Are You Talking to Me?
"Don't you know that you yourselves are God's temple and that God's Spirit lives in you?" (1 Corinthians 3:16) I wonder how startling that was when he first taught them that during his eighteen months stay with them? Up on the hill, the Acro-Corinthus, was the famous temple of Aphrodite. There was a time, said Strabo, when it had 5,000 sacred prostitutes working for it and the money poured into the temple coffers. Fifty-six miles away a huge bronze statue of Athena dominated Athens as Aphrodite dominated Corinth. Athena was the goddess of the mind and Aphrodite the goddess of the body (and other things). Both cities obeyed their deities and Athens left us a long line of thinkers and statesmen while Corinth left us a word for venereal disease ("the Corinthian sickness") and a word meaning "to go to hell"--Corinthianize.
So the Corinthians knew what a temple was and they patronised the one on their hill in sufficient numbers that Paul had to chastise them about it later. In the meantime he tells these shopkeepers, water vendors, saddle and tent makers, slaves and mercenaries (see 1 Corinthians 1:26), "you are God's temple."
Amazing doctrine and all the harder to swallow when you think of how the ancient world looked on the lower classes (and I'm not suggesting much has changed in many parts of the world). We're told there were more than 60 millions slaves in the Roman Empire where manhood was cheap, easily bought and just as easily sold. The haggling over price, the very sound of it speaks its horror, "I'll buy him. No chance of fifty, here's thirty-five pieces of silver, he's not worth even that much." Temples were often swept, polished, guarded, respected and decorated with the finest art and most luxurious hangings while the masses were left to grope in the dark, corrupted and corrupting, humiliated, abused and abusive.
Into all this came an itinerant Jew with a message saying that God had come into the world as an ordinary man from peasant stock. Then he said this astonishing thing, "Don't you know that you yourselves are God's temple and that God's Spirit lives in you?" (1 Corinthians 3:16) I know we're too familiar with that statement but take a moment just to mull it over. The Spirit of the Lord Almighty dwelled in them. Should that make us look at our little congregation differently? Look around and quote Paul under your breath as you do it. Is this not the foundation for a new way of seeing humans? I wonder if any of those Corinthians went home and got down the polished metal mirror and looked into it for a long time?
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.