Heaven & Earth Passing Away?

Matthew 5:18

“For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled”

In Jewish literature, ‘Heaven and earth’ does not  always refer to the universe. To the Jews, the Temple was a portal connecting heaven and earth. They called it the “navel of the earth” and the “gateway to heaven” (Jub 8:19; 1 Enoch 26:1).

To the Jews, the Temple connected God’s realm to where humans lived. To reflect this belief, the Jerusalem Temple was built like a microcosm of the universe. The actual ‘holy place’ and ‘most holy place’ inside the Temple building were constructed like ‘earth and heaven’. The courts outside represented the sea. Check this out:

Josephus, a Jewish historian, writes that the two inner parts of the temple:

“.. signifies the earth and the sea, since these two are accessible to all; but the third portion he reserved for God alone because heaven is inaccessible to men”

(Ant. 3:181, cf. 3:123).

The veil between the accessible and inaccessible parts of the Temple was designed to represent the entire material world during Jesus’ day. Josephus and Philo agree that the veil was composed of four materials representing the four elements— earth, water, air, and fire (War 5:212-213; Ant. 3:138-144; Quaestiones in Exodum 2:85). ‘Heaven’ was beyond this material world. It was behind the curtain.

Outside the Temple’s inner parts (heaven and earth), the courts looked like the sea. Numbers Rabbah 13:19 records:

“The court surrounds the temple just as the sea surrounds the world.”
In Talmudic tradition, Rabbis described how the inner walls of the Temple looked like waves of the sea. From ‘heaven and earth’ inside the temple, you looked out at the sea surrounding the world. Why? Ancients believed the earth had one giant land mass surrounded by sea. The temple reflected that belief. The accessible section of the Temple and the surrounding courts embodied both the land mass and sea believed to comprise the earth. The Most Holy Place was heaven where God’s presence resided.

If we listen carefully to the words of Jesus, we see that His prophecy of “heaven and earth” passing away is not about the destruction of the physical universe but the destruction of Jerusalem and her Temple. Jesus isn’t the first prophet to describe Jerusalem and her temple with such grand and apocalyptic language. To the Jews, Jerusalem was the place where people encountered the presence of God on earth. The Temple is where heaven met earth.

Interpreting Jesus’ language of “heaven and earth passing away” in Matthew 5:18 as the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple fits with the rest of Jesus’ prophetic message. Like Jeremiah smashing a pot outside the city to predict Jerusalem’s fall to Babylonian invaders (Jeremiah 19), Jesus symbolically acted out God’s judgment on the Jerusalem Temple and verbally condemned it (Mark 11). Remember all those tables he flipped over as he yelled, “You have turned God’s house of prayer into a den of thieves!”

In Luke 21:20-24 Jesus gave a graphic picture of how Jerusalem will be surrounded by armies and the Temple destroyed. Jesus knew that Jerusalem and her Temple were about to be destroyed, and he gave it great significance in his teaching. The entire Torah would be set aside once the Temple crumbled.

For years, we have mixed our assumptions with the words of Jesus,and have messed everything up. We’ve created confusion and contradictions. This must stop. “Heaven and earth” passed away when the Romans sacked Jerusalem in 70AD and everything changed. No need to wait for a meteoric destruction of planet earth. You are God’s temple. He lives in you.

There’s no destruction of the world.Get used to it.