THANK GOD, NO SANCTUARY!

The Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him. - Hab. 2:20

If you should visit the Church of Christ in Denton, Texas where Ouida and I are members, as folk do from all over the country, you might not be impressed with our building, for it was once a super market and is very unchurch like. It is roomy and spacious enough to house a day school, which one of our sisters conducts, and its movable chairs allows for gatherings of various sorts, whether it be a coffee house, a teenage party, or a women’s luncheon. Our deacons recently decided to allow the YMCA, which does not yet have a facility of its own in our city, to use it periodically through the week for classes in calisthenics, in spite of the likelihood of some B.O. still wafting about on Sunday morning!

All this and much more led one of our sisters to say, We hardly have a sanctuary here. My reply was, Thank God, no sanctuary!

If sanctuary is understood to be a holy place or a special dwelling place of God, we are forced to conclude, in the light of Scripture, that there are no sanctuaries or holy places anywhere on earth. Not in Rome or Constantinople or Mecca or Jerusalem. Nowhere, not even in Denton, not even the Little Chapel-in-the-Woods where Ouida and I were married. I am sometimes awed by ecclesiastical edifices, whether Westminster Abbey or the Church of St. John the Divine, but I can only conclude that such places are no holier than my living room or a pizza parlor or the old farm back home, though I realize my language would strike some people as near blasphemous. True, God is in some sense everywhere, including cathedrals and coal mines, but I have no evidence that He is in one place anymore than in another.

Perhaps I should guard my words, for it was such talk as this that cost the first Christian martyr his life. Solomon built a house for God, Stephen says in Acts 7:47, but still “the Most High does not dwell in houses made with hands,” he told them, citing their own Scriptures as evidence: “Heaven is my throne and the earth my footstool. What house will you build for me, says the Lord, or what is the place of my rest?” It was too much for those who presumed Jerusalem to be holy and the temple to be sacred, so they murdered Stephen. Now and again I am given the tour of a new facility at this or that church, and I am introduced to educational units, offices, fellowship hall, and “the sanctuary.” Occasionally there will be some such notice over the entrance as “Sanctuary. Quiet Please.” The implication is that there is something especially holy about that particular part of the building, more than the rest rooms or kitchen. One is to be quiet in the sanctuary, while he can be his jolly good self in the kitchen, for there is nothing holy about a kitchen! But I am persuaded that even in church edifices the Most High is as much present in the room where the cookstove is as He is the room where the pulpit is --- or where “the altar” is, to name something that is deemed to be super holy!

Part of the problem is a misconception of such Scriptures as the one quoted above: The Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him. It is presumed that churches (people) can build holy temples and that God will dwell in them. But even in the Old Testament where the Jews had (sort of) holy places and holy things, the God of heaven chose to dwell in human hearts rather than in buildings fashioned by human hands. Psa. 51 recognizes that there is but one real sacrifice in the sight of God, “a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart.” This is why Paul as well as Stephen in the New Testament drives home the point that the God who made heaven and earth does not live in shrines made by man (Acts 17:24).

So, the holy temple that the prophet spoke of is heaven itself, the dwelling place of God. God is in heaven and all those on earth should be silent or reverent in His presence is what Hab. 2:20 is saying. It is like Psa. I 1:4”The Lord is in his holy temple, the Lord’s throne is in heaven; his eyes behold, his eyelids test, the children of men.”

My concern about this is more than a dispute about words. It is part of our heritage that we call Bible things by Bible names, and we have long insisted that if something cannot be described in scriptural terminology it must not be scriptural. Some of our lingo may come from the Babel of confused sectarianism, diverting us from our mission of restoring a scriptural vocabulary for the modern church. Sanctuary is a biblical concept, but it is grossly mischievous to apply it to anything that is the work of our own hands. No room ever built by man, even if with silver and gold, can be the sanctuary of God.

The Scriptures make it clear that it is the church, “the household of God,” that is the only “holy temple in the Lord” that the Father has upon this earth, and that it is believers that are “built into it for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit” (Eph. 2:21-22). “You are God’s temple and God’s Spirit dwells in you” were Paul’s words to real live people in I Cor. 3:16, not to brick and mortar, not to chapels and abbeys, not even to cathedrals. Edifices for one reason or another may be worthy of certain respect, just as a cemetery or a memorial park may be, but that cannot mean that any pile of stone or plot of ground, however honored by men, is the dwelling place of the heavenly Father.

Abraham Lincoln said of a burial place for our honored dead; “But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate --- we cannot consecrate --- we cannot hallow --- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far beyond our poor power to add or detract.” The President was only half right. No one, not even brave soldiers, can make a piece of this earth holy, which is what consecration means. I walk the grounds at Gettysburg with deep respect for its place in our history, but the Most High does not dwell in any portion of space fenced off by man, and that includes our “sanctuaries” that are only our own creations, sometimes the fruit of our pride. God has no shrines upon this earth except the hearts and minds of men and women. If all church edifices were destroyed today, the Most High would have no fewer dwelling places than He now has.

This beautiful truth lends meaning to the apostle’s words in I Cor. 6:19: “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God.” Thank God that He elects to dwell in my earthly tent since that is where I too dwell. He makes His home with me in my body through His Spirit, so that wherever I go He goes. No wonder Paul would add: “You are not your own; you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.” Praise God that He does not allow Himself to be boxed in, whether in a book or a creed or by lock and key. He will move inside every person’s heart and soul and body that invites Him in.

It was an immense truth to Paul that “In him we live and move and have our being,” which in some way applies to all men, for all mankind is His offspring. So the apostle would say to those pagans in Athens: So he is not far from any of us. That is as glorious as any truth needs to be, so what shall we say of the fact that God has made us, His adopted children in the Spirit, His dwelling place? We are His temples on earth! It is simply too much for my small mind to handle, but I can nonetheless rejoice that I do not have to go to some building to find God.

Now will some of you be so kind as to give me a tour of your building so that I may see where the sanctuary of God assembles? - the Editor