Some of the temples around the world have incredible architecture. Massive buildings with huge rooms and high ceilings, and often having ridiculously ornate decorations - with gold everywhere, sometimes even jewels, and filled with incredible paintings and statues. They try to evoke feelings of magnificence and awe.

Temples are designed to impress. To impress the god they are built for. To say, “This is how great we think you are. We have offered up all this valuable stuff to build a temple for you”. But also to impress people I think - there is definitely some “our god is greater than your god, and we have the temple to prove it” going on with some of them.

Yahweh, the real god used to live in a temple like that. In Jerusalem.

But his actual home is in heaven. And from what the Bible says, there is a temple there that would make anything we could build look like a child’s cubby house. Like something a five year old made from cardboard boxes and blankets.
But even so... Even though the man made temple was just a child’s copy of something way more magnificent… God lived in it.

Wow.

That says more about him than it says about how great the temple was. For sure he appreciated the heart of the people who were building it for him to live in. Until then he had been camping in a tent. (A very special tent, but still... a tent).
Interestingly too. He told them to make that tent. He gave them very detailed instructions on how to build it. From what it was to be made from to how it was to be laid out and furnished.
And then he came to visit. God literally lived in a tent so he could talk to his people through Moses and the priests who followed after him.

If you have your Bible handy, turn to the part where God tells them to build a temple for him.
That’s interesting isn’t it... it’s not there. There isn’t one. God never told man to build him a temple.
He told them to build the tabernacle, the tent… but not a temple.
In Haggai 1 he did tell them to go back and re-build the temple which Solomon had decided to build (without a command from God, but with his approval).
Solomon had decided to build the temple after he had spent 14 years building a palace for himself. Then he thought, “I shouldn’t be living in such an ornate palace while God lives in a tent”. Instead of ripping the palace down, he built an even more ornate temple for God to live in.

Now, I’m not denying that God blessed their attempt anyway. And that the temple glorified him. And I’m not saying that they did something wrong.
But what I am saying is that it seems to me that temples are something men decide to make for their god to live in. Not something that their god demands from them.

And I wonder how much the decision was influenced by Solomon’s desire to build flashy buildings, by his desire to show off his own immense wealth. I wonder how much it was influenced by the amazing temples that had been built to other gods which were worshipped in the countries around him. And to say, “ours is better than yours”.

Yeshua said something interesting about the temple one day. “See these things? Not one stone will be left on another.”
To Yeshua, the temple was just a building. Just stuff.
God was over living in buildings made by man. Stephen even reminded everyone in his famous speech of Acts 7 - The Most High does not live in houses made by men.

In the New Testament, God was doing a new thing. No more man made houses, no more man made tents.
From now on God was only going to live in temples that he had made himself.

In 1 Corinthians 3 Paulus tells the Corinthians that they are the temple of God, and that God lives among them.

In English this can be taken two ways, but the “you” here is plural. I don’t think he is saying that the individual Corinthians are each temples of God, but that as a group they were a temple of God.

A church is not a building. There are hundreds of sermons about the church being the people, not the building. And they are correct. The building is just a place where the church gets together every now and then.

God lives in churches, but not in buildings.
So let’s focus on building churches and not put so much emphasis on building buildings.