Trevor Laurence
Having explored the varied ways that Genesis 1–3 portrays creation as the cosmic house of God (Part One and Part Two) and traced how that theme is developed through the entire story of the Bible (Part Three), the fourth and final installment in this larger investigation takes up the powerful and practical question that any careful study of Scripture inevitably raises: What difference does it make?
How ought the recognition that God spoke the heavens and the earth to be his royal residence with his image bearers reshape the ways we conceive what it means to be human, inhabit God’s creation, and sense the world around us?
As Herman Bavinck succinctly observes, “Origin determines direction and purpose.”1 The end of all things is in their beginning. The telos of the cosmos and every created thing within it—the aim, the raison d’être toward which God is directing history and by which every act and subsidiary purpose of agents is measured—is present in and revealed by the arche in which God purposefully structures his world, designs with sovereign intention, and sets his narrative in motion. Which is to say that the start of the story has significant ethical and experiential implications. What the world is and is for, and what we are and are for, determines what constitutes fitting action in the realm of God’s creation.
God’s Presence and Image
The first observation we might make from Scripture’s presentation of creation as a temple is as simple as it is profound: human beings are made for the presence of God.
Theological anthropology must take into account the cultic character of creation and man’s place within it. As Seth is “a son in [Adam’s] own likeness, and after his image” (Gen 5:3), so humanity is made in God’s image and after his likeness (Gen 1:26) to be the son of God—to live in his Father’s house, learn from his Father’s ways, imitate his Father’s character, receive and reciprocate his Father’s love, reign as his Father’s royal vice-regent, serve as priest in his Father’s presence and mediate that presence within the world.2 To live outside of the life-giving presence of God is to live in the realm of death, away from the glory which human beings were created to behold in fullness of joy and to reflect in purposive, worshipful action. To be driven out of God’s house is to be cast from the native environment in which humanity was formed to flourish.
This most basic feature of what it means to be human enables us to properly diagnose the human condition east of Eden: we long to be welcomed back into the holy presence that we were designed by God to inhabit—we hunger for home. As Augustine rightly prayed, “Our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee” precisely because of the prior creational fact that “Thou madest us for Thyself.”3 The common experiences of the mania that frenetically claws for a taste of wholeness and the malaise that sinks into resigned numbness are but oscillating iterations of the restlessness of exile.
Sin, idolatry, and false worship are not merely matters of wrong belief or misdirected allegiance, then, but must also be understood as attempts to recover the all-encompassing, soul-enthralling, purpose-conferring, love-radiating, sense-saturating, shalom-effecting glory that humanity was formed to indwell as we lived in the light of God’s countenance. “The young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God,”4 and when he opens the door to enter, he is trying in vain to draw back the curtain to the Holy of Holies, to trek back westward through guarded gate into Eden, to journey home into the Father’s house—into the holy presence that his senses were made to behold, that his desires were calibrated to seek, in which his being was crafted to find rest.
Salvation, therefore—if it is to truly be salvation—must involve nothing less than restoration into the presence of God, access to his holy temple, a room to abide in his house, the gift of shared sacred space, a consummated world in which sons and daughters may live bodily with the Lord in glory. Conceptions of salvation that reduce the work of God to forgiveness from sin, cleansing from corruption, or justification by faith truncate the restoration that God has accomplished in Christ and the saints’ thankful apprehension of their inheritance, for forgiveness and cleansing and justification are elements in an interrelated web of blessings that serve the ultimate end of planting humanity coram Deo in God’s holy place.
Even notions such as relational reconciliation and covenantal communion are insufficient insofar as they are hyper-spiritualized, de-spatialized, and abstracted from a cultic matrix that conceives reconciliation with God as being brought near to enjoy restored communion in physical, bodily proximity to his presence. Perhaps this is why certain theological traditions have at times found it difficult to muster the same enthusiasm for the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost that erupts naturally for the Son’s atonement at Calvary: the wonder of being with God has been eclipsed by the wonder of being made right with God, when in fact God makes us right with him so that we may be with him. The accomplishments of the cross at times have been extracted from God’s grand redemptive intention to re-create holy space wherein he may abide with his creatures, which bounds forward at Pentecost when he makes his creatures the holy space where he abides by his Spirit.
Salvation is not complete until “the dwelling place of God is with man” (Rev 21:3), when heaven and earth are the Holy of Holies (Rev 21:16) and the new Jerusalem shines with the glory of God (Rev 21:11) because he is in the very midst of his people: “They will see his face” (Rev 22:4), and “the Lord God will be their light” (Rev 22:5).
The salvation of human beings is also the salvation of human action. “His servants will worship him” (Rev 22:4) as priests who bear his name, “and they will reign forever and ever” (Rev 22:5) as kings alongside the King—human beings, brought to their proper end in the house of the Lord, finally and always exercising human agency toward its proper end in delight-full service of God. To truly rescue humanity, to bring us into the fullness of all we are intended to be, God must welcome us into his holy sanctuary, give us his very triune self, and indeed he has.
