And I saw no temple therein, for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it. Revelation 21:22
When I was a child, our family attended a small Baptist church in the village of River John. The building was a very modest structure, with only one storey and no basement, and no fancy ornaments. And yet, that humble little place went by the dignified title of Riverside Temple. It must have made people smile when they saw the sign, and yet, it was an example of the desire to be associated with the dignity associated with the word ‘temple’. Many of the world’s religions have temples, and some of them are spectacular structures. The ancient Jews had a temple, the first one built by Solomon, and the second one built by Zerubbabel and rebuilt by Herod the Great. Temples on earth are usually identified as the headquarters or focal point of the religion involved. But in Heaven, as our text declares, the temple is not a building, but a person. The same applies to God’s Assembly.
The word that is translated ‘church’ in our Bibles is actually the Greek word ‘ekklesia’ that means ‘assembly’. It does not mean a building, a structure, a hall, a chapel, a sanctuary, or any of those things. It means a company of believers who have been assembled to the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ. That is why we don’t call our buildings churches. In fact, we should not even be referring to our assemblies as churches, because we have a much more appropriate word in ‘assembly’. And the word indicates that we have been assembled by the Lord Jesus and to the Lord Jesus. He is the cause and reason for our existence. Without Him we are nothing; with Him we are the temple of God, God’s dwelling place on earth. In the Old Testament, great care was taken to maintain the temple, to perform the functions that God had instructed, and to observe all that the Lord had commanded. The same should apply to the temple today. God’s Assembly is the place where the lordship of Christ is given its rightful place, not simply lip service. It is also the place where the Word of God in its entirety is open and observed, where the Word of Truth is rightly divided, and where the love of Christ is displayed to each other and to the unsaved through the proclamation of the Gospel.
As individuals, we we are instructed to conduct ourselves as those who belong to God, because we are the temple of God, indwelt by the person of God the Holy Spirit. This truth is our guarantee of eternal life, our seal by God that we are His and that we can never perish. Our responsibility as individuals is the same as that of an Assembly, to display the presence and lordship of Christ.
The Lord Jesus is the temple in Heaven. He is also the temple as he dwells in Assemblies and individual Christians on earth. -Jim MacIntosh