Nikki and Colleen talk about how believers are built on the cornerstone of Christ and are the temple of God in the New Covenant. Transcription by Gwen Billington.
Colleen: Welcome to Former Adventist podcast. I’m Colleen Tinker.
Nikki: And I’m Nikki Stevenson.
Colleen: Last week we looked at Ephesians 2:14-18, where Paul moved from teaching us how God individually saves us and makes us new creatures in Christ, to discussing the fact that we are not saved to be singular. We are saved to become part of what Paul calls “one new man in Christ.” We former Adventists are not spiritual Israel. We’re simply depraved humans, just like every other person, until God brings us to life and makes us alive in Jesus. Because Jesus fulfilled the law in His body on the cross, both Jews and Gentiles are reconciled to God in Jesus, not by means of honoring the law, not by the Ten Commandments. We learned as Adventists that our life’s goal was to help Jesus defeat Satan by following Jesus’ example in avoiding sin and keeping the law. This chapter in Ephesians, though, tells us something different. Jesus, not the law, is our connection with God. When we believe and trust Jesus, we’re made alive spiritually, and we’re united with God by Jesus’ resurrection life, and we’re also united with each other in Christ. Today we’re going to be talking about the next four verses in this chapter, where Paul uses a new metaphor and compares believers to a building being built into a temple for the Lord. First, though, I want to say that we love hearing from you. If you have questions or comments, please email us at formeradventist@gmail.com. You can sign up for our weekly Proclamation! email at proclamationmagazine.com, and you can find links to our online magazine and our Former Adventist YouTube channel. You can also donate to Life Assurance Ministries by using the donate tab on that site. Now, don’t forget to register for the 2021 FAF Conference. It will be online only this year because of COVID, but it will be free of charge, although we welcome donations. We will be offering live teaching online and breakout sessions by Zoom for those who register. We’re really excited to say that Phil Johnson from Grace to You will be our featured guest for this conference. So please email formeradventist@gmail.com if you wish to participate, and send us your mailing address and your name. So now, we’re going to look at this passage, the very end of Ephesians 2. And, Nikki, I have a question for you.
Nikki: Okay.
Colleen: When you were an Adventist, what did you think it meant to be built into a temple where God dwells?
Nikki: When I thought of being built into a temple, I always thought about my body and my character.
Colleen: Okay.
Nikki: And so, I was to make life choices that made me worthy of God’s visitation.
Colleen: Oh, that sounds familiar [laughter].
Nikki: [Laughter.] I say visitation because there was no permanent indwelling in my previous worldview. He came and He went. So for me, being built into a temple for God to dwell in was a lot like how Ellen White talks about “Christ formed in you.”
Colleen: Oh, yeah.
Nikki: If I lived a life that was worthy of Him coming and participating in my days and in my moments with me, He’d come. And if I didn’t, I would grieve Him, and He would leave. It’s interesting because I never would have said that I thought you had to live a healthy lifestyle in order to be worthy of God. I wouldn’t have thought that your lifestyle had anything to do with your morality, but then if you bring up this matter of being a temple of God’s, what I believed kind of switches –
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: – because I believed that if you didn’t live a healthy lifestyle and you didn’t make godly choices, and I have air quotes around “godly” because they really were connected to the Adventist health message more than anything – so if you were smoking or drinking or whatever, then you were less moral and you were less deserving of God’s presence and less likely to have it. You had to give up the world –
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: – to be worthy of Him visiting you. And then as Christ is formed in you, that’s your hope of glory.
Colleen: [Laughter.] Yes! Whatever that meant!
Nikki: [Laughter.] If we were having this discussion in the context of the church being built into the temple, I definitely would have thought about the remnant 144,000. I would have seen that as God adding the worthy personal temples, the people who were making those good choices, adding them to the 144,000, and that’s how that was being built up.