In the creation of humanity we also find the foundational reason to honor other human beings, to seek their good in love, to protect their name, to preserve their life. Every human being—no matter his or her genealogy, stage of development, circumstances of birth, degrees of ability, status, successes, or sins—is made in the image of God. This means, as is often noted, that each person possesses a dignity that is to be recognized by every other person, but it is a peculiar kind of dignity.
Human beings are made by God and for God. As his handiwork, every person is the rightful possession of God: my neighbor is to be regarded with all the reverence due the property of God, and an assault on God’s creation constitutes an assault on the Creator.
But more than that, image bearers are endowed with the dignity of a calling. To be made in the image of God is to be tasked as a son of God for priestly service in his house and worshipful rule in his world. Even those humans we love to hate are but priest-kings who have forgotten their glorious calling and directed their royal-priestly efforts toward building a failing kingdom and serving a lesser god. The duty to honor the image of God in the neighbor is a duty to afford the neighbor all the honor due the high office to which he has been called—regardless of whether he bears it well or not—to see in her a would-be servant in the house of God, to seek his liberated joy in repentant embrace of the royal-priestly commission for which he was created.
The Human Vocation
Image bearers are created and commissioned for a task in the world. Consecration with the imago Dei is the divine conferral of a vocation. Human beings formed to exercise the office of the image-son of God are invested with a royal-priestly calling.
As kings in covenantal submission to the King, men and women are made to exercise dominion in representative imitation of God and to subdue the earth, moving out into the lands beyond God’s garden, taming every untame frontier, bringing order and beauty out of the raw materials of the world, making the earth like the holy garden of God and filling the earth as his holy garden people, transforming and adorning the whole creation into a house of glory fit for a glorious King. As priests fashioned to minister before the Lord, men and women are made to service God’s cosmic house by maintaining and cultivating its fruitfulness and artistry, its flourishing and capacity to sustain human flourishing. They guard every space God has claimed from unholiness, corruption, and disintegration. They offer back to God the works of their hands and their very selves in thankfulness and worship.5
Here again, anthropology illuminates hamartiology. Humanity cannot not worship precisely because it is bound up in humanity’s essence to worship, and this worship inevitably takes on a royal and priestly character. “It may be the devil or it may be the Lord,” or power or money or control or beauty or approval, “but you’re gonna have to serve somebody”6 because it belongs to humans’ created nature to serve under, and to serve themselves to, a higher authority.
Idolatry makes kings who bear the image of their god (Ps 115:8), who wield domin(at)ion in the world the way their pseudo-kings wield domin(at)ion over them, who subdue creation in the name of their gods and build temples to idols—banks and businesses, holy sites and homes, institutional and individual bodies all oriented toward worship of some false savior—in God’s cosmic house. Idolatry makes priests who minister to their gods in a never-ending quest to hear “well done,” who defensively protect their idols and drive out every threat that encroaches on their sacred territory, who offer their life and labor in exchange for a taste of a pale and perishable glory. Sin is not creative but derivative, parasitic—it can only distort and misdirect the very good creation of God—and idolatry invariably manifests as the distorted and misdirected exercise of humanity’s vocation as image-bearing priest-king.
The human calling to service, guard, adorn, and participate in building up the world fashioned to be the house of the Lord also clarifies the place of creation care in the life of faith and obedience.7 God has from the beginning intended to grow his creation up into glory through the faithful agency of his royal-priestly sons and daughters, to involve humans in cultivating the cosmos into a holy and habitable house, to enlist his children in the consummation of the heavens and the earth as a temple-palace for his presence. Pollution, strip-mining, unsustainable agricultural practices, deforestation, habitat destruction, ecocide in all its forms is a pillaging of God’s temple not unlike the nations’ pilfering and desecration of Zion, an idolatrous looting of the goods from the Lord’s house. God purposes to dwell in this world and, even outside of Eden, clothes his image bearers in priestly garments (Gen 3:21; Exod 28:40–41) with the commission to serve the ground from which they were taken (Gen 3:23). The exploitation of the earth is a ravaging of the ground upon which God wills to reside in glory, an abdication of the human commission to steward the world toward its appointed end.
The church is that community of compromised priest-kings that have been restored in Christ to their office as sons of God and empowered by his Spirit to execute faithfully their authorized task, a task which is enacted in several interrelated temple domains: the individual, the ecclesial, and the creational.
First, every saint is a temple of the living God (1 Cor 6:19)—a new creation risen through the waters of baptism, a foretaste of the renewed world to come—and each of God’s royal priests is to answer his vocational calling in the tent of God which is his very body (2 Cor 5:1). The image bearer must exercise dominion over his body (1 Cor 9:27), subdue every unbridled passion, cultivate the soil of her heart to bear the fruit of the Spirit, offer his whole self as a living sacrifice, guard her heart from unholy intrusions, and heed Paul’s priestly call to “cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God” (2 Cor 7:1).
