1 Corinthians 3:16-17 (NIV)
Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in your midst? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person; for God’s temple is sacred, and you together are that temple.
In these two short verses, Paul is still talking about teachers, preachers, and leaders who teach falsely and lead believers astray.
As he has made clear, the foundation that Paul laid, the foundation of the Church, a temple made of living stones in which the Holy Spirit has taken up residence, is Jesus Himself. There is no other foundation for the Church.
As new people are brought into the kingdom, the temple grows, both in size and in glory as the light of the indwelling Holy Spirit fills more and more people. And in that living temple, in each individual stone as well as in the whole edifice, God is honored, and glorified, and worshiped.
There are two ways to demolish a temple like this one. The first way is to undermine the foundation, causing the whole structure to fall apart. Teachers and leaders who move away from the true Jesus, replacing the glorious Son of God with a different Jesus who was merely human, a good man, a great teacher, but not the divine incarnation of God the Son. These destroyers of the foundation reject supernaturalism, giving naturalistic explanations of Jesus’ miracles, and denying both the Virgin birth and the physical resurrection. Those who do these things in their authority as “scholars”, or teachers, or leaders, undermine the very foundation of God’s Church. They destroy the faith of many and rob them of eternal life. And they will be judged by God for it.
The second way to destroy the temple of the Church is by tearing down the stones that comprise it. Teachers and leaders do this when they pull people’s devotion away from Jesus to themselves, building a following, a cult of personality, in order to gain either financially or by increasing their own status. The Judaizers were doing this in Paul’s day, persuading people to turn away from salvation by faith in Jesus alone, to a salvation of works and conformity to the law of Moses. These boasted about the members that they had persuaded to be circumcised.
Today there are still those who draw people into their own orbit, pulling them away from a single-minded, single-hearted devotion to Jesus into their own peculiar brand of spirituality. No longer is it about circumcision, but about adherence to their particular interpretation of scripture or their particular form of spiritual practice or philosophy of living. Often the success of these leaders is measured by the numbers of their books sold, the attendance at their mega churches, or their following on social media.
Understand that there are true pastors and leaders who are successful in all these arenas, and whose books, services, and social media followings are used to lift up the true Jesus and to help people know him better and follow him more closely. But if a pastor or leader uses their platform to make followers for themselves, or to foster a non-biblical theology that focuses people on success in this world or on themselves, they are pulling stones out of God’s holy temple to be used to build their own temple, and putting the eternal destiny of those people at risk. They will be judged in the end.
Father, this might seem pretty dark to a lot of people, but it clearly points out that You care about the people of this world, and judge harshly anything that pulls them away from You into the darkness. And You care deeply about Your Church, Your bride, the people in whom You have invested Your mission to save the world. And You take a very strong stand against anyone who would try to undermine the foundation on which your church is built, or try to pull out the living stones of which it is built. As Jesus said in Matthew 18:6 (NIV), “But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” Lord, help us who are preachers, teachers, and leaders in Your church to never seek a following of our own, to glorify ourselves. Instead, help all our work, in your church, on social media, and in anything else that we produce be done to glorify Jesus and to build up Your people. Amen.