Colleen: Oh-h-h. That’s interesting. You know, that whole business of the 144,000 and the remnant and who’s worthy and who’s going to make it was always just a batch of vagaries to me. I mean, like, how do you know? Nobody could ever tell me for sure who the 144,000 were. Nobody could tell me for sure if I really would end up being part of the remnant. Nobody could tell me for sure how to make sure I was saved! Except that I had to repress sin, get over it, stop doing it, keep the law, and be good, and you know, that was just – from day-to-day I knew I was failing at that. So how so you get built up into a temple of God? I mean, what you were saying reminds me of what I hear people say about the Sabbath. “Oh, no,” you know, you’ll hear Adventists say to people who are not Adventist, “Oh, no, you don’t have to keep the Sabbath to be saved. I don’t have to keep the Sabbath to be saved.” Well, fine. What happens if you quit keeping the Sabbath? They just feel like if they gave up the Sabbath, they couldn’t be saved. But it’s like the same thing with the temple. “Oh, no, smoking isn’t something I have to give up to be saved,” or “Drinking isn’t something I have to give up to be saved,” but if I don’t, will I be saved? I mean, you can’t have it both ways.
Nikki: I never was aware of the fact that I had both thoughts in my head.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: I just didn’t.
Colleen: Because we lived with dissonance. It was endemic in our Adventist worldview; we lived with dissonance. And you know what else? Adventism has learned over the decades, more and more I might add, how Christians talk about salvation. They’ve even learned how former Adventists talk about salvation relative to Adventism. And Adventism is changing the way it uses language. Since Dale Ratzlaff wrote Sabbath in Crisis back in the ’80s, in the subsequent decades they’ve become more and more clear about saying to Christians, “Oh, no, we don’t have to keep the Sabbath to be saved. We keep the Sabbath to show we love God.” But if you ask them, “Would you be saved if you gave up the Sabbath?” that would be a different question.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Same with all this business of building up the temple. But the fact is, if you can’t be saved by what you do, you can’t lose your salvation by what you do either. Salvation is about being alive or dead, belief or unbelief. It’s not about whether or not we’re doing physical activities. Now, our physical activities will change once we believe. It won’t be some sort of doing this as an act of grace or an act of obtaining God’s grace or maintaining God’s grace. It’s completely different.
Nikki: You know, as an Adventist, I would have said that I don’t have to keep the Sabbath to be saved, but those words would not have meant I don’t have to be moral to be saved. What I would have meant by that is simply that the Sabbath wasn’t on that list of morality, of the moral things I had to do in order to be saved.
Colleen: That’s interesting, Nikki.
Nikki: It was just the evidence that I was maintaining that other more. It was like a separate list. But I would have said that you would lose your salvation if you kept the Sabbath and then gave it up. I don’t know what I would have said about somebody who never kept the Sabbath. That was a mystery to me because Christians who were not Adventist, I knew, I knew they knew God.
Colleen: That’s so interesting. See, what I would have said about them is what Ellen White essentially said, that when the last Sunday law comes and the final cry goes out, that those Christians who are keeping Sunday with earnestness of heart and sincerity will see the truth and will come to the Sabbath, so that at the final day, those who are saved will keep it.
Nikki: And then I want to say, what’s the point of having the Seventh-day Adventist organization then?
Colleen: Because someone is going to have to tell all those Sunday-keepers about the Sabbath because there’s going to be a Sunday law, and the Sunday law is proof that Adventists are right – I think. [Laughter.] We lived in confusion, Nikki. It’s no wonder this made no sense. Well, I want to say also that the way you were explaining how you understood being built up into a temple of God really is rooted, again, in Ellen White. I have just a few brief little quotes from her. It was interesting as I was looking for quotes about this whole subject, it was hard to find some that specifically addressed this idea of being built up into a temple for the Lord in a way that was consistent or that made sense. But I did find some. On this one, I found it in a quote from the book Our Father Cares, which is a compilation. It was addressing this very passage in Ephesians. In that book, this passage, Ephesians 2:19 and 20, is quoted, and then these are Ellen’s comments on that passage: “The Lord is making experiments on human hearts through the exhibition of His mercy and abundant grace.” I want to say, stop right there. What’s an experiment on a human heart? And what’s an exhibition of His mercy and abundant grace. This has nothing to do with seeing the gospel of Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection and coming to faith.
