God's Temple

I occasionally collect my thoughts and pester my siblings by posting some meandering biblical-theological ruminations on our extended family blog. They generally consist of wild speculations and ridiculous over-generalizations (on a narrow set of grossly repetitive themes). I'll try sharing one on here:

We are God's temple. Cosmos, city, church, family, couple, friendship, and individual human, each entity is best understood as a temple.

Theologians often note that the Old Testament tabernacle and temple plan reflected the rest of God's creation, like a mini cosmos. Moses and Solomon incorporated motifs from heaven and earth, garden and city, land and sea into the divinely dictated layout, decorations, and utensils. Meredith Kline’s writings repeatedly emphasize our human status as priest-kings, designed to minister within God's creation as the bearers of God's glory, made in his image and likeness for this one purpose. John H. Walton (OT professor at Wheaton and author of the Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament) argues that most cultures around Israel understood something to exist in so far as it had a divine function (i.e. served the gods) rather than in so far as it had spatial-temporal properties (as our modern minds naturally tend to think). This fundamentally different ontological perspective alters the way that we perceive and value ourselves and the world. It understands the entire universe to be, at its most basic level, a temple designed to display glory and enable worship. And God gave humans charge over it, placing us at the center of it all.

Not surprisingly, many ancient peoples had some concept of these things, but Israel received the truth regarding this Creator from God himself. As God relates it, He built the first temple, fashioning the heavens and the hearth to declare His glory. He then made us to serve him in the midst of the glorious creation, giving us the job of enjoying and bringing out the best in everything that surrounds us. As priests, we display His glory in every task and interaction that we undertake with each other or our physical environment. These principles underlie the Reformed doctrines of vocation and the priesthood of all believers. God at Work, a little book by Gene Veith, explains this wonderfully. Recognizing all of creation as a temple and we as its priests also brings to mind a string of other voguish concepts such as "redeeming everything for Christ" or "living sacramentally" or "living incarnationally." Serving as the "hands of God" (or recognizing God behind every ordinary blessing) is how Veith puts it. These priestly connections and responsibilities grow even more clear and profound as we look at how all this temple imagery plays out in the rest of scripture.

Skipping over the rest of the Old Testament (and essential material that comes to mind from Ezekiel, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Zachariah), we'll jump straight to the New Testament for a highlights version wrap-up. Christ, in his incarnation, is identified clearly as the temple. Christ is said by John to have come down and "tabernacled among us." He promised to tear down the temple and rebuild it in three days, linking the temple directly with his own flesh and blood. And we are the body of Christ. Feasting upon him and united with him, we live, die, and are raised into the heavenly realms with him. Paul identifies each of our bodies, then, as a temple of the Holy Spirit. We are living sacrifices. Peter says that we are living stones being built into a temple upon Christ who is the chief corner stone. (Elsewhere, Christ is called the stone that the builders rejected, reminding us that a rival building project is underway.) Being members of Christ's body and parts of the Divine temple mean the same thing, further reinforcing the connection between body and temple. Finally, when John sees the New Jerusalem descending from heaven, its gates are the twelve tribes of Israel and its foundations are the twelve apostles of the church. Within that city built of living sacrifices, however, there is no sun and no temple because our triune and incarnate God will be its light and its fullness of glory.

God help us, even now, to see, speak and think as priests within our own bodies, our churches, marriages, families, schools, neighborhoods, and nation. No matter where we turn or what we touch, if it doesn't display glory and enable true worship, we haven't recognized it for what it is.