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It was then that John noticed something else unusual about the city. This time it was not for what the city had, but for what it did not have. “I saw no temple in it,” John says. The absence of a temple indeed would be unusual for John, since the temple of the New Testament times was almost synonymous with the city of Jerusalem. To travel to Jerusalem was to go to the temple.
However, it was immediately quite clear to John why there was no temple in the New Jerusalem. In the same breath he
says, “For the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.”
This is understandable to us in a spiritual sense, since the temple in
the Old and the New Testament was a place where Jews would go to worship God.
God was unseen to the people, and intangible, except for the times early in
their history when he revealed himself as a blazing fire or as a cloud. The
Jews had been taught that the temple was the dwelling of God. Even God himself
had indicated this. At Solomon’s dedication of the temple that he had made in
Jerusalem, the glory of the Lord came and filled the temple to such an extent that
even the priests could not enter it (2 Chronicles 7:1-2).
Two Words
It is significant to know that there are two different Greek words in
the New Testament that are both translated simply as temple in the English. The first is the word hieron, which has at its root a word to indicate something that is
set apart or sacred, as an actual temple building made of wood and stone would
be. It was not a multipurpose building. It was set apart and dedicated to use
for worship. The other word is naos (from
naiō – to inhabit). This is a word
that refers to an inner but unseen spiritual life that is within a person or
even an object, such as the life that is within the buildings of the temple.
These two words often seemed to be used interchangeably in the New
Testament. It may be much the same as when we use the word church. When we commonly speak of the church, such as, “This
morning we are going to church,” we mean it in terms of the church building. However,
we also know that any building made of bricks, wood and glass is not the true
church, as when the Bible speaks of the church.
The true inner life of the church is the lives of the believers in Jesus. Sometimes people refer to this as the invisible church, since it is the true church which cannot be seen and is in other ways mostly intangible. However, this is the true inner life of the church of Jesus Christ which does not depend upon a building. The actual life of the church resides in the believers, not in the building.
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The true inner life of the church is the lives of the believers in Jesus. Sometimes people refer to this as the invisible church, since it is the true church which cannot be seen and is in other ways mostly intangible. However, this is the true inner life of the church of Jesus Christ which does not depend upon a building. The actual life of the church resides in the believers, not in the building.
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