Nikki: Uh-uh.
Colleen: This is saying, God is working on all of us. It’s sort of an external power, making experiments. “He is effecting transformation so amazing that Satan” – once again, it’s all about Satan in Ellen’s writings –
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: – “Satan stands viewing them as a fortress impregnable to his sophistries and delusions. They’re to him an incomprehensible mystery. The angels of God look on with astonishment and joy that fallen men, once children of wrath, are through the training of Christ developing characters after the divine similitude, to be sons and daughters of God, to act an important part in the occupations and pleasures of heaven.” What does she mean?
Nikki: Wow. So, first of all I want to say, when I became a Christian, I had no idea how much we actually don’t know about Satan –
Colleen: That’s true.
Nikki: – because Ellen told us even what he thought and felt. And the other thing, she says that they’re developing characters so that they can be sons of God?
Colleen: Yes! Yes, exactly what she says. That is not true at all! We’re sons of God when we trust Jesus, are born again, and adopted by Him. It’s all an act of God! We don’t become sons of God by what we’re doing.
Nikki: We’re born of God.
Colleen: Oh! And that “divine similitude” thing. That’s like “propensities to sin” and “the divine similitude.”
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: I mean, her words are just – I’m just so thankful we have the Bible now, with the Bible words. [Laughter.]
Nikki: Yeah. [Laughter.]
Colleen: Now, this was interesting to me because it actually is a comment that says what you were saying. This is from Testimonies for the Church, Volume 2. It’s just a sentence, but it says so much. “The lack of stability in regard to the principles of health reform is a true index of their character and their spiritual strength.” Well, is it no wonder that Adventists, without even understanding where it’s coming from, have so much guilt about what they eat and about their lifestyle? For them, lifestyle and eating is part of their religion, in spite of the fact they try to pawn it off as not that, but health. This is about spirituality, at the bottom line. If it weren’t, it wouldn’t have so much force. And then finally, this quote is one I read last week, but it fits so well with this. There are extra sentences that apply. But I’m going to start with the part of the quote I read last week because it’s just so clear what she believed. “We are God’s workmanship, and His word declares that we are fearfully and wonderfully made. He has prepared this living habitation for the mind. It is curiously wrought, a temple which the Lord Himself has fitted up for the indwelling of His Holy Spirit. The mind controls the whole man.” Now, right there, Nikki, we’ve just been reading what Paul says about being built into a temple for the Lord, and she identifies the temple as the mind, the individual minds of people. She goes on, “All our actions, good or bad, have their source in the mind. It is the mind that worships God and allies us to heavenly beings, yet many spend all their lives without becoming intelligent in regard to the casket, the human body, that contains this treasure. As the interest of the student is awakened and he is led to see the importance of physical culture, much can be done by the teacher to secure proper development and right habits. Since the mind and the soul find expression through the body, both mental and spiritual vigor are in great degree dependent upon physical strength and activity. Whatever promotes physical health promotes the development of a strong mind and a well-balanced character. Without health” – now, get this – “without health, no one can as distinctly understand or as completely fulfill his obligations to himself, his fellow human beings, or to his Creator. Therefore, the health should be as faithfully guarded as the character. A knowledge of physiology and hygiene should be the basis of all educational effort.”
Nikki: It makes me think of those chakra posters, with the body sitting on the floor and different levels of enlightenment making its way up to the mind and all of the vegetarianism that goes along with that culture. It works really well together, doesn’t it?
Colleen: Absolutely. In fact, once again I want to recommend Cheryl Granger’s article from the 2014 Proclamation!, From Where Does the Adventist Health Message Come? It really is a New Age message. Vegetarianism, in Scripture, has nothing to do with spirituality, but in Adventism it does, and in a lot of the New Age religions it does. You were not far afield from your Adventist milieu in thinking that this passage had something to do with character development and the way you observed the behaviors that were supposed to be moral.
