Jesus identified himself as the true temple of God because he is the ultimate meeting place between God and humanity (Jn. 2:19). When you went to the temple in Jerusalem, you went to God’s footstool. If you looked at Jesus, you actually saw God—head, hands, and feet!  In the Incarnation, the second Person of the Trinity—the Word—took humanity from the womb of the Virgin Mary. Therefore wherever Jesus walked, God was treading. 

One of the most wonderful truths of Scripture is that God wants to be near to us. He isn’t a distant deity, unconcerned with the world’s affairs. God has actually chosen to step down from the heavenly heights and plant his feet here in our midst. Here are three places the Bible says God’s feet touched the ground.

God’s Presence in the Temple

David described the temple he wanted to build for God as “a house of rest for the ark of the covenant of the Lord and for the footstool of our God” (1 Chron. 28:2). In the Psalms, this language of “footstool” is also picked up: “Let us go to his dwelling place; let us worship at his footstool!” (Ps. 132:7 cf. 99:5). The imagery here is striking. God sits on his royal throne, and he rests his feet in Jerusalem. His feet touch the ground in the temple, where he promised to be near to his covenant people. When God described the glory of the temple to the prophet Ezekiel, he said, “Son of man, this is the place of my throne and the place of the soles of my feet, where I will dwell in the midst of the people of Israel forever” (Eze. 43:7). The soles of God’s feet touched down in the temple, and there God’s people could worship at his footstool.

You could imagine, then, how terrible it would have been when King Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the temple around 586 BC. This wasn’t just a national catastrophe; it was a religious catastrophe. The Babylonian captivity was a judgement on God’s people for their years of idolatry. The poet of Lamentations mourned, “How the Lord in his anger has set the daughter of Zion under a cloud! He has cast down from heaven to earth the splendor of Israel; he has not remembered his footstool in the day of his anger” (Lam. 2:1). For the time being, it seemed as though God had moved his feet somewhere else.

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