Being and Building God's Temple

Talk Delivered on 13-11-04

Let’s begin by opening our Bibles and reading from Ephesians 2:19-22.

“Now, therefore, you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone, in whom the whole building, being fitted together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.”

There’s a lot to unpack in this passage. Paul is talking about God’s people being His temple, with Christ as the chief cornerstone. To appreciate the full significance of what Paul is saying, let’s consider a bit of background about the temple.

In the ancient world a temple was more than just a building where you worshiped your god. It was actually a place where heaven and earth joined, where there was a dimensional overlap. In the Ancient Near East, each nation considered that its god was supreme above the gods of the other nations and that he was enthroned in a heavenly palace above the gods of the other nations. This heavenly superiority was then symbolized through the gods enthronement in an earthly palace or temple. There is not space to develop the point, but all these elements come into play whenever the Old Testament speaks of God’s temple. It was the place where you could be in the presence of the God of Israel because it was the place where heaven and earth met. The Old Testament gives majestic descriptions of the times when God’s presence filled the temple.

Now the thing that made the exile so tragic was that God’s people had to leave His temple. This was equivalent to God’s presence departing from His people. However, the prophets prophesied of a time when the temple would be renewed and God’s presence would return to it. Perhaps the best example is Ezekiel’s vision of the new temple, with rivers of healing flowing out from it to heal the nations.

Now although the temple began to be rebuilt during the period of Ezra and Nehemiah, and was functioning again during the time of Jesus, God’s presence had still not returned to it. This is why, according to many Jewish theorists of the time, the return from spiritual exile still had not happened. The real return from exile would be when God’s glory once again filled the temple and when the enemies of God’s people were defeated. This was, of course, was what Messiah was expected to bring about.

What does Jesus do, however? He doesn’t defeat Israel’s enemies but appears, Himself, to be defeated by them. He doesn’t restore the temple, but pronounces judgment on it when He overturned the tables and chased out the money changers.

Why did Jesus enact this symbolic judgment on the temple? Well, not only had it simply ceased being a light to the world, it stood for everything that was opposite of what the temple was supposed to represent. It was governed by a ruling elite that oppressed the poor and clung to the form of religion without the content. When Jesus comes and said that they have made His father’s house into a den of thieves, He is quoting from a passage in Jeremiah 7 which is about the destruction of the temple. Since the Messiah was supposed to be the person who restored the temple and brought God’s glory back to it, by pronouncing judgment on the temple, Jesus is not making it any easier for the people to believe His Messianic claims. He was rejected by the would-be builders of the temple, those who would have the temple restored to the glory prophesied by Isaiah, Ezekiel and the other prophets.

Paradoxically, however, the stone which the builders rejected actually became the chief cornerstone of the renewed temple. And this brings us back to the passage we opened with from Ephesians. Through Jesus death and resurrection He does restore the temple but in a totally unexpected, revolutionary way. He doesn’t restore the physical temple which He judged, but creates a new temple of living stones made up of those who conform to the image of the capstone. This corporate temple is given the ability to do and to be everything that the physical temple was supposed to do and be, plus more. Thus, Peter writes,

Coming to Him as to a living stone, rejected indeed by men, but chosen by God and precious, you also, as living stones, are being built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. Therefore it is also contained in the Scripture, Behold, I lay in Zion a chief cornerstone, elect, precious, and he who believes on Him will by no means be put to shame.” Therefore, to you who believe, He is precious; but to those who are disobedient, “The stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone,” and “A stone of stumbling and a rock of offence.” They stumble, being disobedient to the word, to which they also were appointed. But you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people, that you may proclaim the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light; who once were not a people but are now the people of God, who had not obtained mercy but now have obtained mercy. (1 Pet. 2:4-10).

Remember that the renewing of the temple and the return from spiritual exile would be when God’s presence once again filled the temple. Think now of what happened with the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost. Luke records that there was a sound of rushing wind filling the house and there appeared tongues of fire that sat on the apostles heads (Acts 2:1-3). Such a description echoes descriptions in the Old Testament when the Lord’s presence filled the temple.