Nikki: I want to clarify. I wouldn’t have said that this passage taught that, because I don’t know that I even remember reading this passage. I just knew the language of Adventism: “Oh, your body’s a temple. Why would you put a dead animal in your temple?”
Colleen: Oh, my goodness. To dispel any more mystery, Nikki, would you read these four verses for us, so we know what we’re talking about? Ephesians 2:19-22.
Nikki: “So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints, and are of God’s household, having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole building, being fitted together, is growing into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together into a dwelling of God in the Spirit.”
Colleen: Thank you. You know, what’s so interesting to me about this, and just thinking about your initial response to being built into a temple for the Lord and reading those horrifying Ellen White quotes, I realized that my Adventist worldview really was very self-centered. When I thought “temple of God,” like you, I thought mostly of my personal body –
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: – which was always discouraging. [Laughter.] But then, I did know that the Bible taught that the church was a temple of God as well, but it was very vague to me, and I wouldn’t have been able to talk about how that even was relevant to me really, because it all seemed to depend on the individual temple of God holiness and what I put into it and how I disciplined it. In fact, I was just remembering that after I had my knee replacement I was pondering how a person who has not an ounce of athletic ability has ended up with a knee replacement of all things, I realized it was because I had spent my life trying to maintain my “temple of God” by doing things that I really wasn’t fitted to do, like excessive running and excessive dieting that amounted to anorexia and sub-nutrition. That was all an outgrowth from my obsession with the health message. And when I look at this passage, I’m realizing that Paul is talking about something completely different. In this passage, he is talking about the church, the collective Body of Christ into which we are placed when we trust Jesus and are born again and are baptized by the Spirit into the Body of Christ. This is a reality I didn’t know anything about as an Adventist. This is a collective Body that he’s talking about here. So, Nikki, you were talking to me about this passage before we started to record. Would you like to share some of the thoughts you had about verse 19?
Nikki: Sure. There were a couple things. So he says here that they are no longer strangers, and we know from last week that he had just told the Gentiles that they were strangers to the covenant of promise. And I found his choice of words there, “stranger,” I found that fascinating. They were always included in the Abrahamic covenant. They just didn’t know it. They were strangers to it. They were unaware. But God had always planned to graft in the Gentiles through the Abrahamic covenant, and he says they are no longer strangers because of the blood of Christ.
Colleen: Wow.
Nikki: If you’re going to have the bloodless atonement – just on the side – you’re going to lose a lot of rich doctrine. You’re going to lose all of the benefits that come from being covered by the blood of Christ. They’ll never see it if they’re not willing to look at it. So they’ve been brought near, and he says here that they are of God’s household, and the Greek work there means “of one’s family,” and it’s intimate.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: And I was thinking about that and the fact that this is a fundamental change in our identity, with unavoidable and profound trickle-down ramifications. And I emphasize “unavoidable” because when you’re coming out of Adventism and you are a new believer and you’re placed in the household of God, you’re born again and you’re seeing truth for the first time, you’re being convicted in new ways, and you’re feeling your loyalties kind of torn between what you know to be true and what God’s called you to and the pull to not enter into Babylon, shall we say?
Colleen: Uh-huh, yeah.
Nikki: And the anxiety of disappointing our family. We don’t anticipate that because we don’t anticipate, I think – I should say I didn’t anticipate the sense of loyalty and newness and shift in me that came from following Christ. We now have a new parentage. We have a new Father, and with a new Father come new expectations for us.
Colleen: That’s a great point.
Nikki: We now represent a new name in the world, and that means something. It’s not just, like, your initiation rites into a club. You’re an ambassador of Christ when you’re born again and you bear His name into the world. And so there is all of this newness that comes with being this new creature we’ve just read about, being created in Christ, and now being a part of the household of God and how that changes our very identity.
