Why did the builders reject the chief cornerstone in the temple legend?
According to the legend, the builders could not recognize the chief cornerstone when it was brought in ahead of time. Not knowing what to do with it, they dumped it in a vacant lot, where weeds grew around it. It was the very stone meant to hold the architecture together.
Les explains that this is a legend, not Scripture, connected to Peter’s Old Testament analogy of Christ as the chief cornerstone. In the legend about building the temple, predominantly Solomon’s temple, everything was pre-cut at the quarry so there was no sound of a hammer or chisel at the temple site. One day the chief cornerstone was brought in way ahead of time, but the engineers and architects could not recognize it and did not know what to do with it, so they dumped it in a vacant lot where weeds grew up around it. That stone should have been the chief cornerstone holding all the architecture together. In arch architecture, the very top stone holds everything together, and that is what Christ was to have been. But the builders dumped that very stone in a vacant lot, and people would bump into it in ignorance.