The Temple Is Us
6 min read
9 Within your temple, O God, we meditate on your unfailing love.
10 Like your name, O God, your praise reaches to the ends of the earth; your right hand is filled with righteousness.
— Psalm 48:9-10
The New Testament corrects the Jewish misunderstanding about the temple of God. And so Christians today tend to understand the that the temple of God is the believer (actually, Christ in the believer). But that is not quite right, either. That understanding of the temple of God as the believer has been influenced by “the expressive individualism of modern culture” (Tim Keller).
In other words, people today tend to read and understand the Bible with respect to their individual selves, the “me, myself, and I.”
But the apostle Paul refers to the local church as the temple of God (1 Corinthians 3:16-17). And Paul is not referring to the church as a building or an institution; he is not referring to the church as an individual, either. Most of the time, Paul is referring to the church as the people of God—the community of believers who are bound together by their covenant of faith in Christ Jesus.
The presence of God is in that “temple.” The presence of God is in that community of believers—the local church.
Of course, the presence of God is in the individual believer through the Holy Spirit, too. But the Bible doesn’t really talk about that so much. Most of the time, the Bible is talking to the community about the community. And that’s really important, because if we don’t get that, we will misread the Bible.
And maybe it is because Christians are a sinful and broken people too that even theologians have tended to emphasize the significance of the universal (big “C”) Church over the local church. But it is in and through the local church that the plan and the purpose of God in Christ Jesus unfolds in our daily lives and in this world.
And so, it is a bit mind-blowing that these two verses should capture the nature of the relationship between us (as individuals), us (as a local church community), us (as the universal Church), and God so completely.
It is in the community of believers that we as individuals come to understand how wide and long and high and deep is the love of God in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 3:18) and learn to love one another as the Body of Christ (Ephesians 4:11-16). And the result of God’s work in us is that we grow and mature to fill the earth with the glory of God in Jesus’s name, through God-fearing, God-honoring, God-worshiping, God-loving communities and families—the church.
God’s right hand is filled with righteousness. God’s right hand is Christ. God’s right hand is the Body of Christ—the local church.
Father, as far as the heavens are above the earth, Your ways are higher than our ways, Your thoughts than our thoughts. Help us not to get caught up in the unknowable things that You do. But help us to live and to love here and now to build up Your kingdom, Your church, GCC and Canvas, and our families. Use us to encourage and not to discourage, to bless and not to curse, to build up and not to tear down. In Jesus’s name. Amen.