Will there be sacrifices at a temple in Messiah’s Kingdom? Hebrews 10:11-18 (Memorial Worship)

How are we to explain the revival of the sacrificial system in the Messianic kingdom?  The problem we face is that the sacrifice of our Lord on Calvary is full and complete.  It brought to an end the need for blood sacrifices, blood sacrifices that were ineffective in the first place.  The sacrifice of Christ is perfectly effective; and where there is remission of these (sins and lawless deeds) there is no longer an offering for sin.  

In addition, how can there be a temple?  Why would there be a return to that which was a copy and shadow of the heavenly things (Heb. 8:5)?  

One answer is that these statements in the Old Testament are symbolic of worship in the future.  Similar to this thought is the view that says that the prophets could not have understood if they had seen future worship of God’s people; they only knew worship around the temple.  Thus they wrote in this way to describe something that would have been unknown to them.

But this answer does not fit what we see, either in Ezekiel 40-48 or in the other references to temple worship in the Kingdom of Christ.  Those passages do everything to suggest they are describing something real; in each case the context is literal.  It never says they are suddenly being allegorical.  And they give such detail that it does not fit allegorical writing.

Consider Zechariah as an illustration.  Zech. 1-8 is one vision after another, filled with scenes that are symbolic and illustrative.  But when you come to Zech. 9-14 you do not see this type of writing.  These are burdens (Zech. 9:1; 12:1), a term that describes the preaching of the prophets.  Within those chapters you have prophecies that are literally fulfilled in the first epiphany (appearance of Christ).  The triumphal entry of Christ is predicted in Zech. 9:9-10 as well as the betrayal price (Zech.11:12).  

So again we ask, what explanation both satisfies a literal interpretation of these passages while exalting the sacrifice of Christ?  My answer to that question is to see this revival of the temple in terms of a memorial of the work of Christ.  (I say my answer; but certainly there were others before me to claim this, with one in particular being a man I greatly admire, Charles Feinberg, who taught this in his classic from 1954 Premillennialism or Amillennialism.)

The idea here is that these things look back to the work of Christ, even as the celebration of the Lord’s Supper does in the Church today.  In the time of the Messianic Kingdom, when Christ’s earthly rule is from Jerusalem and where Israel is finally the nation God intended, it is not inconsistent to think that the feasts and sacrifices are performed with Christ at the center of it.  If you can put yourself into this picture you can say that in fact the finished work of Christ is indeed honored.  (There is more to say about this in our next blog.)