In Acts 7, St. Stephen is standing before first century Israel’s highest court, accused of religious and civil crimes. (The two cohered in the first century in a way they do not in our society.) Stephen’s future hangs in the balance. When he is given the opportunity to testify on his own behalf, instead of denying the accusations, he launches into a meandering sermon—or at least that is what it seems like to us.
In reality, Stephen’s “sermon” is a carefully-worded defense, but in place of denials he is offering a biblically-based apologetic for the importance of Jesus over the tabernacle/temple. You will notice that Stephen never exactly denies the allegations, which are malicious distortions of what he actually said, but he did say something about Jesus, the temple, and the “customs Moses handed down.”
Stephen wants the court to understand that things have changed since Jesus came, died, and rose again. His death and triumphal resurrection has changed the playing field, which is to say, changed the way that people come to God. Stephen does not say as much about this as we would like – people throwing rocks at him brought his defense to a premature end – but we can see from the apostolic writings where he was headed.
It will help us if we understand, to the degree that our very different life experience allows, what ancient Jews felt about the temple. At least three times a year, when Galilean festivalgoers crested the Mount of Olives, they saw the Holy City stretched out below them and there, dominating the foreground, was the temple. It was the size of a modern-day professional football field, and it was the place where God resided. Even the sight of it filled people with awe. This is why the accusations leveled against Jesus, and later, Stephen (of acting, or being complicit in an attempt, to destroy the temple) were taken so seriously.
In John’s Gospel, immediately following the story about Jesus purging the temple and controlling access to it, we read that the Jewish leaders demanded proof of Jesus’s authority to act in this way. He answered, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.” The Jewish leaders misunderstood, but John explains: “…the temple he had spoken of was his body. After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken.”
The temple “was his body.” John Dickson points to Gospel stories that bear this out. For example, we often find Jesus telling individuals that they have been forgiven, but in first century Judaism only a temple priest could do that, and only after the appropriate sacrifices had been offered. People murmured about this, and the scribes accused Jesus of blasphemy because of it. Dickson notes that when Jesus pronounced people forgiven, he was acting “like a mobile temple.”
Jesus himself pointed to the end of the temple’s usefulness as a place to meet and worship God when, in John 4, he told the Samaritan woman that a time was coming when people would no longer worship at the temple in Jerusalem (John 4:21). The Jerusalem temple was destroyed in 70 A.D. by the Roman general Titus, but that was not what Jesus was talking about. He understood that a new temple would be available before then.
In the Gospel of Mark, the Spirit descends on Jesus at his baptism. Later, on the Mount of Transfiguration, the glorious cloud – the Shekinah of God – descends on Jesus, just as it had descended on both the tabernacle and the temple when they were dedicated. More importantly, Jesus plainly stated that people can only come to God through him—not through the stone temple.
Stephen quoted Isaiah 66:1-2 during his trial: “Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool. What kind of house will you build for me? says the Lord. Or where will my resting place be?” Stephen went on to explain that “…the Most High does not live in houses made by men”—echoing Solomon’s prayer and referring to the Jerusalem temple.
But if God does not live in temples built by men, where does he live? St. Paul, who was present at Stephen’s trial and heard his defense, answered that question when he wrote to the Colossian Christians. It is “in Christ [that] all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form…” Jesus is the temple not built by human hands, which is why St. Paul tells the Ephesians that access to God the Father is found through Jesus rather than a stone temple, and that spiritual blessings are received “in Christ” rather than in Jerusalem.
Finally, in the Book of Revelation, the author sees no temple in the age to come and he explains why. It is because “the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.”
These ideas lay behind Stephen’s defense before the Sanhedrin. He and the early church believed that Jesus had transformed the religious landscape. The Jerusalem temple, which remained a marvelous place that the early believers frequented daily, had ceased to be the locus of God’s presence on earth. That was now to be found in Jesus.
The Way Home 
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