Prologue: The Temple Restored (2 of 2)

And then the veil. Matthew 27:51 says it tore at the moment the Son died — the thick curtain that marked the boundary of the holy of holies, the place of God's manifest presence, unreachable except once a year, by one man, with blood. It tore from the top down. Not from the bottom, as human hands would tear it reaching up. From the top, from God's own side, reaching down. The barrier that had contained the distance since the exile from Eden was not breached by human effort. It was dissolved by God Himself. The boundary is ended. Come in.

And so at Pentecost, fifty days after the Resurrection, what poured out on all who believed was not finally a gift from God. It was God. The Father walking with His people again — not beside them in a garden, but within them, as in nothing that had ever existed before. The temple was never finally meant to be a building of stone. The stone building was a signpost, a long signpost pointing forward, pointing to you. Do you not know that you are God's temple, Paul asks ordinary quarreling believers in Corinth, and that God's Spirit lives in you? The whole arc of redemption bent toward that sentence. God back in His people — breathing, walking, knowing and being known.

Here is what this means, and why this book exists. The believer in whom the Spirit dwells is not progressing toward something new. They are recovering something original. The walk in the cool of the day — the companionship, the knowing, the face-to-face of the garden — has been given back. Not as a future hope only, though the fullness awaits. As a present reality. Now. The Spirit makes it available today, in the kitchen and the car and the 3am ceiling-staring, because the work that makes it possible is finished, and the barrier that made it impossible is torn.

Once you understand what was restored, you can begin to understand, from the inside, what it felt like to be Adam walking with God before the hiding began. Not as a theological exercise. As a lived experience available to you today. The Spirit within you is the mode of that walk — the same walking-with that the garden knew, now interior, now permanent, now closer even than beside. You are not alongside God. God is inside you. The temple restored is not a lesser version of the garden. It is the garden made intimate in a way the garden itself could not yet be.

And when a person begins to realize this — really realize it, not as a doctrine assented to but as a presence noticed — something happens that no one has to manufacture. Worship becomes natural. It rises the way warmth rises from a fire. You are not performing devotion for a distant audience. You are responding to Someone in the room. In the face of God recognized, the heart does what hearts were made to do.

Leona Choy, in her book Powerlines, surveyed the great evangelical voices of 1850 to 1930 and found among them a shared conviction worth recovering: that conscious daily fellowship with the Holy Spirit is the ordinary, consistent experience of every true-hearted believer. Not a high aspiration for the spiritually elite. The normal expectation of everyone who belongs to Christ. She was not describing something new. She was describing Eden recovered.

This is what this volume is for. Not to win an argument. It is to help you come home to a presence that never left. The walk was purchased at the cross. The descent into Sheol conquered the separation. The Spirit delivers the walk to you now — and the kitchen is as good a place to receive it as any garden ever was. The Companion is already there. He has been there all along. What follows is an invitation to notice.