God’s Word for You
1 Corinthians 3:16-17 You are God’s tent
by Pastor Timothy Smith on Thursday, December 1, 2022
16 Do you not know that you yourselves are God’s temple, and that God’s Spirit lives in you? 17 If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him; for God’s temple is holy, and that is what you are.
Paul has just described those preachers whose work will be found to be useless on judgment day when it is burned away. Now Paul comes to a much more serious and destructive kind of preaching, the worst of all: This is preaching that destroys souls.
True Religion is Communion with God
To begin with, the apostle explains why this is so important. Each and every single believer is the temple of God. This shows that the true definition of religion is that it is essentially communion with God. Jesus said: “If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him and we will come to him and make our home with him” (John 14:23). So while Paul says that the Holy Spirit lives in our private temple, Jesus says that he and the Father live there, too. And this makes perfect sense because apart from the act of our salvation carried out by the Son of God alone on the cross, every other act of God that can be said of one person of the trinity can be said of each. Jesus also said, “If a man remains in me, I (remain) in him” (John 15:5). John the apostle wrote: “He is in the light and we have fellowship with one another” (1 John 1:7), and Paul also wrote: “Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). These verses do not tell us, as the pagans claim, that there is no difference between God and man. That is pantheism, which is at the root of the Christian Science Movement. Pantheism does not acknowledge God as the Creator, ruler or Savior, because it also denies creation as the Scriptures teach, and denies the concept of sin.
Another aspect of the communion with God that true religion teaches is that it rejects the false doctrine of Deism, a teaching that since the world was created, it has gone its own way without the Creator, who is removed from the world and does not interfere with or interact with the world. This was the view of many of America’s founding fathers, and while it has led to a highly moral stripe in American laws and customs, it does not make our country a Christian one, at least not by virtue of its founders, their beliefs, or their laws.
The Doctrine of the Mystical Union
But believers are God’s temple, Greek naos (ναὸς). In the Greek translation of the Old Testament, this is the word for the Holy Place, the inner tent of the sanctuary, where the bread and the candlestick were set (1 Kings 6:17; Ezekiel 41:15). Paul is not only saying that we have access to such a place, but that we have access to God, something unusual even with kings (Esther 1:14) but granted to us through faith (Romans 5:2) and given by the Holy Spirit (Ephesians 2:17). Even more than this, we ourselves are such a place, such a temple, the holy place where man meets God.
This happens within us, a state our theologians call the mystical union of God and man. God is essentially and graciously present in believers, through which those who are united with God in this way rejoice and are filled with comfort and peace, and are also constantly made more aware of God’s grace and certain of that grace, strengthened in sanctification, and preserved for eternal life. No intimate human friends can be so closely united as God with the believer. It is the joining of God with the human, not in the way Christ was a man taken into the essence of God, but that the believer finds God drawn closer to him, so that God is in us, joined with us, truly, inwardly. This is not mere assistance from God, but the inner working of his grace. Yet it is also short of any mixing or transforming the human essence of the Christian. Jesus prayed, “I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (John 17:22-23). Christ dwells in our hearts through faith (Ephesians 3:17) so that we may grasp “how wide and long and high and deep is the love of God, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that (we) may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:18-19).
Luther illustrated “in a crude way,” as he said, looking for the right words, this indwelling of God: “Christ lives in me. Christ is my form, which adorns my faith as color or light adorns a wall. This attachment to him causes me to be liberated from the terror of the law and of sin.” Or as he says in the same commentary: “Faith takes hold of Christ and has him present, enclosing him as the ring encloses the gem.”
Therefore, when we are teaching or preaching, we must take care:
1, not to obscure the gem of Christ in the ring of faith
2, not to draw attention away from Christ
3, not to replace the gem of Christ with any other
4, not to mar or damage the ring of faith so that the gem falls away
5, not to allow our own ring of faith to become tarnished or fall into disuse
6, not to trade it for anything else
The warning is clear: “If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him.” Do not hurt the faith of anyone. A parent who baptizes his child but then lets that child’s faith die by starving it of the gospel, of regular worship, of refusing to bring it even to Sunday school, is a parent who will have to answer for that dangerous and deadly sin. Will he perhaps escape as if through a fire? An unbelieving teacher who steps on the faith of his students will answer for his miserable, wicked, criminal words in eternity, for “God will destroy him.” A wife who heckles and belittles her husband’s faith and bullies him into skipping church will suffer grave punishment in hell, for “God will destroy her.”
But as for you, believing brother and sister in Christ, remember what you are. You are the temple of God; you are holy, that’s what you are. You are not just allowed in God’s tent or merely invited into God’s tent. You are God’s tent. He lives in you, dwells in you, gives you strength, gives you courage. Bless his holy name and be blessed, O Tent of God.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. To receive God’s Word for You via e-mail, please visit the St. Paul’s Lutheran Church website.