The Whole World Is God's Temple

What the Bible shows us about what God's presence in creation can show us

If you’ve been reading your Bible and attending church for a while, it’s probably no surprise that the theme of the Temple is a huge deal in Scripture. It’s such a big deal, in fact, that even Jesus would speak of Himself as a temple (John 2:19–22), and Paul would similarly speak of the collective whole of Christian believers as the temple of God (1 Corinthians 6:19; Ephesians 2:19–22).

But even in spite of how important you know the Temple to be in the Bible, perhaps what you heard last Sunday sounded a bit…outside the box. Together, we saw that the Temple isn’t just an important biblical idea; it’s so important that it even finds its way into stories where we wouldn’t exactly expect to find it. Yet there it is, the Bible showing just how crucial the idea of God’s presence is.

Actually, as we’ve already seen, that word “showing” is really important. The Bible loves to communicate through images, scenes, playing on different words and ideas, and by leaving a trail of breadcrumbs where we’d least expect it, forcing the reader to really sit with and engage with these stories in order to connect the dots. Put simply, the Bible often shows without telling.

So with that being said, here’s how the Bible shows that the whole world is God’s temple, right there in the very first chapter of Genesis:

1. Let’s first just think about what a temple is. A temple is where you think your God lives. In other words, the Temple is all about God’s presence. Having God’s presence in our lives is obviously very important, so if this is what the Temple is all about, we shouldn’t be surprised to find traces of this idea hidden even in passages that don’t seem to be related to it. But do we? Well, if the Temple is the place where God’s presence is to be found, and since God’s presence can be found everywhere in creation (not to mention the fact that we know that God wants to live with and in us), the idea of viewing creation itself as a kind of temple that God inhabits becomes very plausible.
   
   
2. When we read further in our Bibles, we see that the Temple is actually modeled after God’s creation. In this way, the Temple and God’s creation mirror each other. Both are composed of three main sections or tiers: corresponding to the heavens above, the earth below, and the waters around the earth in creation is the Holy of Holies and the Holy Place inside the main building of the Temple, surrounded by a courtyard on all sides. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. In the same way that the biblical writers imagined the waters surrounding all of creation, the courtyard surrounding the temple contains a bronze object full of water (used for washing). This object was called the Bronze Sea (Exodus 30:18; 1 Kings 7:23). Now consider all the things that God creates on the dry land: plants, animals, and humans. The Holy Place symbolically represents the same trio: it contains a gold lamp stand with seven branches, resembling a tree (plants; Exodus 25:31–40); a curtain with cherubim on it, separating the Holy Place from the Holy of Holies (animals; biblical cherubim have animal like features, and what’s especially noteworthy here is that they stand in the way to the Holy of Holies, just as the they guard the way back into the Garden of Eden, giving us yet another creation connection; Exodus 26:31–33); and human priests to care for and operate in the sanctuary (corresponding, obviously, to the dry land’s humans). And finally, just as God was thought to have a special dwelling place in the heavens above, so the Holy of Holies was the place where the presence of God would actually be encountered (Leviticus 16:2). And not only does the structure of the building of the Temple reflect the structure of creation as a whole, the structure of the stories about the building of the Temple reflects that of the story of creation: both creation and the Tabernacle were completed after a series of seven speech-acts of God (Exodus 25–31; count the occurrences of the phrase, “Then the Lord said to Moses,” most of which occur in chapters 30 and 31), and the Temple is dedicated by seven petitions to God by Solomon, followed by a seven-day feast (1 Kings 8:31–51, 62–66).
   
   
3. An ancient temple usually contained an image of the god it was dedicated to. Yet whereas these images in the temples to other gods of the ancient world were idol statues, the temple of the living God—the whole of creation—was likewise filled with living images: human beings. This is just one of the many ways that the creation story of the Bible shows God to be not only different from any other god but superior to any other god as well.
   
   
4. In the ancient world, it was widely recognized that a god only “rested” in a temple. So, when creation ends with God “resting” on the seventh day (Genesis 2:2–3), this should be a massive clue for us. The idea of God resting, therefore, can be seen as the idea of Him taking up residence in creation as His temple. This becomes even more profound when we consider what this idea of “rest” really means. In the ancient world, a temple, as a resting place for a god, was really the command center from which that god would rule. It’s less about taking a break and more about reclining on the throne. The Bible, then, uses this concept to show us that our God is not in fact limited to any one place or territory; because God rests in creation as a whole, He rules over everything, everywhere. And Genesis doesn’t stop there. You know that phrase, “there was evening, and there was morning,” after each day of creation from days one through six? It signals that each passing day has concluded. But it does not appear after day seven. The activities of day seven, when God transitions from His work of ordering and organizing into the business of maintaining and sustaining all life, are presented as happening on a day that has no end. Put more simply, the Bible has not-so-subtly shown us (without telling) that while God conquered chaos in just six mere days of creation, His rule over all creation is everlasting.
   
   
5. Finally, if Genesis is showing us that creation is a temple, it not only has so many wonderful and unexpected truths to teach us about how we should think about God and how we should think about His creation, but it also allows us to see God as setting a powerful example for how and where we are to look for rest in our lives. You see, God knows and He demonstrates better than anyone this simple truth: where you rest determines how you rest. When we read the creation story, we see that God’s primary method of creating is not by making things pop into existence out of nothing, but by carefully separating things, arranging them, drawing proper boundaries, and putting everything where it belongs. And it is only after finishing this work that God calls this space that He has made good, and He knows that it is only after this space is properly ordered that He can actually rest in it. There is no such thing as true rest if there is not true order. There must be order in the space in which we operate if God’s presence is to move in.
   

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