The Temple Of God.

The Temple Of (The Biblical) God.When we hear St. Paul say in 1 Corinthians,  “you are the temple of God, and the spirit of God dwells in you“ we often imagine that he means each one of us is a temple. But that is not true. The “you” of 1 Corinthians 3:16 is not addressed to individuals but to the Church. It is the Church that constitutes the one temple, or “God’s building” as St. Paul had put it in verse 9. It is in the gathering together of his Church, his “called ones” (in Greek ecclesia) that the spirit of God dwells. And in this way the Church is his temple. And since we are dealing with the Biblical God, it is not a temple made of stones. The temple of this God is radically different from the temples of other gods of the ancient world. Those deities could be depicted in representative statues, which were housed in temples made of stone and built by the hands of men. They were attached to both a city and a king, who was the deity’s plenipotentiary. The God of the Bible is not like that. He has no statue, and he doesn’t speak to an earthly king in a palace or temple made of stone. In fact, his first interaction with a people is through Abraham, who is not a king, but rather a Shepherd, a Bedouin sheik (see Genesis 13). So when Paul addresses the Corinthian Church in the first century, it is with this understanding of temple - a dwelling place of the spirit of God. Not a building made of stone, but rather anywhere God‘s people are gathered around his word, which is the expression of his will, and led by his spirit. Let’s hear how St. Paul, in chapter 3 of 1 Corinthians, uses the metaphor of architecture -  “you are God’s building” and expands on it to show that the work one does in building up the Church can have a permanent, lasting value, or be considered utterly worthless.Photo by Brett Jordan.