His Presence Wherever We Are
It is incredible that I do not have to go anywhere in particular to experience God's presence. On a rainy Saturday evening I had planned to go out for a drive and a walk, thinking the rain might hold off. By the time I was ready to leave it was pouring, so I went upstairs, lay down on my bed, and began to pray while music played from the corner of the room and the rain fell outside.
As I began to intercede in the Spirit, I thanked God for the ability not to have to go anywhere. My normal routine is to walk in parks and in nature, talking with Him and praying in the Spirit there, because I love being outside. Yet I was simply reminded of the obvious: I do not have to go to any particular place to have time with Him.
How blessed we are in the New Testament. Consider Israel—they had to go to the temple to experience the presence of God in a special way. Yahweh was there, and if you wanted to feel Him, sense Him, and be where He said He was, you had to go there. Now we are the living, walking temple. Wherever we are, God is. We literally do not have to go anywhere, exactly because He has decided to make us His temple. His personal presence is always wherever our body is (1 Corinthians 6:19). It is beyond belief what we have and what we take for granted.
I thought about the temple in the Old Testament and how that was not the first arrangement. When God brought Israel out of Egypt into the wilderness, He had Moses build the tabernacle. It was designed and built to be movable. It was never meant to stay in one place forever, so it was always going to be on the move—which is really like us. It was literally called the tent of meeting, and the New Testament calls our bodies tents (2 Corinthians 5:1).
Then I thought about David and his desire to build God a house, a permanent dwelling. His heart was right as he looked around and saw that he himself lived in a house. Yet God's answer was essentially, "Why do you want this? It has never even come up on My heart to have a permanent temple or house" (2 Samuel 7:5-7). Still He went along with it. The type was already there in the movable tent—that is us. We never put down roots here on earth, because we are living in tents not made to last forever. They are not our final dwelling place. But God has chosen to dwell in us wherever we go and wherever we are. It has not come upon His heart to build a permanent building for Himself here, because we are the movable temple, the movable tents.
The tent of meeting was given in connection with the giving of the law. Paul tells us very clearly that the law was added because of sin, (Galatians 3:19) and you can see it played out in the Old Testament. Moses went up to receive the Ten Commandments while the people were sinning at the bottom of the mountain (Exodus 32:1-8), and God began laying more and more law on them in response to their continual waywardness of heart. From the beginning in Egypt, on their way out, and after their deliverance across the Red Sea, they were continually unbelieving—mumblers and grumblers, constantly wanting to go back to the old ways of servitude (1 Corinthians 10:10-11) (Numbers 11:4-6) (Jude 1:16).
Even though the tent on earth was God's pattern, made after the pattern of heaven (Hebrews 8:5), there was still a temporality to it here. The next age is clearly something different from what exists now. Our bodies will be different; we will be with Him and see Him as He is (1 John 3:2). Scripture specifically says there is no need for a temple, for God Himself is the temple, and the Lamb is the temple.
22I saw no temple in it, for the Lord God, the Almighty, and the Lamb, are its temple. Revelation 21:22
There is no more separation.
That is the picture. All the separation has always been because of sin and unbelief. The intention was never separation.