John 2:19 Commentary and Bible Study

We see here Christ’s foresight. Here is prophecy from Christ and it is couched in a kind of riddle or concealed truth, a traditional Jewish mashal, an allegorical statement with a truth. Both the statement and the truth buried in it are both going to be fulfilled. The term he used for temple in Aramaic and in our Greek original can be used either of the temple or they could equally be applied to your body. Destroy this temple, destroy this body – the language is equally applicable, ‘and in three days I will raise it up.’ You could say that of somebody being healed from an illness, raised up, or you could say it of a building being reconstructed.But the Jews did not get it. They were not waiting – though their minds were trained to understand when somebody was speaking in a riddle, when he was making a terse, brief, wise statement that has a deeper meaning; it was a sport among them and part of their culture to speak in such statements from time to time – but they did not understand this. Jesus, in his answer, referred to a greater temple, the temple of his body, of which the temple of the Jews was only a symbol. When the Jews in the future destroyed this greater temple by putting the Messiah to death, the Lord Jesus Christ would later raise his body from the dead, three days after the crucifixion. This act of murder would be entirely consistent with the disrespect they now showed for God’s earthly temple. If the Lord had the power to raise the true temple – his body – from the dead, he certainly had the right to cleanse the earthly temple.