Colleen: You know, Nikki, you’re making me think of that day I adopted my sons, you know, and they were adults. But there is such a distinct difference in identity when you become adopted into people that are not part of your natural household. Even though we had the same last name, “Tinker,” I hadn’t been their legal mother, and when I became their legal mother, we all three experienced a new identity in public, in front of the world, that changed everything we expected about ourselves and the people in our lives. What you’re saying is so profound.
Nikki: And it changes everything about the days that follow that moment and the choices you make in those days.
Colleen: That is so true. I think it’s interesting that Paul uses in this verse words that were typical in Roman political life. “Strangers” were people who were complete foreigners and had no rights or privileges. They had no connection with the Roman town; they were just people passing through. “Aliens,” on the other hand, were noncitizens, who nevertheless lived in the city, and they had what might be called customary privileges as neighbors, but they weren’t family, they didn’t belong, they were protected as neighbors but not as members. And then “citizens” only had the full protection and the rights of a citizen in that city. So Paul is using words that his audience would have known in the Roman world very well, and they would have understood that he was reminding them exactly what you said, they’re intimate now, they’re family. It’s not just a metaphor, although it is a metaphor, but it’s something that represents what is actually real, it has actually happened. That’s who they are, and he’s saying, you have to think of yourselves this way.
Nikki: And again, it’s past tense.
Colleen: That’s right. It’s not something they become by acting a certain way and claiming that they will keep promises and fulfill expectations. This is what God has done. In verse 20, we come to another interesting set of things that he says about what it means to be part of this temple being built for the Lord. He starts using a building metaphor, and he says that this household of God is being built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the cornerstone. We’ve had many conversations over the last few years, Nikki, about this very subject, and I’d like you to share some of the really great insights that you were talking to me about before we started to record today. Could you talk a bit about that apostles and prophets thing and the foundation?
Nikki: Yeah. Well, it made me think of our first episode that we did on Ephesians, where we talked about hermeneutical principles.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And we said a text can never mean what the author didn’t mean for it to say, and we have to stick with what he said and what the first audience understood, and he uses this metaphor for a reason. So I was talking to my husband, who is a structural engineer, and he was sharing with me that back then when they would build, the cornerstone would instruct the builders on how to lay that foundation. I’m not going to be able to articulate this like he can, but it was what started the entire process. You set the cornerstone, and the foundation was based on the cornerstone. And we have Paul telling us that that cornerstone is Christ, and none of us would presume to change that cornerstone. If we’re a Christian, we believe the Bible, we agree, yes, that’s Christ. Then he goes on and he says that the foundation is the apostles and the prophets.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: A foundation can only be laid once.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: So the cornerstone, Christ, instructs the prophets and the apostles and lays this foundation, and then we are being built up upon it. And so the metaphor lets us know that there is this one-time foundation – you don’t build a building and put a foundation on the top. You don’t have one on the bottom, one on the top, one three floors up. There’s one foundation. In the same way that we can’t redefine who the cornerstone is, we can’t redefine that foundation. If you think of this building as being built up by bricks, we can’t – based on what I understand, we can’t decide in 2020 that I am, you know, I’m a part of the foundation and then just jump down to the bottom of that building and proclaim that for myself. This is rooted in history. This is not allegorical, it’s not – this is rooted in history, and Paul is telling this church of Ephesus that there was a foundation that was built with apostles and prophets, Christ the cornerstone, and they were being built up.
