The Temple is You

November 14, 1940. Coventry, England.

German bombers hit the city for eleven straight hours that night, and by morning Coventry Cathedral which stood since the 1300s, was a smoking shell. Only the outer walls and the spire were left upright. Everything else was ash.

The next morning, the cathedral's provost, Richard Howard, walked through the wreckage. Somebody found two charred oak roof beams that had fallen and landed crossed over each other. Howard had them tied together and stood them up in the rubble. Then, on a scorched wall nearby, he had two words scratched into the soot with a piece of chalk: "Father Forgive."

Not "Father, destroy them", like I would have said. Not even "Father, why?" Just forgive.

What came out of that ruin still shows up in hundreds of chapels around the world today. Medieval nails pulled from the wreckage were welded into what's now called the Cross of Nails, and a reconciliation ministry grew out of that cathedral that reached of all places, back into Germany. Decades later, enemies became partners in rebuilding trust from nothing.

Ezekiel's people knew something about standing in rubble, too. By the time he wrote the words below, the temple was gone, the nation was scattered, and everything that told them God was near had been leveled by Babylon. The building, the land, the whole structure of their life. To people staring at exactly that, God says this:

"And I will make a covenant of peace with them, an everlasting covenant." (Ezekial 37:26) 

He makes that promise while the wreckage is still smoking. Not after things get better. Not once the rebuild is underway. He speaks "everlasting" over people who have every reason to believe it's over. That's the whole pattern of how He works. Romans 8:28 isn't a verse for when life is tidy, it's a verse for exactly this moment, when the thing you built looks like Coventry the morning after. He's not distant from the rubble. He works in it, and He reconciles all of it for good, for those who love Him. Whatever's smoking in your life today, a marriage, a job, a diagnosis, a country. His promise doesn't wait for better conditions to become true.

Here's that part that strikes me and challenges me. Ezekiel's people were waiting on a building. "I will put my Temple among them." A structure. An address. But Paul later tells the church in Corinth, flat out: "Don't you know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit?" (1 Corinthians 6:19). The promise didn't land on a building. It landed on people. It landed on us.

So when God says the nations will know He's the Lord because His Temple is among them, that's not a prophecy about architecture. That's a prophecy about you and me carrying Christ's Spirit into a break room, a Little League bleacher, a Thanksgiving table where politics got ugly last year. The nations don't come to know God by watching a building. They come to know Him by watching us.

Which means if I don't love the direction this nation is headed, the first place I have to look isn't a headline or an election. It's the mirror. I'm the Temple He said would be among them. Am I one anybody would look at and conclude God is good?

Coventry didn't become a symbol of reconciliation because the building was impressive. The building was gone. It became a symbol because a man scratched "Father Forgive" into soot instead of writing something else. The temple that mattered wasn't made of stone. Neither is yours. Be a temple for others to see and be drawn to God.