"My Father's House" vs. The House of God
Posted: Mon Jun 05, 2006 5:09 pm
I am a part of a group of Christians who meet together for fellowship outside of the institutional church system. I left my church of 24 years over a year ago to pursue this less traditional path because I felt a yearning in my heart to be part of an ecclesiastical model based on the apostolic patterns of the early New Testament church.
In the denomination to which I used to belong, you’d be hard-pressed to attend a service in which someone did not get up and say, “Like David said, I was glad when they said unto me, let us go into the house of the Lord.” They are wrapped up in the mindset that the brick and mortar churches they attend every Sunday actually comprises “the house of the Lord.” If I were to suggest that perhaps their million-dollar structures are no more important to God than the corner convenience store, they’d be highly offended.
However, their ecclesiology flies squarely in the face of what the early church taught, that God no longer dwells in houses made with hands, but the individual heart of the believer is the “house of God.”
I do not have anything against traditional church-goers, believing that a large portion of the Body of Christ can be found among them. However, I do not find church buildings, in and of themselves, to reflect the kind of stewardship God requires of His disciples. I believe investing in people, rather than in buildings and pastoral salaries, is more in line with the values of the kingdom of God. There remains, however, one argument which traditional church-goers maintain to justify their adherence to their church buildings that continues to stump me: Jesus’s own adherence to the brick and mortar temple as exhibited in John 2:16-17.
Now, it seems to me when I read 1 Chronicles 17 that God never really wanted a temple. Even in light of verses 11-14, where God states that Solomon will build Him a house and his throne will be established forever, it seems God is referring to the coming of the Messiah, seeing as how neither Solomon’s rule nor the temple lasted forever.
Did God somehow change His mind, i.e.: “Okay, I really didn’t want a temple, but since you guys went to all this trouble of building me one, I’ll dwell in it”? Those who justify large, beautiful, expensive church buildings always point to Solomon’s temple as a God-ordained precedent, but although their logic seems faulty to me, I can’t quite make a scriptural or logical case against it because of Jesus' zeal for it. And His zeal here confuses me. Why such zeal when God seemed to have such disdain for buildings as Stephen pointed out in Acts 7:49-50? And why would Jesus refer to the temple as His father’s house, only to have his disciples several years later proclaiming that the temple was not the house of God (much to Stephen’s detriment).
(I am new to this forum, so I apologize if this question has been covered already and I’ve missed it. If so, please direct to me that thread. Thanks!)
In the denomination to which I used to belong, you’d be hard-pressed to attend a service in which someone did not get up and say, “Like David said, I was glad when they said unto me, let us go into the house of the Lord.” They are wrapped up in the mindset that the brick and mortar churches they attend every Sunday actually comprises “the house of the Lord.” If I were to suggest that perhaps their million-dollar structures are no more important to God than the corner convenience store, they’d be highly offended.
However, their ecclesiology flies squarely in the face of what the early church taught, that God no longer dwells in houses made with hands, but the individual heart of the believer is the “house of God.”
I do not have anything against traditional church-goers, believing that a large portion of the Body of Christ can be found among them. However, I do not find church buildings, in and of themselves, to reflect the kind of stewardship God requires of His disciples. I believe investing in people, rather than in buildings and pastoral salaries, is more in line with the values of the kingdom of God. There remains, however, one argument which traditional church-goers maintain to justify their adherence to their church buildings that continues to stump me: Jesus’s own adherence to the brick and mortar temple as exhibited in John 2:16-17.
Now, it seems to me when I read 1 Chronicles 17 that God never really wanted a temple. Even in light of verses 11-14, where God states that Solomon will build Him a house and his throne will be established forever, it seems God is referring to the coming of the Messiah, seeing as how neither Solomon’s rule nor the temple lasted forever.
Did God somehow change His mind, i.e.: “Okay, I really didn’t want a temple, but since you guys went to all this trouble of building me one, I’ll dwell in it”? Those who justify large, beautiful, expensive church buildings always point to Solomon’s temple as a God-ordained precedent, but although their logic seems faulty to me, I can’t quite make a scriptural or logical case against it because of Jesus' zeal for it. And His zeal here confuses me. Why such zeal when God seemed to have such disdain for buildings as Stephen pointed out in Acts 7:49-50? And why would Jesus refer to the temple as His father’s house, only to have his disciples several years later proclaiming that the temple was not the house of God (much to Stephen’s detriment).
(I am new to this forum, so I apologize if this question has been covered already and I’ve missed it. If so, please direct to me that thread. Thanks!)