Colleen: That’s really interesting. What Paul is saying, if I understand your metaphor and your insights from structural engineering, the foundation is a one-time, unrepeatable event in the building of a building.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And Paul is identifying that singular, permanent, once and done foundation as being built by the apostles and prophets based on the cornerstone Christ, so that when that job of building the foundation is done, you can’t say, “Oh, I’m an apostle in 2020, and you can just consider me as part of the foundation,” or “I’m laying a new extra structural principle up here on the 2020 floor.” You can’t do that because the apostles were the foundation. They had a specific job at a specific time in the life of the church, and the New Testament prophets as well. That’s a really interesting insight and an easy way to understand this because I used to struggle a lot with what do we do with this whole problem of the prophets. What are New Testament prophets? What are Old Testament prophets? Are they different? Well, clearly they are because Jesus said that John the Baptist was the greatest prophet and the greatest that had been born of women, and he was the last Old Testament prophet. He was the last prophet that prophesied the coming of the Messiah. After Jesus, we learn in Hebrews 1:1-3, where the writer of Hebrews says, “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days He has spoken to us by His Son, whom He appointed the heir of all things, through whom also He created the world.” So when we hear now in the New Covenant the word “prophets,” and when we read it in the New Testament, we have to know that we’re dealing with something different from the Old Testament prophets, who would come with new information from God about His plans and His purposes for His people.
Nikki: Yeah, and I think that we have to remember, when we read Acts, that that was the historical laying of that foundation, and so we do read about prophets in Acts who were prophesying at the time, and remember, they didn’t have New Testament Scripture at that time. There were letters circulating here and there, but this was the very new stage in the birth of the church.
Colleen: Now, that’s a really interesting point. There are New Testament prophets that are named. Agabus was one named in Acts, and he gave prophecies that were from God, that were for that early church. One of his most famous is that Paul would be arrested if he went to Jerusalem, and he knew that was true, and Paul went to Jerusalem, and he was arrested. It was clearly a prophecy from God, and it’s recorded in the eternal word of God. It was a word from the Lord for the early church. We also learned that Philip had four unmarried daughters who were prophetesses. There is a role in the New Testament for prophets and prophetesses, but according to this verse, their primary role appears to have been in laying the foundation of the church. Now, do I think that God can raise up a prophet to give instruction or guidance to His church if needed? Of course He can. But we learn here that the primary role of New Testament prophets was in explaining the New Covenant. In fact, in verses 4 and 5 of chapter 3, we read this: “By referring to this, when you read you can understand my insight into the mystery of Christ, which in other generations was not made known to the sons of men, as it has now been revealed to His holy apostles and prophets in the Spirit.” Paul is using that same phrase in the next verse and explaining how the apostles and prophets were tasked with the understanding of the Gentiles coming into the church, being filled with the Spirit, like believing Jews also were coming into the church and being filled with the Spirit. The apostles and the prophets had this insight from God, and like you said, Nikki, there were two things to remember about this. First of all, there were no written Scriptures for the New Testament that were collected and available to everybody. They were speaking the words of God in a very unique part of the church’s history. And that’s the second thing. The formation of the church is a one-time, unrepeatable event. It took a period of time. It is explained and described in the Book of Acts. But that unique time in the life of the church cannot be repeated. It’s once and done.
Nikki: And you know, this topic is very controversial in the church, in the Body of Christ. There are a lot of different ideas about this. So often in current day self-proclaimed prophecies and prophets, I hear things that are directed toward a person’s lifestyle or morality, what they need to do, the choices they need to make, where they’re falling short. I had some friends who had a very sick daughter who were told that it was their fault. They had been told by God that they needed to do something differently. I had a friend who came to my home and sat with me and said, “Nikki, I’ve been hanging out with this couple, and they love the Bible, but they told me that they’re prophets, and they told me that God wants us to buy this house, but we can’t afford this house, and I don’t know what to do.” That is not what the prophets did. And in chapter 4, Paul says that God gave the prophets and the apostles and various other offices to the church so that we’re no longer tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming. The prophets were given to us to give us doctrine, to give us truth about God, not to tell us secret messages from God. In the New Covenant, the Holy Spirit guides us, and He tells us what we need to know.
