Jesus continued to do as long as the Temple was
standing. What was it that attracted
them there?
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| Entrance gate photographically restored. |
This kind of
entrance to the Temple is what the Bible means in Psalm 100 when it says to
"enter his gates with thanksgiving, his courts with praise." First you went through the gates, and then
into the courts.
There were also
other gates to the Temple area, but all had the same effect: even though the
Temple was built right up against the city, when you entered the Temple, you
entered another world, separated from the world of daily life. It’s the same way when you go up into this
area today, though it looks quite different today. But because of the walls and its
height above the city, you don’t hear much of the city noise, even with cars and
trucks driving around outside.
From these main
courts, open to the sky above, they would have gone past a low stone fence. Behind the stone fence was another, smaller
set of stairs that led into the Court of the Jewish Women. This was an area into which only Jews were
allowed to enter. This was the area
where most of the worship that took place in the Temple happened.
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| Stone fence and steps leading to the Court of the Women. |
Here, in the
Court of the Women, Peter and John were met by many dozens and possibly
hundreds of other Jews coming up to the Temple for what the Bible calls the
"hour of prayer, the ninth hour."
Now it's
interesting and important that the Bible calls this an "hour of
prayer." Because according to the
Bible, this was actually the time of the evening—or more accurately, the
afternoon—sacrifice. The ninth hour
corresponds to our 3 pm, 3 in the afternoon.
This was the second time in the day—each and every day—when a specially
chosen lamb was offered up to the Lord:
a lamb without spot or blemish, and therefore ritually pure or
clean.
These two
lambs—one offered at about 9 am, the other at about 3 pm, every day, were
known as the daily sacrifice, or the perpetual sacrifice. This daily offering is mentioned in Ex.
29:38,39: "And this is what you
will offer on the altar: one-year-old
lambs, two of them for the day, continually (or perpetually). One lamb you will offer in the morning, and
the second lamb you will offer between the evenings." So this is what they did, every day. The curious expression, "between the
evenings," they took to mean mid-afternoon, or about 3 pm.
So the “hours
of prayer” in the Temple were actually the times of the daily offerings or
sacrifices: at 9 and 3, and another at
about noon, which is when special sacrifices were offered up on holidays. These same times of prayer continue in
synagogues around the world today. The
earliest, Shakharit, got its name from the dawn (Shakhar), which is when the
priests began to prepare for the morning sacrifice. The afternoon prayer is called Minkha (which
means gift or offering), and the noon prayer is called Musaf, which just means
“additional.”
These were the
same three prayer times used by the earliest church: as it says in the Didache, the earliest
preserved church manual: “Pray in this
way three times a day” (Didache 8.3).
When Peter and
John made their way up into the Temple, the preparations of the priests were
already well underway. A lamb had
already been selected for the sacrifice, and was waiting at the ready in a
special room in the inner courts of the Temple.
It had been inspected by the priests to ensure that it was ritually
clean—without any spot or physical blemish.
Now it was inspected again, in preparation for the sacrifice.
The importance
of the sacrifice being without blemish is stated over and over again in the
Bible, as in Deut. 17:1. Why was this so
important? Because a blemished animal
rather than honoring God would be an insult to God, it would dishonor him. It’s a general principle in the Bible that we
should bring our best to God. This is
how we show him honor and show him the respect that he is due as God.
Among the
priests themselves, lots were drawn to decide who would fulfill the different
duties that were to be performed that day:
some would prepare the wood and the fires on the altar of sacrifice,
others were assigned for the actual slaughter itself, in which the lamb was
swiftly killed, its neck cut with a quick stroke of the knife. This was intended to produce the least pain
to the animal. Then the skin of the lamb
was removed, and it was cut into sections, just like in a butcher shop.
These pieces
were then carried ceremoniously to the huge altar of sacrifice, which also
stood out under the open sky, directly in front of the Sanctuary of the
Temple. The sections of the lamb were
then carried up the ramp of the altar, and laid on one of the three fires kept
burning on its top. Here the entire lamb
was completely burnt up in the flames.
In Hebrew, this
whole burnt offering is called an olah offering, a “going up” to
God. This refers to the smoke ascending
from the altar, "going up" as it were, to God in heaven. This kind of animal sacrifice can be traced
all the way back to Abraham, back to Noah, and even to Cain and Abel in the
opening chapters of the Bible.
It was quite
different than the practice in the pagan temples, where several-course
restaurant-style meals were prepared and set before the idols—only to be eaten
by the priests. In the Israelite
practice of worship, the olah—the "going up" sacrifice—was
not used to benefit any earthly priesthood.
