ABSTRACT
Jesus strongly assures his disciples that, with the Lord as Master, his created earth will provide for their physical needs. At a cosmic level, it was the Temple's reconciliation of God and man to each other that mitigated the estranged condition between them that derived from the blighting effects of the Fall of Adam and Eve. Jesus' teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, therefore, urges each disciple to realize these royal temple visions and symbols by seeking "first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well". Judging is a common theme of the Temple, particularly divine judgment. Talionic justice accomplished a sense of poetic justice, rectified imbalance, related the nature of the wrong to the fashioned remedy, and achieved an appropriate measure of punishment or degree of reward. Sometimes, early Christian allegories saw only one tree of eternal life, the living cross, with Jesus being the root and righteous people becoming the branches.