Colleen: That’s a really great point. Sometimes I think that people who especially, like I, who came out of Adventism, who had all kinds of unbiblical ideas about revelation and prophecy, it’s hard to figure out how to land when I come out of that because there’s such a wide variety of beliefs about prophecy in the Christian community. And I’ve had to land with this: God has said there’s one place where He’s spoken, and that’s in His word. Now, His word says He gives, like you explained, the gift of prophecy to the church. I can’t think that another human’s word to me is binding on my conscience just because they claim they have heard from God. You know, as believers we are all indwelt by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit leads Christians through applying God’s word to our lives, through convicting us of sin and of righteousness, through helping us to make wise decisions and giving us the mind of Christ. The normal life of the Christian is to be led by the Spirit. And if God wants me to do something, He knows how to get my attention through the Holy Spirit and not to just send some random person to say, “Here’s what the Lord wants you to do.” If the Lord hasn’t spoken that to me, I can’t just assume that this is now to bind my conscience and cause me to act.
Nikki: Yeah. And that’s not to say that He doesn’t use His people. We read all over Scripture that we are commanded to admonish one another, to encourage one another, to teach one another, to speak the truth to one another in love, and the Lord uses those relationships to reach us. But when someone comes and says, “God told me to tell you,” I think, are we not on speaking terms? Did I offend Him? Because, you know, I don’t think that He works that way.
Colleen: Exactly. When I read this passage, I have to understand that Paul is saying something specific to the church at Ephesus and to the church in general. And he’s talking about the temple of the Lord, which is the Body of Christ, and he’s saying that this temple, which is the church, was built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, and today we have the written New Testament, which gives guidance and explains how to live to those who are born again and part of that Body. I can relax and not feel like everybody that claims to have a word from the Lord has to be somehow filtered and taken seriously. I can go to Scripture, I can pray, I can compare what that person says to Scripture, and if the Lord isn’t convicting me of this thing through His word, I have to know that this is just another person speaking to me. But I have to say, there have been many times since I’ve become a born-again believer when I have been wrestling with something I’ve seen in Scripture, wrestling with how to deal with it in my own life, and I’ve had somebody speak to me without my even knowing it was going to happen, and they confirm what I’ve been sensing in the word of God as I’ve wrestled and prayed.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: God does that.
Nikki: Yes, He does.
Colleen: That’s the normal life of the Christian, and that’s very different from somebody coming and saying, like that person you mentioned, “We are prophets, and the Lord wants you to buy that house.” So when we look at verses 21 and 22, we see this summary of this temple. “Christ Jesus Himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole building, being fitted together, is growing into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together into a dwelling of God in the Spirit.” What is Paul doing here, between 21 and 22? He shifts from speaking about this building to “you also.” Who’s he addressing?
Nikki: The church in Ephesus.
Colleen: Yeah. He goes from first speaking about the church as a whole to addressing the local body, and the interesting thing about this is, as believers we’re never stand-alone, Lone Ranger Christians, as Gary Inrig often says. We’re connected to one another in Christ.
Nikki: And that’s what’s interesting to me here is that “in Christ.” It’s a pattern, isn’t it, of this whole section? We were created in Christ. The church is growing in Christ. This is all occurring in Christ, and we’ve been built on the foundation; right? So that’s past tense. But we are growing. That’s an ongoing thing. And this is something that’s being acted upon us. We are being fitted together. We are being made to grow, built together. This is God working in us. So this isn’t – I mean, even though smoking isn’t good for you, this isn’t about us giving up smoking and doing these things so that. This is happening to us. Paul’s explaining what’s happening.
