You also, as living stones, are built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.
(i) It was the secular temple that, more than anything else, blinded Israel to the recognition of the Messiah.  Jesus plainly spoke of himself as the true temple, even from the first: "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up" (John 2:19); and "One greater than the temple is here"  (Matthew 12:6); but the religious leaders were so blinded by their own ideas of a temple that they were never able to understand the nature of that holy institution which Jesus came to establish.  It was Stephen's stress of the spiritual nature of the true temple that unleashed the full fury of the temple mob against himself and which issued in his martyrdom.