It was intended only for the God of heaven, as could be seen by the thin
white stream of smoke ascending from the top of the altar.
The idea of
burning up animals in this way, every day, may seem a tremendous waste of
perfectly good animal meat to us today.
After all, God certainly doesn't "need" the smoke of that
burned animal—he certainly doesn't eat it.
But this kind of earth-bound thinking misses the whole point: that the offering of sacrifices was not
nearly so much for God's benefit as for ours.
The offering up of these animals to God was an activity that drew people
into the presence of God—just as it drew Peter and John into the Temple that
day. It was an act of worship that
caused people to turn away from their own interests and activities and to turn
to God—to spend time in his presence.
In fact, you
could say the daily ritual sacrifice is what made it possible to come into the
presence of God. Because only after the
sacrifice was performed, twice each day, were the priests allowed to go into
the Holy Place, the Sanctuary of the Temple.
This daily ritual presented the truth that because of the sinfulness of
man, sacrifice, death to atone for sin, is necessary to enable us even to enter
into the presence of God.
This was a
truth the disciples knew had now been fulfilled in Jesus. Through his one sacrifice, he had atoned for
the sins of all time, and because of it had himself entered directly into the
presence of God, not in any earthly Temple, but into the heavenly presence of
God himself.
But how did the
times of the daily sacrifice come to be called "hours of
prayer"? What was the connection
with prayer? The identification of the
daily sacrifice with prayer can already be seen back in the time of the Old
Testament.
In Elijah's
confrontation with the prophets of Baal on Mt. Carmel, he offered up his prayer
to God at precisely the time of the afternoon sacrifice: as it says in 1 Kings 18:36: "And it happened at the going up of the
offering (the Minkhah; i.e. the afternoon sacrifice) that Elijah the prophet
came near and he said, ‘LORD, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel....'" This was the prayer that God answered with
fire from heaven, a fire that consumed the sacrifice, the rocks of the altar,
and even the dust around the altar.
Even earlier,
Solomon, at the dedication of the Temple, addressed his prayer to the Lord
after many hundreds of sacrifices had been offered up; a prayer that, according
to 2 Chron. 7:1, God also answered with fire from heaven. Solomon prayed, with his hands lifted up to
heaven: "Have regard to the prayer
of your servant and to his supplication, LORD my God, to listen to the cry
and to the prayer that your servant prays before you, that your eyes may be
open toward this house day and night, toward the place of which you have said
that you would put your name there, to listen to the prayer that your servant
prays toward this place." (2 Chron.
6:19-20)
This position
of prayer—with hands raised, facing the sanctuary of the Temple in Jerusalem—eventually
became one of the most important positions for prayer. Why hands raised? It's a symbol of surrender to God—just like
in a military surrender. It means, look, I've got nothing in my hands,
no hidden weapons, no tricks up my sleeve.
It's like our gesture of waving an open hand to say “Hi!”—see, it's
safe, I've got nothing in my hand. It's
a friendly gesture, the gesture of a friend.
It’s also the gesture of a child that comes running to a parent the
child is glad to see. It’s a gesture of
openness, of wanting to receive someone.
This is how the
Jewish people and later the early Christians, for at least the first eight
centuries of Christianity, prayed. It's
a symbol of surrender to God: I give up,
I surrender myself to you, I'm holding nothing back, no hidden agenda—I'm a
friend and not a foe. I want to be with
you. I want to receive you.
Why were these
prayers prayed toward the Temple?
Because the Temple was a symbol of the presence of God, with sacrifices
that made it possible for sinners to come into the presence of a holy God,
sacrifices that opened the door to communion and to communication with
God.
The prophet
Isaiah went so far as to call the Temple a "house of prayer." As it says in Isa. 56:7: "I will bring them (he's talking about
foreigners here) to my holy mountain (that is, to the Temple Mount in
Jerusalem) and I will make them glad in my house of prayer. Their whole burnt offerings and their
sacrifices will be accepted on my altar; for my House (that is, the Temple)
will be called a house of prayer for all the peoples." Why will the sacrifices of foreigners be
accepted in God's Temple? Because he
wants his Temple to be a house of prayer for all nations. Here again, we see the direct connection
between prayer and sacrifice, a connection that Jesus confirmed in his teaching
by quoting this verse in Matt. 21:13.
Even today,
2,000 years after the destruction of the Temple, religious Jews continue to
pray every day at the time of the ancient sacrifices in the Temple, facing
toward the Sanctuary of the Temple in Jerusalem.
The Muslims,
too, originally prayed in this direction, but later, in the lifetime of
Mohammed, they changed the direction to Mecca.
