“A dirty plate simply needs to be cleaned, not smashed”
1.Destroy THIS temple, and I will rebuild it in 3 days.
2. At that hour, there was a great earth quake and the temple veil was torn.
3. You don’t pour new wine into old wine sacks, you pour new wine into new wine sacks.
Christ did mean to smash the old order by of man made rules and regulations by showing himself to be full embodiment of the law as it was always meant to be fully lived by men. Christ came not to destroy the law but to fullfill it and to show that men could have God’s law written into hearts of flesh, incorporated right into our minds by the work of the Holy Spirit.
We have been washed by his blood and cleansed of sin so that the penalty of the law has been lifted from us. Christ was always blasting the religious leadership of his time, they were not faithful to the law, they created a system of extrapolative thought that skirted around the exact full blooded meanings of the Mosaic code so that they could be soothed in their consciences while ignoring the neediest of men. If Jesus was often calling the pharisees and scribes...generations of vipers, “full of dead men’s bones and other corruption”(the worst insults you call a Jew back then), then you cannot say that they were faithful to the sense and spirit of the law. They were small minded and vicious,human shrews, ignoring the marvelous power of miracles that Jesus displayed, fearing the loss of their earthly prestige and power and willing to put their Saviour to death for worldly trifles that have all decayed to dust.
No, Jesus came to smash the old powers of sin and death by fullfilling the law in his person. The wages of sin was death, but Jesus had no sin so he should not have had to die. Thus the perfect storm which at the end Christ was left with the keys of death and hell...the lamb that was slain and now and for ever worthy to reign!
Yes, as I said, Jesus' passion, death and resurrection both signaled and necessitated the breaking of the Old Covenant and the creation of a new and eternal Covenant. Indeed, He said at the Last Supper: "This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood" (Luke 22:20). This covenant will endure till the end of the age, for we will walk in Grace, and not in the Law, until He comes in glory.
Therefore, His new covenant, presently in force, must be maintained with care. He is always faithful, even when we are not so faithful. When our end of the covenant is broken, it needs to be repaired within its own framework. The framework was established and ordained by Him; it cannot under any scheme of mere men be changed. To that extent, it is directly analogous to a dirty plate that must have its situation remedied by cleaning it, not by smashing it. Remedying the hypocrisies and corruptions in the Church is in order whenever they occur, not the creation of ersatz "new, new covenants," "new, new, new covenants," etc., which have absolutely no divine sanction and cannot be demonstrated to have come from from God's mandate.
Even the Old Covenant, while it was in force, and until its time had come through Christ's passion and death, was always held in force by God, which is why, as I said before, the Levites, the priests and the high priests were left in their proper succession, however unworthy they might be (and they were often amazingly unfaithful, idolatrous and apostate at various times!). The "cleansing of their plate" was accomplished by The Exile, and, subsequent to it, the Jews were, despite their other hypocrisies and penchants for legalism, were nearly immune to idolatry and apostasy.
The Church is to be considered in the same way when it strays corporately through human weakness, and the result will be better, for, again, we live under Grace, not under the Law as the Jews did.