Sublime and beautiful picture! Is it a fancy piece; or is it a reality? It is a reality. The apostle’s soul was such a temple. There were such temples in Corinth when he wrote this epistle—temples more grand and beautiful than all the Corinthian columns and gilded domes which adorned that city. Every true saint is such a temple. Every professor of religion claims to be one.
My friend, take the picture home, and look at it. Study it well, and see if you can see yourself in it. Ah, you professing Christian, does your soul look any thing like it? If indeed it be a temple, does it not become you to watch its portals with untiring vigilance, lest pollution enter it? Have you kept the temple pure? Our text calls you to serious self-examination. Go inside the temple, and look about. See if its walls be not hung round with pictures of earthly idolatry. See whether pride and vanity and fashion have not built their altars within. See whether greedy avarice has not set up the tables of the money-changers there, and well-nigh turned the temple of the soul, which is God’s house, into a house of merchandise. Listen whether there is heard there the tumult of angry passions, and the clamors of selfish and forbidden lusts.
Oh search the temple well, for God will search it soon. “The Lord shall suddenly come to his temple; but who may abide the day of his coming, and who shall stand when he appeareth? For he is like a refiner’s fire, and like fuller’s soap.”
None but the pure in heart, the sanctified in Christ Jesus, will endure the trial. These shall stand the fires of the judgment-day, and shine in bliss and glory for ever in the city of God.
But not a few professed temple-builders will be confounded, and their work consumed; for the fire shall try every man’s work, of what sort it is.
V.
God’s Witnesses.
YE ARE MY WITNESSES. Isa. 43:10.