The Ark

When Moses and the Israelites needed a physical focus for their worship, God gave them the Ark of the Covenant. The Ark was to be a place of refuge from the spiritual storms. The Ark was where the High Priest made intercession for the sins of all the people on the Day of Atonement. The Ark literally saved the children of Israel from physical destruction in a number of battles. I don't think it's an accident that we use the same word "ark" for both the vessel that saved Noah and his family (and by extension, the entire human race) and also the vessel that helped to spiritually and sometimes physically save Moses and the children of Israel for hundreds of years. The temples we have today are patterned after the temple of Solomon, which was patterned after the Tabernacle, which was designed to protect the Ark of the Covenant, which was echoing Noah's Ark. Noah led his wife and his sons and daughters in law onto the Ark so that all generations of his family could be blessed and saved. We now enter the temple, which can be traced in a line back to Noah's Ark, so that all future and past generations of our family can be blessed and saved. When we go into the temple, we are figuratively going into the Ark to protect ourselves from the flood of sin and to save all of our family, past, present and future.