“Don't you know that you yourselves are God's temple and that God's Spirit lives in you? If anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy him; for God's temple is sacred, and you are that temple.” (NIV)
The “you” here is plural and so refers to the church. But what does it mean to destroy the church? It must be more than building it with “wood, hay or straw” for the man who does that sees his efforts burned up, but he himself survives. In contrast, the man who destroys the church is in turn destroyed by God. That sounds painful. This verse leads to the corresponding question of what does it mean for God to destroy a man. The Bible Knowledge Commentary also points out that this sounds like an application of the Old Testament law of retribution (an eye for an eye).
As a side note, when I was comparing different translations of these verses, I decided that I preferred the NIV version for two reasons. One, it was the only one that I looked at that preserved the second person plural pronoun when talking about the church. English does not have a distinct second person plural pronoun unlike many other languages. The translators communicated this information by using “you yourselves” instead of just “you.” (I suppose it could have been “Don't you know that you all are God's temple.”) Two, the NIV uses “destroy” for both the man's and God's actions unlike the versions in the KJV family. Doing this does a better job at preserving the reference to retribution that a reader might remember from a passage like Genesis 9:6.
Comments
yikes! are you saying that god, who is perfect, is capable of an imperfect act, that of an eye for an eye?
Posted by: jaime on Friday, September 16, 2005
God is merciful, but he is also just. Our actions on earth do have consequences. This passage says that the consequence for destroying the church is destruction for that man or woman. It does not say what qualifies as destruction for either God or man (though I am sure people have ideas on that). It also does not say when the destruction - the judgement by God - occurs. I don't think we should understand it as a child hitting back at a playmate who has just knocked down his tower of blocks. It is different from the normal human response to injure the person who has hurt us. It is about justice rather than feeding human anger.
This reminds me of an Irish folk song entitled There Were Roses. It speaks to what happens when man lives by retribution. The song is about a Protestant young man being killed in revenge for the death of a Catholic who just happened to be good friends. Here is one of the verses:
The entire lyrics are found here. I could not find a complete recording of this on the web. I did find one that had two verses. It's the fourth RealAudio link from the top.
[Edit: I did find a complete recording online. (I've heard much better versions.)]
Posted by: CJ Costello on Friday, September 16, 2005