Does this mean that at Pentecost God’s people have finally returned from spiritual exile? I don’t think so, for when the Old Testament prophets spoke about the return from exile and the final restoration of God’s people, it involved a lot more than simply God’s presence filling His temple, as important as this is. The promises show that when the return from exile occurs God’s people will be instrumental in bringing salvation to the ends of the earth. This is clearly the meaning of the symbolism in Ezekiel’s vision of the renewed temple, with the two rivers flowing out to heal all the nations. That hasn’t yet happened. It’s like now God’s people are living in an exodus period. We’ve been delivered out of Egypt but we haven’t yet entered into the promised land flowing with milk and honey. But remember, during their wilderness sojourn, there was the tabernacle which was a foretaste of the temple built under Solomon. When God’s presence came to the apostles at Pentecost, it was like God’s presence filling the tabernacle in the wilderness. The presence of the Spirit, represented in flames on the apostles heads, is like the pillar of cloud and fire coming to lead the people out of the wilderness. God’s people are a kind of temple now, just as the tabernacle in the wilderness was a kind of temple. God’s glory has dwelt with believers ever since Pentecost to show them the way into the promised land, yet it remains only a firstfruits of the Spirit (Rom. 8:23). Pentecost was the beginning of God’s efforts to build the new temple. We await and pray for the temple to be complete in all it’s fullness, when God’s people are resurrected and “He comes, in that Day, to be glorified in His saints…” (2 Thess. 1:10).

So we have two stages operating here. One is the stage that we’re in now which is firstfruit stage. The Kingdom has been inaugurated but not yet consummated; the temple of living stones has been built and filled with God’s glory, but it isn’t yet complete. That is why Paul spoke of us as “being built up into a spiritual house” as an active thing. Jesus is the Master builder – He is the one that is building us up into this spiritual house, “a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.”

Now here’s the important point: He wants us to build with Him. And the way we do that is to put into practice what it means to be God’s temple now, for as we do that we are cooperating with God’s work in building us into the final temple. It’s like what I spoke about in my last meeting where I said that by following the standards of the kingdom now, we hasten the coming of the day when the entire world will live by those standards. Hence we find that throughout his writings, Paul invokes the truth about being God’s temple as an incentive for holy living. In 1 Cor. 6:19, he uses the truth about being God’s temple as the reason why we should flee from sexual immorality. In 1 Cor. 3:16 Paul tells us not to defile the temple of God in whom the spirit of God dwells. In 2 Cor. 6:16 Paul brings up our being the temple as a reason why we should keep ourselves from idols. In the passage from 1 Peter that we looked at earlier, Peter uses the idea of the temple as a reason to praise God.

As we cooperate with God in building and being His temple, our attitude should be like that of David who, speaking of the temple said,

“Surely I will not go into the chamber of my house,

Or go up to the comfort of my bed;

I will not give sleep to my eyes

Or slumber to my eyelids,

Until I find a place for the Lord,

A dwelling place for the Mighty One of Jacob.

(Psalm 132:3-5)

This is exactly the attitude we should have. We have an imperative to actively strive, every day, to seek the establishment of God’s temple. This means putting into practice everything the temple represents, as well as never tiring in our attempts to help our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ to see, understand and live by the principles of the temple. Put another way, the way to build God’s temple is to be God’s temple as best we can, to put into practice what I call the “temple principles.” I’d like to mention three such temple principles.

First and foremost, notice that Paul wrote about the temple “having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets…” The behavior and teaching of the apostles and prophets, which has been recorded for us in scripture, must be the foundation stone of all our thinking and living. If it is not, then we are not building for God’s temple, we are building the Tower of Babel.

It is no coincidence that it was at the feast of Pentecost that the Spirit descended on the apostles. Pentecost was the feast which commemorated the giving of the law at Mount Sinai. The law was given to Moses before the people entered into the promised land. The purpose of the long Exodus period was so that the people’s lives and thinking could be permeated with God’s standards before they entered the promised land. Their wilderness sojourn had to be prolonged until they learned to submit to God’s standards. Similarly, God’s people today are in a kind of Exodus period, as I have already mentioned. We also have been given standards by which to govern our lives – standards which we must learn to love before we are fit for entry into the promised land of the Kingdom.

How strange that God’s Spirit is often pitted against God’s laws when it was at the very festival of the law that the Spirit came. The Spirit did not come to replace God’s laws, but to transform our heart so that we want to obey. If we do not have the Spirit, then we see God’s laws as bondage, as being burdensome, and we turn away from Biblical standards to our own feelings.

