The Old Testament presents the temple in Jerusalem as the place where God manifested His presence with Israel. Psalm 11:4 puts it directly, “The Lord is in His holy temple.” As noted last week, the New Testament picks up the imagery of a temple as the place where the Spirit of God dwells. A major difference is that in the Old Testament the temple was a physical building, but in the New Testament the temple is composed of Christian believers.
Two passages in 1 Corinthians refer to believers as the temple of the Holy Spirit, but with a subtle difference between the passages. We looked last week at 1 Corinthians 3:16–17. That passage tells us that believers gathered in worship are collectively God’s temple. This week we look at 1 Corinthians 6:19–20 in which our bodies as individual Christians are said to be temples of the Holy Spirit. The difference is found in changing the reference to a temple in the singular in this week’s passage instead of the plural reference in last week’s passage. When we are together we are God’s temple and when we are apart we continue individually to be temples of His Spirit.
Temples of the Holy Spirit
This truth comes at the climax of a larger passage that addresses a problem that is as true today as it was in ancient Corinth, namely, sexual immorality. Against a cavalier attitude that thoughtlessly indulges the body in sinful pursuits, the awareness of Christians that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit should give us serious pause when tempted to go with the tide of the times.
As Christians, wherever we go and whatever we do, we involve God’s temple — our very bodies. Indulging physical appetites in ways that are outside God’s intention is nothing short of a defilement of this temple. If Christians carried a deeply grained conviction that our bodies are God’s temple it would go a long way toward raising the moral climate of our times. Faced with temptation we should be able to say, “I cannot do that because my body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, and I do not wish to grieve Him.”
Daily awareness of being God’s temple would not only safeguard us against acts of sin against our bodies but would also deliver us from wanting to know how close we might imitate an unconverted society and its questionable morals and yet still enjoy God’s favor upon our lives.
The physical body
A theology of the physical body must include at least three ideas that flow out of 1 Corinthians 6:20. First sinful indulgences involving the physical body desecrate God’s temple. A truth ingrained in attitudes toward the temple in the Old Testament is that the temple was made a holy place by its dedication to God and His consequent presence manifested in it.
The second idea to be woven into a Christian’s theology of the body is recognition that we have been bought with a price, the precious blood of Christ. As a result of the purchase we are no longer our own. We belong to Him, body, soul, mind and spirit.
The third strand in a theology of the human body is that involving it in sinful activities amounts to failure to glorify God through our bodies. Not only must Christians avoid demeaning their bodies as if desecrating a holy temple, but positively we must be vigilant to adopt behaviors that actually glorify God.
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