Jeremy approaches Bible teaching with a passion for getting the basic doctrines explained so that the individual can understand them and then apply them to circumstances in their life. These basic and important lessons are nestled in a framework of history and progression of revelation from the Bible so the whole of Scripture can be applied to your physical and spiritual life.
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Where do you go to meet God? Church? A temple? Synagogue? A confessional? None of these places are the place to meet God. If you are a Believer in Christ, then God dwells in you so to meet with Him you simply need to pray to Him where ever you are. Keep in mind, if sin has taken you out of fellowship, you should start by confessing this and repenting.
Jeremy Thomas is the pastor at Spokane Bible Church in Spokane, Washington and a professor at Chafer Theological Seminary. He has been teaching the Bible for over 20 years, always seeking to present its truths in a clear and understandable manner.
Welcome to Beyond the Walls with Jeremy Thomas and our series on the New Testament framework. Today, a smaller, bite-sized piece from the larger lesson. We hope you enjoy it.
But when we abide in Christ, the Spirit who indwells us produces the sinless life of Christ through us. That's 1 John 3 9. His seed abides in us, and when we abide, you know, we do not sin. Why? Because in him there is no sin. Not because in you there's no sin, it's because in him there's no sin. And so when his life is expressed through us, when we abide, then it's a sinless production. That's why it's called the fruit of the Spirit, right? What the fruit of the Spirit is, is the Spirit producing Christ's life through you. And of course, the Spirit isn't going to produce sin, right? He's going to reproduce the life of Christ, and Christ was sinless, so there is a sinless expression of his life through us when we abide.
But you have to be regenerate. The regeneration is what happens the moment you believe in Christ, is one of the things that happens. And it gives you a uh, you become a new creature. And now we're going to look into the concept of the indwelling because the indwelling relates directly to this new regenerate nature or person that you are. So this comes to the indwelling of the spirit. This is distinct. It's distinct from, but it is related to regeneration. Both occur, of course, at the moment of belief. Whenever you believe the gospel, whenever you believe that Christ died for your sins and rose again. But regeneration creates the location inside the believer for the spirit to indwell.
And so the imagery here is the imagery of the temple. You are, of course, we'll find out a temple, but use the Old Testament temple as your imagery. And we don't have to guess what it looks like, but this was at the time of Christ. It doesn't look like the Old Testament tabernacle or the Solomonic necessarily. But this is at the time of Herod. This is a model actually in Jerusalem. I've been there several times to take pictures. I love this model, actually. It's super cool. You can kind of see everything at one time, and that's what's helpful. You know, is you get lost in the city if you're just standing around. But if you look at this model, you can kind of see how everything was. You're looking actually at the Temple Mount at the time of Christ, which was built by Herod the Great, great because he was a great builder, right? So you see the this whole area today is the Temple Mount, but it doesn't look exactly like this. But you can see on the southern end what was called the Royal Stoa. These are, this is it's giant, and you could walk under this, it's shaded area. But you also see that all the way around there are actually stoas. So these are like, you know, shaded walkways in that area. And all that area is just this whole area is called the temple compound. And if you look in the top right corner, you see this strange structure right outside the temple called the Antonia Fortress. That's the Roman fortress. And uh at the time of Christ, of course, there were Roman soldiers stationed there overlooking the Temple Mount, so that if there was any problems, any riots, any fights, whatever, they could quickly descend onto the Temple Mount and quell those riots. You see that in Acts chapter 20, 21 with Paul when they attack him. Um but the center portion, the main portion of the temple, the temple proper we call it there, uh contains, you know, the court of Israel and of course the the most holy place inside uh inside the temple proper. Now that inside portion, you know, where you're supposed to put basically the Ark of the Covenant, right? And the small room that was a square in the very back of that area was known uh by the Greek word naos. Okay, the Naos. And the Naos means the most holy place where God dwells. He didn't dwell in the whole area, he dwelt in that most holy place, above enthroned above the angels on the lid of the Ark of the Covenant, right? And um the whole area, there's another word for temple in the Greek called the Hiuron, and the Hiuron just refers to the whole area, but that one room is another word for temple, Naos. Okay, and what the New Testament does is it takes one of those two words and it applies it to us, and it says, You are the temple. And the word that it uses is Naos, the most holy place. So that is the imagery behind uh indwelling. It reaches back to the Old Testament and the tabernacle and the temple uh complex.
So uh the concept of indwelling in a location, a locale, therefore, does not conflict with the con the concept of his omnipresence. Now, as omnipresent, I mean God is in all places completely. He's not like we used to say, he's not spread out across the universe or something, like part of him is there and part of him is there here and there, you know. No, he's he's completely everywhere at every point in space. He's also completely at every point outside of space, right? That's part of omnipresence. Um, but the concept of him indwelling in a location is not contradictory to that. God can, for example, dwell in heaven, right? This is where we usually say if somebody says, well, where's God? We'd say, Well, he's in heaven. I mean, wouldn't everybody say that? But we might also say, but he's also everywhere. And so sometimes we may feel tension in ourselves between these two ideas, but there's really no tension because the concept of indwelling in a locale is that of a meeting place. That is the concept of God indwelling a special place. That is, a meet, it's a meeting place where he meets with man. So in the Old Testament dispensation of Israel, that place was the physical temple that was located eventually in Jerusalem. That is where God dwelled. Uh, remember in Deuteronomy and elsewhere it says, when this place, this temple, is built, you will, you should face it three times a day and pray toward this place. And your prayers will be heard and answered by me. And if you remember in the days of Daniel, uh Daniel was actually commanded by the king, not, you know, it was an edict that nobody is to pray to any other God. And Daniel kept doing this three times a day in his window, remember? And the direction that he was facing was guess where? Jerusalem and the temple. It says this explicitly. He was doing exactly like the law said. So God's meeting place in the Old Testament with man was the temple. And if you wanted your prayers to be heard, you would direct your prayers to that temple. Um I've I've taken some books that relate to temples and so forth from Jewish writers, not Christians, they're just Jewish writers. And they basically say that the way that the Jewish mind thought of it was that when you prayed toward the temple, your voice went to the temple, and then there was like a portal that went up to heaven from there. And that's the way your prayers could be heard. So they thought of it very physically, like you're sending, like we would, like a telephone line. My my voice might is modulated through, you know, the electrical to you know, the other end and it's demodulated or whatever. Um we think of it like that, or we should. Maybe it's now it's going to a satellite, but the idea is the same. They thought of it like that. Um very, very physical way of thinking of how you communicate with God.
Um, but now in the New Testament dispensation, that's post uh the cross, after the cross, that place is the spiritual temple that is located in all believers, and teacher.
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