Ezra 4:24-6:22 / 1 Corinthians 3:5-23 / Psalm 29 / Proverbs 20:26-27
Humans live in houses, animals live in holes and dens, but where does God live? In the Old Testament the answer to that question varied. Yes, He lives in Heaven, but also God is everywhere. When the people who descended from Israel (Jacob) left Egypt, God lived in a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. When the tabernacle was built in the desert, God lived above the ark, between the Cherubim. And again, when Solomon built the beautiful temple at Jerusalem, God lived above the ark, between the Cherubim.
1 Corinthians 3:16 NLT states Don’t you realize that all of you together are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God lives in you?
I had not before noticed that all of us together create a temple. I know the verse from 1 Corinthians 6:19 NLT states Don’t you realize that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and was given to you by God?
We have talked on my Wheat or Chaff channel about the fact that God came upon men and women in the Old Testament and up until Jesus Christ incarnated (became a man) on the earth. Once Jesus arrived, He was the first in Whom the Spirit of God resided. There was no opportunity for God’s Spirit to live within us until after Jesus’s crucifixion, burial, resurrection, and ascension.
Jesus told His disciples for weeks that He was going to be leaving them and going back to His Father, but they had no frame of reference for such things. They didn’t understand what Jesus meant. Jesus told them in John 16:5-7 NLT this: “But now I am going away to the one who sent me, and not one of you is asking where I am going. Instead, you grieve because of what I’ve told you. But in fact, it is best for you that I go away, because if I don’t, the Advocate won’t come. If I do go away, then I will send him to you.”
How could it be better that Jesus went away after He and the disciples had spent the past 3 years together forming friendships? They probably thought they would continue to live in community for the rest of their lives. We know from scripture that they also believed Jesus had come to set up an earthly kingdom to set them free from Roman oppression. That, however, was not Jesus’s plan.
Jesus knew why He had come; to reconcile us in relationship to His Father. I say reconcile because when Adam and Eve sinned, we lost our intimate friendship with God. It was always the plan of the Father to provide a way for us to be in close communion with Him again.
The advantage of Jesus’s leaving was that just as He had lived with Holy Spirit living within Him, He was going to send Holy Spirit to live within His followers. A new day was coming! The power that was around the disciples was now going to live in them.
Why is that an advantage? Because Jesus was one person while on earth, not able to be everyone at once as God’s Spirit is able to be. We also are only able to be in one place at a time as we carry God’s Spirit. However, if ALL of God’s followers are filled with Holy Spirit, we can carry and give the Spirit to anyone with whom we come in contact. Score!
So, our bodies are a temple, and we as Christ’s body on earth are also a corporate temple. Talk about power on earth! Let’s keep our personal temple as well as the temple of Christ’s body, as a whole, free from sin, and let’s treat these temples with the love and grace of Jesus.