The connection
between prayer and sacrifice was also symbolized in the Temple by the duties of
the other priests, duties that were performed after the sacrifice had been
"offered up" on the altar of sacrifice. As the worshippers watched from the Court of
the Women, three priests approached the altar of sacrifice, where the lamb was still
burning. One went up the to collect some
of the burning coals from the altar in a container.
Then he,
together with the other two priests, entered all alone into the Sanctuary of
the Temple—the tall building in the middle of the Temple compound. Here they proceeded forward past the golden
lampstand and the table of showbread to the golden altar of incense. This stood just in front of the veil or
curtain of the Temple that divided the Holy Place from the Holy of Holies. This was the closest that an ordinary priest
could ever get to the Holy of Holies.
Here one of the
priests laid out the hot coals on the altar of incense. Another set down a container of incense. And
then these two priests ceremoniously withdrew from the Temple, leaving the
third priest standing all alone in the sanctuary.
This lone
priest then took the incense, which was in a powdered form, into his hands and
spread it out on the hot coals on the altar.
This immediately sent a thick cloud of fragrant smoke up into the
air. While he was doing this, the people
were outside, in the Court of the Women, prostrated before the Lord in silent
prayer for about half an hour.
This ceremony gave
yet another name to this time of sacrifice and prayer: “the hour of the incense offering” (Luke
1:10). The incense, rising before the
Holy of Holies, was a symbol of the prayers of the people rising up to
God.
This connection
between incense and prayer was understood all the way back in the time of
David. In Ps. 141:2 it says, "May
my prayer be presented as incense before you, the lifting up of the palms of my
hands as the evening sacrifice." This verse, as in all the poetry in the Bible,
is written in poetic parallelism: that
is, one line reinforces, or restates another.
In this verse, the parallel is between prayer and incense in the first
line, and the lifting of hands and the evening sacrifice in the other. In other words, the association of prayer and
incense is equated to the relationship between the lifting of hands and the
evening sacrifice.
The first part
is a symbolism most Christians are familiar with. In the same way that the incense went up and
over the veil (or curtain) of the Temple into the hidden place of the Holy of
Holies, so our prayers enter up and into the presence of God where, as Jesus
put it, he dwells "in secret."
As Jesus said in Matt. 6:6: "But
you, when you pray, go into your inner room, and having shut your door, pray to
your Father who is in secret..."
But here David
equates not only the incense, but the entire evening (or afternoon) sacrifice
with prayer: as he says, "the
lifting up of the palms of my hands (in prayer) as the evening sacrifice." In other words, he equates the whole of the
evening sacrifice, both the sacrifice itself and the offering up of incense,
with prayer. Both, together, are an
image, a picture, of prayer, ascending to God.
They represent time spent worshipping God, in which the focus of our
attention is on God himself, lifting up those things that are of great value to
us: our thoughts, our concerns, our
inner life to him, surrendering ourselves to his will and to his way.
As David goes
on to say in the next two verses: “Do
not incline my heart to any evil thing, to practice deeds of wickedness with
men who do iniquity; and do not let me eat of their delicacies" (Ps.
141:3,4). David is asking for God's help
to live God's way. He's surrendering
himself completely to God.
This is the
context of Paul's thoughts in Rom. 12:1.
It's a verse we're all familiar with, but which I hope we can now see in
a new, more accurate light. If I read it
the way it’s usually translated, it says, "I urge you therefore, brothers,
by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a sacrifice—living, holy,
pleasing to God—which is your spiritual
worship."
The language of
the last part of the verse is a little difficult, because this is not the word
“spirit” as in the Holy Spirit, but rather the word logikos, which is the root
of our English word logical. This word
can have the meaning “sensible” or “reasonable.” But here, as in another place in the New
Testament, it is used in the sense of giving the spiritual or deeper meaning of
a symbolic picture. What it means is
that presenting our bodies as a sacrifice to God is a spiritual picture of what
true worship and true service of God are supposed to be.
In this image,
Paul takes things a full step forward from the language of David in Psalm
141. Rather than just offering a
sacrifice, Paul says we are to become the sacrifice: not a dead sacrifice, instead a living
sacrifice. But like a sacrifice, we are
to completely give over our bodies—in other words, our lives—to God. Notice the language used here: our bodies are to be "holy and pleasing
to God." This is just like the ritual cleanness of the lambs that were
offered as a sacrifice, without spot or blemish.
This is the
same language used by Paul in Ephesians 5:27 of the wedding feast of the
Lamb: "that (Jesus) might present
the Church to himself as glorious, not having a stain or wrinkle or any such
thing, but that she might be holy and blameless."
