1 Corinthians 6:19 “Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own?”
God views our bodies in a light that is completely different to the way natural man sees it, for in the above quoted passage of scripture the apostle Paul teaches us that our bodies are in fact God’s temple. The Lord Jesus was the first one to introduce us to this concept when He referred to His own body as a temple (John 2:19), and the reason He did that was because when Jesus came to the earth, for the first time God dwelt in a physical human body. Before the Lord Jesus came to the earth, under the old covenant God’s presence resided in a temple made with human hands (Exodus 25:22). But at our Lord’s crucifixion the veil of that temple was torn in two, and so God’s presence no longer resides in a temple made with human hands. God could not dwell in the bodies of the old covenant saints however, because none of them had been born-again yet and they were still spiritually dead people. The new covenant saints however are born-again, because of which they are spiritually alive unto God, and so God now dwells within each one of His children, just as He dwelt in Jesus when our Lord walked this earth. This is the reason that the Lord requires us to present our bodies holy and acceptable to Him, because our bodies are in fact His temple in the earth today. The reason that our bodies are God’s temple is because our bodies are the temple of our own spirits, and the Holy Spirit dwells within our spirits.
Acts 7:44-45 “Our fathers had the tabernacle of witness in the wilderness, as He appointed, instructing Moses to make it according to the pattern that he had seen, (45) which our fathers, having received it in turn, also brought with Joshua into the land possessed by the Gentiles, whom God drove out before the face of our fathers until the days of David.”
The concept of our body being the temple of God was never taught under the old covenant, because as we have already mentioned, it was not possible for the old covenant saints to have the Spirit of God dwelling in them as they were not yet born-again. In the Old Testament there were numerous types and shadows recorded of that which is experienced in reality by the saints in the New Testament. As mentioned in the above quoted passage of scripture, one example of a type and shadow of that which was to come was the tabernacle that God instructed Moses to construct, which was not a permanent structure, for it was a tent (Exodus 26:7). We have already seen earlier that the Holy Spirit refers to our mortal bodies as tents. And so we see that just as the first temple of God was a tent, so the current temple of God (the bodies of the saints) is also a tent, for our bodies are mortal and not immortal. Under the old covenant God used the first tabernacle while the Israelites were in the wilderness before they entered into their promised land i.e. Israel. And so in the same manner God dwells within our mortal bodies while we are pilgrims in this world, before we enter into our promised land i.e. the New Jerusalem.
Michael E.B. Maher
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