For
we are the temple of the living God. As God has said: "I will live with
them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they will be my
people." "Therefore come out from them and be separate, says the Lord.
Touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you." "I will be a Father to
you, and you will be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty."
//In Paul's second letter to Corinth, he thrice quotes God directly, in
verses lifted from various Old Testament books: Leviticus, Jeremiah,
Ezekiel, Isaiah, 2 Samuel. These words were quoted by Paul himself in
the 50s.
A
decade and a half after Paul quoted these three verses, God destroyed
Jerusalem, led the Christians out, and settled in spirit with them in a
new land. Just as Paul predicted. You can read how this happened in
Revelation, a book written a few years after the severance it describes,
in words that sound too close to Paul's to be coincidence. Here are the
three quotes, in the language of Revelation.
The promise of being their God: Revelation 21:7, He who overcomes will inherit all this, and I will be his God and he will be my son.
The call to come out: Revelation 18:4, Then
I heard another voice from heaven say: “Come out of her, my people, so
that you will not share in her sins, so that you will not receive any of
her plagues.”
God's promise to dwell with them: Revelation 21:3, And
I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Now the dwelling of God
is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and
God himself will be with them and be their God.”
All
this, Paul explains, is because the Christians are to be the new
"temple of the living God." Shortly after he wrote, the Jerusalem Temple
was so thoroughly leveled by the Romans that (according to legend) not
one stone remained upon another.
Spooky stuff, right? How did Paul know?
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