You Are A Temple

Yahweh descended from Sinai to take up residence in the tabernacle, to make His home in the midst of His people. Though access to His house was limited, He intended the tabernacle to be a house of hospitality. In the house were a table of showbread for food, a lampstand to shed light, an altar of incense that represented prayer. Bread, light, and incense are God’s gifts to Israel.

Priests entered to minister in the Holy Place, to eat the bread of the presence, to share in the sacrificial meat. Three times a year, Israel drew near to Yahweh’s house to eat, drink, and rejoice before Him. He didn’t come to exclude; He came to welcome.

Jesus fulfills the law in precisely this way: He tabernacles among us to open up God’s table to sinners, to welcome the blind and lame and deaf, to give His own flesh as the bread of God. In Jesus, the barriers that kept Israel at a distance from Yahweh are removed. He sits face-to-face with sinners in Galilean villages, Yahweh incarnate eating and drinking and rejoicing with His people.

When Paul tells the Corinthians that they are temples of the Spirit, he emphasizes the restrictions: Because they are holy space, claimed by God in the Spirit, they are not to use the members of their bodies in ungodly ways. They are not to join the members of Christ to prostitutes, but to remain in one Spirit with Christ (1 Corinthians 6:12-20).

But the entire theology of the sanctuary comes into play. When the Spirit consecrates an individual as a temple of the Spirit, that person becomes a locus of hospitality – offering the bread, light, incense, and all the other gifts of the sanctuary to his neighbors. When a household is indwelt by the Spirit, it is remade into an image of God’s own house, a place of hospitality, prayer, light, life. When a church receives the Spirit, it is opened as God’s house to offer Christ the Bread, Christ the Light, Christ the intercessor to the world.