This, Paul
says, is the true meaning of worship, the true meaning of the Christian
life: to present yourself to God as a
sacrifice, having been set apart to God—set apart from the things of the world,
which is what "holy" means—just like the lambs for the sacrifice,
living our lives in a way that is pleasing to God, through our surrender to his
way. It’s a picture of stepping, as it
were, right into the fire of the altar, to be completely consumed by God and
the things of God, our lives going up continually to God as a sacrifice.
This is not the
only place that Paul uses this kind of language. In Rom. 15:16, he describes his ministry to
the Gentiles as that of a priest, offering up the sacrifice of the Gentiles on
the altar of faith. Or to quote it directly: "...ministering as a priest
the gospel of God, that the offering up (in other words, the sacrifice) of the
nations (the Gentiles) might be acceptable, having been made holy by the Holy
Spirit."
This is a
picture of total surrender, of total commitment to God: not just of setting aside time for the Lord
every day, but of living a life that is burning with the power of God—a life
that is a continual prayer ascending to God, a life lived in constant
fellowship and communion with God.
This is what
Jesus himself was talking about when he says in Matt. 10:39: "The one who has found his life will
destroy it, and the one who has destroyed his life because of me will find
it." Following Jesus is not a way
to find yourself with regard to the things of this world. It’s a way to completely give yourself up to
him.
People who
truly follow Jesus look like they’re destroying their lives to others. “Why are you going over there to be a
missionary? You’re just throwing away
your life.” Yes, destroying it from the
point of view of the world. But following Jesus is the only way to find true life. If you stop short of total surrender, it will
only bring loss.
As Jesus said
in Luke 14:27: “Whoever does not carry
his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.” Carrying your cross means destroying your
life from the point of view of this world.
This is the same idea in different words.
But then he
illustrated it with a parable: “For
which one of you, when he wants to build a tower, does not first sit down and
calculate the cost, to see if he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation, and
is not able to finish, all who observe it begin to ridicule him” (Luke 14:28-30). What did he mean by this? That once we begin with Jesus, we need to
press on until we finish. Otherwise,
what good will it be?
Peter put it
even more directly when he said that it’s much worse for you if you start with
Jesus and then turn back: “For if they,
having escaped from the defiling deeds of the world by the knowledge of the
Lord and Savior Jesus the Messiah, but having then again been entangled by
these are overcome, this latter situation is worse for them than the former
one” (2 Pet. 2:20).
So what’s the
solution? Only total surrender to God
brings us victory: giving up everything
for him, and then following him without getting sidetracked.
Jesus paints the same picture using a slightly different image in Luke 9:62 when he says: "No one, after putting his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God." Once you get started with Jesus, don’t look back. Just keep going. We need to willingly give over our entire lives to him, total surrender—just as he totally surrendered his life as a sacrifice for us. What’s the Christian life about? Losing your life for Jesus; surrendering your life to Jesus.
Jesus paints the same picture using a slightly different image in Luke 9:62 when he says: "No one, after putting his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God." Once you get started with Jesus, don’t look back. Just keep going. We need to willingly give over our entire lives to him, total surrender—just as he totally surrendered his life as a sacrifice for us. What’s the Christian life about? Losing your life for Jesus; surrendering your life to Jesus.
The earliest
church saw a connection between the cross and prayer in the position of prayer
I mentioned before, standing with arms outstretched, which they saw as a symbol
of the cross. Prayer is an act of
surrender to God.
Total
surrender—total commitment—not just offering a sacrifice, but becoming the
sacrifice; not just giving of what you own, but giving everything you own; not
just offering prayers, but becoming a prayer:
a life consumed with the fire of the Almighty. Our God, the Bible says over and over, is
"a consuming fire." Have you
stepped into the fire? Have you felt the
heat? Are you being consumed by his
presence in your life?
I want to
challenge you today to pray with me with your arms stretched out to God. Or to prostrate on the ground if you
like. Because both are positions of
complete surrender to God. And let’s ask
God to have his way in our lives.
Let's pray: Father God, we have heard the words of your
Son to us today, words that challenge us to the deepest place in our
being. But they are also freeing words,
liberating words, if we accept them, words that have the power to free us from
the entanglements and worries of this world, words that can free us from the
tyranny of worry about our lives and set us free to trust you completely. Help us to come away from the world with
you: to be holy, to be different, to
enter into the secret place with you, Father, where we can find true life. Help us to put our hands to the plow of
serving you and never look back. In Jesus’
name.
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