1 Corinthians 3:16

Most of us lower our voices when we walk into the church building. Nobody taught us to do it. Something about the quiet and the empty pews does it on its own. We call it the house of God out of habit, and the habit runs deep.

For the last two weeks we’ve been in the part of Ezekiel where a man walks through a temple with a measuring reed. Every gate. Every wall. Every chamber. God handed a people living in captivity a set of plans, and the plans said something they needed to hear. He still intended to dwell among them.

Then Paul asks a question centuries later that ought to stop us where we stand. “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” (1 Corinthians 3:16, ESV).

Not the building. Us.

Here’s what’s easy to miss. Paul isn’t pointing at us one at a time. In the Greek the word for you is plural and the temple is singular. Many people. One building. The vision Ezekiel saw measured out in cubits came to rest on people. God’s plan was never masonry. The stone and cedar were always pointing at what he intended to build out of us.

Paul says it again to the Ephesians, and he tells us what God is doing with the building. “in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit” (Ephesians 2:21-22, ESV).

Built together. Joined. The work is going on right now, and the material is people. The man who gets there early to turn the lights on. The family nobody has seen in a month.

That ought to change how we treat each other. It’s easy to be short with somebody we’ve written off as just another person in the room. It’s harder when we remember what God is making out of them.

It changes the week too. The Spirit doesn’t wait in the parking lot while we go be someone else. Whatever we walk into on Monday, we walk in carrying him.

The part of Ezekiel we’ve been reading ends with a temple measured down to the cubit. John’s vision ends somewhere else entirely. “And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb” (Revelation 21:22, ESV).

Think about that for a second. A prophet in exile was shown a building. A prophet on Patmos looked for one and there wasn’t any. By then there’s nothing left to measure. There’s no holy place to visit and no common place to go home to. There’s only God, and his people, and no distance between them.

That’s where all of this has been headed the whole time. The measuring, the building, the waiting. One day we won’t go to the temple. We’ll be home in it.