Why would God choose a cubic home?

Friday my sister gave me a two hour tour of her partially built dream-home. As her husband has been a logger, it includes many gorgeous wood beams & pole accents. The large family room with its built-in fireplace & rock-work to the beamed ceiling was my favorite room. My thoughts kept going to the children's Sunday School lesson I was preparing all week for the 15 children ranging from 2 to 10 years of age. The topic I chose was "God's House". How do you prepare a lesson for that age range with such developmental differences? I kept it moving with lots of visuals & interaction. We started by introducing ourselves & saying something we like about our homes or something we would include in our dream home. The kids loved this & talked of big back yards with swing sets & pools & of car bedrooms. We sang the action song "The Wise Man Built His House Upon a Rock", which I had printed out with drawings. We repeated the fingerplay "Here's the church...here's the steeple....open the doors & see all the people." I let the children lead that & say the second part all by themselves. I then told the story of Jesus going to Jerusalem with his parents at Passover time when he was 12 years old. (Luke 2:41-52) He inferred that the temple was His Father's house when his parents came back to find him & when he drove out the money changers at Passover at the beginning of His ministry. (John 2:13-22) He taught in the temple then that if they "destroyed this temple, in 3 days He would raise it up"- speaking of His body. At a later Passover, after 3 1/2 years of ministry, He was rejected & judged by the nation's leaders in the area of God's house. His rejection, death for our sins & prophesied resurrection led to that physical temple's destruction, as well. (John 21:6)

I had made copies of a drawing of Herod's temple, showing the interior courts, rooms, etc. So we spoke of why Jesus would drive out money changers from the only area where gentiles could come to pray & worship God. We started to concentrate on the question "What would God's dream house look like if He designed & built one?" The omnipotent, omniscient God would be unlimited in the type of home He could build for Himself! Well, He actually did design it in three ways:
1) He gave His designs for the home of His Shekinah glory to Moses on Mt. Sinai. Above the mercy seat of the ark of the covenant in the Holy of Holies was where His physical manifestation dwelt amongst His people. The Holy of Holies stayed essentially the same in the design & plans He gave to King David for King Solomon to build the first temple. (I Kings 6:19-20) The later temple built by Zerrubabel & Jeshua after the Babylonian captivity was a poorer copy of the first temple (see Ezra), which was remodeled & added onto by King Herod during the time of Jesus. On August 3rd (the 9th of Av on the Jewish calendar) was the date this year for "Tisha B'Av". This is the saddest day in the Jewish calendar. It commemorates the anniversary of the Divine decree that Israel must remain in the desert for 40 years until the unbelieving generation of 20 years and older died off. It's also the anniversary of the destruction of the first temple by Nebuchadnezar & again of the second temple by Titus in 70 A.D. In 1492, Av 9 was the last day by which all Jews who would not be baptized into the Catholic faith had to leave Spain. The Spanish Inquisition followed. World War I began on Av 9 which brought about conditions which gave rise to nazism & the Holocaust.
2) The individual believer in the Messiah became the next temple for His presence on earth when the Messiah ascended after His resurrection. He spoke generally about this to the Samaritan woman in John 4:19-24. In I Corinthians 3:16 & Ephesians 2:19-22 it is stated more clearly that we believers in Jesus are now God's temple. God's Spirit lives within us as soon as we ask Him into our lives. Of course I spoke in simpler language to the children about this history. We sang two more songs that I had printed & illustrated on a large easel tablet: "Lord Prepare Me to be a Sanctuary" & "Joy is the Flag Flown High from the Castle of My Heart."
3) The New Jerusalem, spoken of in Rev. 21: 15-16 is the coming eternal dwelling of God. (There will be a temple built in the "last days" that God will not inhabit & then a millennial temple which He will dwell in for 1000 years along the same design as the previous temples as far as a Holy of Holies - Ezekiel 41:4) We look forward to this gorgeous city as our future home. God Himself will be the temple, living in close fellowship with us in this huge city.

If you looked up the references, you would have noticed one common design factor. God loves cubes. The Holy of Holies was a cube in the tabernacle & temples, individuals are composed of carbon, water & the only naturally occurring cube crystals - salt, with our blood being a .9% solution of saline with many proteins and other items floating in it, & the New Jerusalem is a huge cubical city with 1,500 miles on each side. I explained to the children about saline solutions for IV's & saline flushes for surgery because of our saline blood make-up, etc. I distributed sugar cubes to help them visualize a cube, which they all promptly started to lick. We finished with a video that mentioned Jesus' visit to the temple at the age of 12. I left the children with the same question that I leave you. Why would God always choose a cube as the shape for His & our dwelling?

17 Hours to Prison & back

Sunday we dropped everything else & drove to Shelby, MT - not too far from the Canadian border on Interstate 15. About 1 1/2 hours north of Great Falls there is a privately run prison which takes federal prisoners & overflow from DeerLodge State Prison. Austin, whom Louis led to the Lord a couple years ago in the Missoula Detention Center, is an inmate. We are the only folks on his visitors list & are the only ones he has asked to be called in the case of an emergency. Spending 3 1/2 hours in the visitors' room with Austin was a bit eery. Every few minutes, the guard came around checking on whether Austin needed to use the restroom or taking his count of all the inmates present in the room.

We sat across the table from Austin, like all the other visitors did with their significant other inmate. Austin had never been in this room before & appeared quite nervous...constantly rubbing & scratching his forearms. We had to provide photo IDs, undergo body searches, complete some paperwork, lock up everything on us in a locker (except our clothing) & some quarters that we could use in the extremely overpriced vending machine in the visitors' room.
We wondered if other staff were watching us from the walls besides the main guard posted at an elevated station in the middle of the room. The fishbowl feeling is one I'd like to remember. We are actually on display like this all the time. We just forget that we are. We are accountable for every action, word, attitude, & motive!!