Temple of Heaven

I don’t usually visit Chinese temples, not even the famous ones, as a tourist. I am not trying to be legalistic, but my spirit man is more sensitive. Some places might seem harmless, but spiritual forces are real, and I don’t want to play with ‘fire’.

But somehow, the Temple of Heaven in Beijing felt different. It was constructed between 1406 and 1420 during the reign of the Yongle Emperor (永乐帝) of the Ming dynasty. No idol statues are found in it, and I felt that it was built to worship the one true God, the Yahweh of the Bible. In any case, it shows that there’s a spirit in us to worship a being larger than us, a creator of all things. Just that throughout history, people added their own interpretations, even worshipping created things like trees and stones.

I wondered if I was the only one who saw the Temple of Heaven this way. So I went to Google and found an article on Christianity.com (free to read on desktop) written by a Chinese writer. Quoting from it:

If you ever visit the Temple of Heaven in Beijing—ancient China’s largest center for high-level rituals—you might be struck by its lack of Buddhist and Taoist idols. The design of the Chinese place of worship displays some of the characteristics of the ancient Chinese tradition of ritual sacrifice to heaven, which seem to bear many similarities to the rituals for worshiping God recorded by Moses in the Pentateuch of the Old Testament.

Ancient Israelites’ burnt offerings, sin offerings, and peace offerings all involved the butchering of unblemished animals—bulls, sheep or goats, doves or pigeons, depending on the sacrifice. After the animal was killed, the priest burned its carcass. As part of sin offerings, priests sprinkled the animal’s blood on the altar, representing the washing of the believer’s sins with the blood of the sacrifice.

Priests also butchered cattle and sheep as part of ancient Chinese rituals of sacrifice to heaven.

By the time of the Ming dynasty, the annual ritual sacrifice to heaven was considered a great ceremony. Five days before the sacrifice, the emperor himself would go to the place where sacrificial animals were kept and personally study their appearances and states of health, ensuring that the animals were unblemished and without defect.

Afterward, the emperor fasted and purified himself for three to five days leading up to the ceremony, before burning the selected animals as part of the event. People hoped that the smoke from the burning animals would rise up to the God of heaven so that he would send down blessings.

The Confucian classic Shijing (Classic of Poetry), whose earliest contributions date back to the 11th century B.C., contains a hymn with the line “The fragrance of the sacrifice rises; the God of heaven is surrounded by the fragrance; how wonderful is the fragrance!” After describing the entire process of the ritual, the last line says, “After Houji established the sacrifice ceremony (to heaven), people no longer feel guilt.”

The Shijing commentary suggests that the Zhou people began sacrificing to the God of heaven to “no longer feel guilt for their sin,” to express respect of the divine, to seek his protection, and to pray for peace and prosperity for the country.

Compare this to these Bible verses:

‘When a ruler has sinned, and done something unintentionally against any of the commandments of the Lord his God in anything which should not be done, and is guilty, or if his sin which he has committed comes to his knowledge, he shall bring as his offering a kid of the goats, a male without blemish. …

‘If anyone of the common people sins unintentionally by doing something against any of the commandments of the Lord in anything which ought not to be done, and is guilty, or if his sin which he has committed comes to his knowledge, then he shall bring as his offering a kid of the goats, a female without blemish, for his sin which he has committed.

…and the priest shall burn it on the altar for a sweet aroma to the Lord. So the priest shall make atonement for him, and it shall be forgiven him.

‘If he brings a lamb as his sin offering, he shall bring a female without blemish…. He shall remove all its fat, as the fat of the lamb is removed from the sacrifice of the peace offering. Then the priest shall burn it on the altar, according to the offerings made by fire to the Lord. So the priest shall make atonement for his sin that he has committed, and it shall be forgiven him.

Leviticus 4:22,23,31b,32,35 (NKJV)

Other than the Sin Offering (Leviticus 4–5:13), you can also read about the other offerings in Leviticus: the Burnt Offering (Leviticus 1), Grain Offering (Leviticus 2), Peace Offering (Leviticus 3), and Guilt Offering (Leviticus 5:14–6:7).

In my previous post, written before my trip, I shared how God is bigger and more complex than we often imagine. The ancient Chinese people understood this, judging by the sheer scale of the temple architecture and space. The temple’s grandeur wowed us. How much more will we sing hallelujah when we see the God that this temple was built to worship? The temple grounds also reveal how much reverence the ancient Chinese had for God. Unlike now, people used God’s name in vain.

Often, the older generations in Singapore refer to Christianity as an angmo or Western religion because of the Western missionaries that came to our shores. A reconciliation of being Chinese and Christian was explored in this article on Christianity.com: “The average person won’t think, Am I Confucian or Christian? He’s probably thinking, I’m both, or a shade of either.” Moreover, the Temple of Heaven shows that God was already stirring the hearts of our Chinese ancestors before the missionaries: to worship a one true God.

To add to this, the emperor was regarded as the Son of Heaven in ancient times (皇帝被视为上天之子 (简称“天子”) ). The belief was that God entrusted these Chinese emperors with earthly authority, giving them the mandate to govern under Heaven’s rule. This was probably a shadow of the coming king of kings — Jesus, the true Son of God ruling heaven and earth.

Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.”

Matthew 28:18 (NKJV)

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