Colleen: Exactly! That’s such a shift from the way I thought of it in the past. It’s like a 180, and it’s hard to find words to articulate how completely different it is. This is about us, as you put it, being acted upon by God, teaching us to trust Him, teaching us to submit to Him and to His word, as we learn to think His thoughts and to act with the mind of Christ, which the Holy Spirit works out in us. You know, it’s interesting, as I think about this metaphor of the temple, Israel had a temple. They had a beautiful physical temple, coated with gold, beautiful fabrics, beautiful embroidery, incredible artistry. That temple was where God literally put His presence in the center of Israel. It was the only nation in the world where God put His presence. And He put His Shekinah glory, which was visible, in the temple over the mercy seat in the Most Holy Place, and Israel was the nation where God dwelt. And the rest of the world, when they wanted to understand Yahweh, they wanted to understand this God who led them through the Red Sea, who parted the Jordan, who provided crops, who conquered their enemies, the nations would come to Israel to learn about Yahweh. And I remember hearing our pastor, Gary Inrig, one day say something that was just such an interesting insight for me. He said, “Israel was a nation where God dwelt, and the world came to Israel to learn about God. The church is not a nation. It’s like the inverse of that. We don’t have a physical temple now, but the believers collectively are the temple of God. The church is not a nation, but the church is scattered throughout the nations. We personally bear God’s presence into the world. We go into the world and take the presence of God in us to them, teaching the gospel of Immanuel, the God who came and identified with us and took our sin and died. The church has the personal presence of God.
Nikki: Colleen, that’s so interesting. I’ve never quite thought about it that way, that the people had to go to Israel to see – or to be near God when His Shekinah glory dwelled in the temple, and now He’s dwelling in us. There was a time when we were having to do some I guess you might say, like, Berean investigation into some teachings that we were coming across, and we watched a video about a church that was in worship, and they had glitter, gold flecks, falling from the sky and feathers, and they were calling it “Shekinah glory,” “this is God’s Shekinah glory” –
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: – and the message was really, “Come to us, we have the Spirit. Come and see the Shekinah glory,” and I remember watching that with your son, Nathanael, and I’m pretty sure – I’m sorry if I misquote him, but I’m pretty sure he said something about the fact that in the last days people will say, “‘Come, He’s in here. Come, He’s in here, come and see,’ but don’t go.” And I thought that made a lot of sense because in the Body of Christ, the Holy Spirit is in each of us. We don’t have to go run into secret rooms to go and see God’s indwelling or God’s dwelling, His Shekinah glory. We each bear Him into the world.
Colleen: That is so interesting, Nikki. I hadn’t put all of that together either. This is why God’s word keeps us on track. The whole idea of coming to a church or a temple in order to see the glory of God is an Old Covenant idea.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: We in the New Covenant have what you might call an invisible religion, and we talked about this when we went through Hebrews 13, that the author of Hebrews was encouraging those believing Hebrews, who had left the truly beautiful religion of Judaism, the most beautiful religion in the world, because Jesus had fulfilled all of those physical shadows of Himself, to the point that the Romans called them atheists, because they had no visible God. And the author of Hebrews was saying, “But we have an altar that anybody who serves the temple has no right to eat from.” We have a God that we don’t see physically, but we know Him, and He indwells us. That’s infinitely better than having a visible Shekinah glory that’s inside a building and you have to go to the building to be near it.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: God has done something so remarkable in sending Jesus to fulfill those types and shadows and giving us Himself so that everything that was in the temple is in Christ, and He puts us in Himself, and all of that is now ours. And that’s what Paul is saying here. He’s saying, we are this temple, and we’re being built into a holy temple for God. Everything that Israel experienced in that temple ceremony, we have as our own inheritance in Christ when we trust Him and are made alive. It’s more than I even know how to talk about.
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: So if you haven’t experienced the Shekinah glory of Yahweh in the person of the Lord Jesus transforming your life and taking you out of the domain of darkness and putting you into the kingdom of the beloved Son because you have trusted in Jesus, if you haven’t experienced that, we ask you to just go back and look at what Jesus has done. He came, the living Lord, embodied in a human body, and He, a sinless man, died the death of the sinner by becoming sin for us on the cross and paying the price for all of our sin, not as divine child abuse, not as an example, not as a guilting mechanism, to try to get us to toe the mark. He did it so we don’t have to be dead for eternity in our own sins. And if you haven’t trusted Him, think about what He did and allow His blood to wash you clean. So don’t forget to write to us at formeradventist@gmail.com. Follow us on Instagram and Facebook, and please, write a review for us wherever you listen to podcasts, and we look forward to launching into the first part of chapter 3 of Ephesians with you next week.
Nikki: Bye for now.
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