The conclusion appears warranted, therefore, that Genesis 2:15 contains an explicit reference to the entrusting of man in his priestly office with the task of defending the Edenic sanctuary against the intrusion of anything that would be alien to the holiness of the God of the garden or hostile to his name. From subsequent developments it is evident that Adam's priestly charge was meant to set him on guard, as at a military post, against the encroachment of the Satanic serpent. In the Zechariah 3 passage, we see the messianic figure of the Angel of the LORD fulfilling this primal priestly duty. He judicially rebukes the malicious accuser, who in effect poses in God's holy presence as one of the cherubim guardians, as though he would defend the sanctuary against the sin-stained human priest. Back at the beginning, the challenge of Satan's unholy trespass was to precipitate the critical hour of probation when man, under the priestly charge to guard God's courts, was faced with the duty of pronouncing the holy judgment of God's house against the preternatural intruder.
This judicial-military function of the office of the guardian-priest is an important aspect of the whole course of judgment executed by agents of God's kingdom subsequently in redemptive history. It is in fact the essence of holy war. Israel's conquest and dispossession of the Canaanites was carried out in fulfillment of their status as a nation of priests who were commissioned to cleanse the land claimed by Yahweh as holy to him. The priestly character of this and other such holy war undertakings was accentuated by the prominent role which the special Levitical priesthood within priestly Israel was assigned in them. Similarly, Messiah in his going forth in the great final judgment for the cleansing of God's cosmic temple, a judgment adumbrated in the temple cleansings recorded in the Gospels, is depicted in prophetic psalm and apocalypse as a priest-king leading a priestly army. Within the present age of the new covenant the function of negative consecration belongs to the church, this ecclesiastical form of it being declarative and spiritual and not applicable outside the holy covenant community.
At the level of the individual's identity as a temple of God the priestly office involves this negative, protective kind of sanctification as well as positive consecration. The judicial-military aspect of the priestly guardianship of the personal temple of God is brought out in redemptive revelation by the injunction that the armor of God be put on to defend against the hostile, defiling incursions of Satan. Since putting on the divine armor is a variation of the metaphor of investiture with the priestly glory-robes, a major biblical symbol of the imago Dei, the connection between priesthood and the image of God is again in evidence here. If the priestly privilege of beholding God is creative of the reflected image of God's Glory, possession of the dominion-glory of the image in turn equips for the priestly service of guarding God's sanctuary. Accordingly, the judicial as well as the ethical dimension of the imago Dei comes to expression in the triumphs of priestly guardianship of our personal sanctity.To summarize, Kline addresses the various priest-temple relationships: first, of Adam as a priest within the temple of Eden, Israel as a nation of priests guarding the temple of the promised land, the Levitical priesthood ministering within the temple, the Messiah as the Great High Priest of the cosmic temple, elders and other leaders guarding the purity of the church, and finally, individual Christians as guardian-priests of their own bodily-temples. The priest-temple relationship allows us to define both the idea of holy war against Satan, beginning with the enmity between the seed of the woman and of Satan, as well as the priestly aspect of the glory reflected in our being images of God.
SDG
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