Tag Archives: holy places

Temples of God: The Lord is in His Holy Temple

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cloudsOne of the most beautiful promises of the New Testament is that God will come to live inside of us, his children. We, both individually and collectively, are made into temples of God:

Romans 8:9     You, however, are controlled not by the sinful nature but by the Spirit, if the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ.  10 But if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness.  11 And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you. 

1 Corinthians 3:16     Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you? 

1 Corinthians 6:19 Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; 

2 Corinthians 6:16 What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols? For we are the temple of the living God. As God has said: “I will live with them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they will be my people.”

Ephesians 2:21 In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. 

Colossians 1:27 To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. 

1 Peter 2:4     As you come to him, the living Stone—rejected by men but chosen by God and precious to him—  5 you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

According to the New Testament, the implications of this are that we are to be holy, set apart from “common” things, just as the Old Testament temple was a special, sanctified place. God lives in us! We aren’t meant for immorality. Christ in us, the hope of glory. We are meant for good, not evil. The sanctifying Spirit dwells in us. Because of that, we are to dedicate our bodies to God’s service. The church is the temple of God. Therefore, anything that we do to harm the church is an attack on God’s temple.

We need to recapture that feeling of awe, the recognition of the holiness that is ours, not because of our human efforts, but because the Creator of all has chosen to make a home within our hearts.

Assembly and Holy Places

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tab20All right, a little cajoling and we get some serious discussion going. Let’s continue our study of assembly in the Old Testament. Please join in, especially if you spot a mistake!

I want to look at the holy places that God appointed for worship: the tabernacle and the temple. In theory, the activities were to be the same in both. The basic activities (some of this taken from this website: THE ROUTINE SERVICE OF THE TABERNACLE) were:

  • Daily — The high priest was to replenish the oil-lamps of the seven-branch candlestick, and offer incense before the vail, every morning and evening: and on the great altar, he was to offer a lamb in sacrifice every morning and evening.
  • Weekly — On the Sabbath day, the daily sacrifice was to be doubled.
  • Monthly — On the first day of the month there was to be a large addition to the daily sacrifice. There were to be seven lambs, two young bullocks, and one ram, besides the daily lamb of the morning and evening; and these additional burnt offerings were to be accompanied by proportional meat offerings and wine offerings in the quantities specified (Num. 28:11-14) in addition to which, there was to be an offering of one kid of the goats for a sin offering.

In addition, there were annual services related to the feasts, which we discussed in the last post. As for the average worshiper, his interaction with the tabernacle had to do with what is seen in Numbers 29: “In addition to what you vow and your freewill offerings, prepare these for the LORD at your appointed feasts: your burnt offerings, grain offerings, drink offerings and fellowship offerings.” (Numbers 29:39) We see from later use (like Solomon, Daniel, etc.) that the Israelites understood that their prayers were to be directed toward this holy place. They also began to come to the temple to pray there (Luke 18:10). At some point, the Jews developed the practice of three daily times of prayer in the temple, one of which coincided with the evening sacrifice (Acts 3:1).

The primary purpose of the “holy places” was not for assembly, although assembly did take place there. How would you relate all of this to our day? [If you want to discuss “the priesthood of all believers” in relation to this, please include Exodus 19:6 in the discussion] Do the practices and commands surrounding the tabernacle and the temple teach us anything about our worship today, especially our coming together to worship?