Where Does God Live? The Story of God's New Home

Based on Ephesians 2:11-22

There's a phrase most of us have heard, probably on a meme: "My body is a temple." It gets used to justify healthy eating, justify not healthy eating, and everything in between. But it raises a genuinely important question. What do we actually mean when we say "temple"?

Here's a working definition worth holding onto: a temple is the unique location where God's space (heaven) and human space (earth) overlap. It's the meeting point between God and humanity, a Venn diagram where the two circles come together.

With that in mind, the Bible isn't a story with one temple. It's a story about a temple that keeps changing form.

A Temple in a Garden

It starts at the very beginning. The garden of Eden, where God walked with Adam and Eve in the cool of the evening, that was the first temple. Heaven and earth fully overlapping. God dwelling with his people, his people with free access to him.

Then they sinned, and they were driven out. The overlap collapsed. And humanity has been longing to get back ever since.

Tents, Stones, and Glory

Centuries later, God rescued his people from Egyptian slavery and led them through the wilderness. His new dwelling place? A portable tent called the tabernacle, built with deliberate garden imagery woven into its design. And when it was completed, the glory of the Lord filled it. Not a metaphor, but a real, almost physical presence that settled there.

Eventually, King Solomon built a permanent structure, the temple in Jerusalem. And again, when it was dedicated, the glory of God filled that temple so completely the priests couldn't even continue their work. This was the place where heaven and earth met.

But it was destroyed. Rebuilt. Renovated by Herod into something magnificent. Yet even at its most spectacular, it came with walls, literally. A series of courts separated people from God's presence based on who they were. Gentiles could only go so far. Jewish women, a little further. Jewish men, further still. Only the high priest could enter the innermost room, the Most Holy Place, and only once a year.

The closer you got to God, the more you had to qualify.

A Baby Changes Everything

Then a baby is born.

John's Gospel (1:14) describes it this way in the original Greek: "The Word became flesh and tabernacled among us, and we beheld his glory." He tabernacled among us. The same word used for that tent in the wilderness. Jesus pitched his tent in our neighborhood.

And everything the temple was supposed to be, Jesus became. Forgiveness of sins? Go to Jesus. Healing? Jesus. Community and belonging? Jesus. Heaven and earth no longer overlapping in a building on a hill in Jerusalem, but in a person walking the dusty roads of Galilee.

When Jesus was crucified, something happened in that temple. The thick curtain sealing off the Most Holy Place, the one blocking ordinary people from God's presence, was torn in two, from top to bottom (Matthew 27:51). God was done being contained. His presence broke out and went into the world.

As Paul would later say to the Athenians (Acts 17), surrounded by temples and shrines: "The God who made the world and everything in it doesn't live in shrines made by human hands." You can't build a box big enough.

The Wall Comes Down

This is exactly where Paul picks up in Ephesians 2. He's writing to Gentile Christians in Ephesus, and he wants them to remember who they were before Christ.

You were outsiders. Without a Messiah. Excluded from citizenship with Israel. Foreigners to the covenants of promise. Without hope. Godless, the same Greek word as "atheist." He's not being harsh, he's being honest, and the honesty matters because of what comes next.

But now.

Those two words show up here echoing what he said earlier in chapter 2 when Paul wrote about being dead in sin but God made us alive in Christ. The pattern is the same: here's what you were, but now... / but God....

"In Christ Jesus, you who were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace (or 'shalom'), who made both groups one and tore down the dividing wall of hostility."

There's an inscription archaeologists found at the temple mount, believed to date from the time of Jesus. It was posted on the wall separating the Court of the Gentiles from the inner courts. It reads something like: "Gentiles are to come no further. If you do, you have no one to blame but yourself for your death."

Literal Translation: "No stranger is to enter within the balustrade round the temple and enclosure. Whoever is caught will be himself responsible for his ensuing death."

That is the wall Paul says Christ has demolished.

Jew and Gentile, once kept apart by law, custom, culture, and literal stone barriers, are now one. Paul calls them "one new humanity." Not two groups tolerating each other, but something genuinely new. A new kind of people that hadn't existed before.

Bible math: one plus one equals one.

God's New Address

Which brings Paul to his extraordinary conclusion in verses 21 and 22:

"In him the whole building, being put together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together for God's dwelling in the Spirit."

Notice who's doing the building. Not us. God is growing something organic, alive, something that can't be destroyed because no human hands built it.

We are living stones, Peter would add (1 Peter 2), with Christ as the cornerstone.

The church, people collectively gathered around Jesus, is now God's dwelling place on earth. Where the garden was the first temple, and Solomon's structure was a temple, and Jesus himself was the temple, now we together are where heaven and earth overlap. Where God's presence meets the world.

That's not a small claim. It means when people encounter us, they should encounter God. It means we carry his presence into our neighborhoods, our workplaces, our relationships.

And if we are his temple, the defining feature of that temple should be the same thing that moved God to build it in the first place: love.

As John writes: "No one has ever seen God. But if we love one another, God remains in us and his love is made complete in us" (1 John 4:12).

God lives here. In us, together. Let's look like it.

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