So that is the first ‘temple principle’: that God’s temple is built on the foundation of the apostles, prophets and Pentecost. Put another way, the spirit which was given at Pentecost, turns us to God’s laws which have been revealed by the apostles and prophets.

Now onto the second temple principle. If those who believe in Christ are the temple of God, then we should think corporately rather than individually. This is a difficult concept for a post-enlightenment Westerner to grasp. Three hundred years after the Enlightenment and it has almost become a truism that religion is fundamentally a solitary experience between the individual and God, or the individual and his feelings about God. Not for Paul, or any of the other writers of the New Testament, for whom the corporate life of God’s living temple was the paramount thing. In the Ephesians passage that I opened with, Paul spoke of the whole building, being fitted together. Those who believe in Christ should fit properly with the other members. As Paul instructed later in the same letter, “[endevour] to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” (Eph. 4:3) To have unity with the other living stones of the temple does not mean we have to all think the same or that we have to all agree on non-essential matters of theology. It means we have a far more stable foundation of unity than whether we happen to agree with each other. The unity is in Jesus, the capstone. However, this unity is not automatic, but something we must endevour to keep, as Paul put it. That is why Jesus said if you are offering a gift to God and there you remember that your brother has something against you, go and be reconciled first and then present your gift. To worship of God while neglecting one’s responsibilities to brothers and sisters in Christ, is like the kind of religion the Lord condemned in the opening of Isaiah’s prophecies: religion where the outward forms have been separated from the content.

Imagine each member of God’s temple being a stone which, together, form a large pyramid, with Jesus on the top as the capstone. In such a structure, if any two stones are not knitted together properly, the whole building will necessarily be unstable and eventually crumble.

Paul wrote the letter to the Galatians to address this subject of being knitted together. In Galatians chapter 2, Paul recounts the time when he had to rebuke Peter since Peter “withdrew and separated himself” (Gal. 2:12) from the other brethren. The issue that caused Peter’s withdrawal was the problem of the law. Paul goes on in his letter to the Galatians to talk about the law and justification by faith. Most people think that in Galatians Paul is simply talking about the fact that you can’t earn your salvation by good works; but this was not even an issue in those days since no one, not even hardcore Pharisees, ever imagined that they could earn their salvation, as recent scholarship has shown. Rather, when Paul spoke of justification by faith, he was talking about how you tell who is already a member of the renewed covenant family. Justification is not about how you become a member, it’s how you tell who already is a member; it’s not about how to get saved as who you eat with; it’s a corporate thing rather than merely an individual thing. (For a defense of this view of justification, see N. T. Wright What St. Paul Really Said.) Seen with this nuance in mind, Paul’s letter to the Galatians is not some theoretical dissertation on soteriology; rather, it was answering the problem that had arisen when certain members of the church withdrew and isolated themselves. Paul’s answer is, you can’t do that because we are all part of the same family. Thus, in chapter 6 of Galatians, Paul concludes with the practicalities of what it means to live as the family of God. We are told such things as “bear one another’s burdens” (Gal. 6:2) or “if a man is overtaken in any trespass, you who are spiritual restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness…” Finally, in Galatians 6:10m Paul tells them how it is important to do good in the world, but it is especially important to do good to those who belong to the household of faith (Gal. 6:10). Why is this? Simply that the stronger the love links between the different living stones in the temple, the more secure the whole temple will be.

Finally, if we are to live in such a way as to hasten the completion of God’s temple, we must live as light and live in the light. Only by living in this way, will we be able to be everything that the physical temple failed to be. Speaking about Jesus’ judgment on the physical temple, N. T. Wright wrote how the entire institution of the temple

had come to symbolize the injustice which characterized the society on the inside, and, on the outside, the rejection of the vocation to be the light of the world, the city set on a hill that would draw to itself all the peoples of the world. (The Challenge of Jesus, p. 44)

It is now our vocation to be the light of the world. As a community, as God’s corporate temple, we have the solemn injunction placed upon us that permeated all the covenants of the Bible: to be a people set apart, a people who show by their lives that we are called by the name of the Lord. Thus, Jesus says,

You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven (Mt. 5:16).

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