Second, the church as a collective is—like the individual living stones from which she is built—the Lord’s house and a royal priesthood (1 Pet 2:5) charged with tending the holiness of God’s garden-people and expanding God’s temple-community throughout the earth. The church guards the sacred space of the Spirit’s abiding through the repentance and church discipline that drive out evil from God’s holy dwelling. The church cultivates the garden of God—the fruitful vineyard connected to Christ the vine—as each believer uses his gifts for the edification of others, stirring one another up to love and good works (Heb 10:24). And like Israel, God’s kingdom of priests commissioned to enter the land the Lord was giving them in order to subdue and prepare it as the place of God’s templing presence (Josh 1:1–9), the church is commissioned by the Lord Jesus to go into the world, subduing the nations with the means of grace (2 Cor 10:3–6), warring against unholy powers, filling up the whole earth with the temple of God (Matt 28:16–20).8 The Great Commission identifies the church’s ministry of word and sacrament as an integral means by which renewed humanity answers the First Commission: by baptizing their children and those who enter the kingdom like children to be priests in God’s temple, by discipling them to be kings in the way of the King, the church is fruitful and multiplies, fills the earth and subdues it, announces and asserts the dominion of the Lord whose name and authority she bears, cares for and builds up the house of God in the land God wills to fill with his glory.
Third, the cosmos which God created to be the temple of his presence will be brought to completion as the house of the Lord when Jesus returns to resurrect all things, and God’s royal priesthood participates now in the renewal of the world, preparing creation for its destiny as the holy dwelling place of God. The vast assortment of vocations in which Christians may find themselves are all to be an exercise of the human vocation. By their various labors in God’s world, priestly kings subdue and sanctify every sphere of human activity in faith and obedience, wresting territory from Satan’s dominion and restoring it as the domain of the one true King. They bring order to every realm of creation—economics, politics, art, food production, horticulture, architecture, mathematics, philosophy, engineering, societal and family life—and coax out of God’s handiwork its potential as a vibrant and verdant, habitable and hospitable home for God and man. They ornament the world with beauty, holiness, righteousness, justice, and worship, transforming God’s gift of creation and offering it back to him as a gift of praise, participating in small, seemingly trivial, sometimes difficult-to-even-notice ways in the restoration of the world that will be completed when Jesus returns to consummate the cosmos as the temple of God.
Isaiah 60 anticipates a day when the nations will bring the wealth and works of their hands “to beautify the place of my sanctuary, and I will make the place of my feet glorious” (v. 13). God promises that with the gifts of the peoples, “I will beautify my beautiful house” (v. 7). The fruit and glory of human labor will beautify the beautiful house of God with man. When John finally envisions the kings of the earth bringing their glory into the new Jerusalem (Rev 21:26), the restored cosmic temple lit up with the grandeur of God’s presence, he is observing the fulfillment of Isaiah’s hope—all the products of faithful human culture brought into God’s resurrected house to contribute the finishing human touches that help to make the place of his feet glorious. Christians work in their vocations in this hope, persevering in repentant, virtuous, loving, and worshipful exercise of their various callings propelled not by some short-sighted guarantee of unmistakable effectiveness but by the promise that their royal-priestly service in God’s world honors the Lord who wills to dwell on this earth’s soil and will be wrapped up into the splendor of his consummated temple.
Every believer, therefore, in whom the Spirit dwells is a Bezalel, “filled…with the Spirit of God in wisdom, in understanding, in knowledge, and in all kinds of craftsmanship” (Exod 31:3, NASB), called and equipped to adorn the temple of her body, the temple of the church community, the temple of the world. And, anointed with the Spirit of wisdom (Eph 1:17), we must grow up into the wisdom that is fitting for royal, priestly children of God so that—like Bezalel and Solomon after him—we might wisely work on God’s house, exercising skillful discernment, cultivated judgment, and sanctified creativity in all our temple-building endeavors.
A Whole New World
In an age of rapid technological innovation, growing scientific understanding, and increasing means of controlling our lives and manipulating our environment, it is quite natural for us to imagine the world—to conceive of it, sense it, feel it, move through it, perceive its significance—in purely material terms. The blueness of the sky is a product of sunlight scattering as it hits earth’s atmosphere. The sun is “a hot ball of glowing gases”9 around which the earth orbits in predictable patterns. The soil beneath our feet is a combination of minerals, organic matter, water, and air, and this ground is distinguished from that ground only by the precise proportions of its constituent elements. This naturalistic conception of the natural world is as natural to Christians as it is to anyone else. God exists, Jesus is coming again, and sunsets and canyons are evidence of the Lord’s powerful artistry, but by and large we experience the world around us on a day-to-day basis in immanent terms indistinguishable from our neighbors.
The Bible invites us, however, to inhabit, imagine, and sense God’s world in cultic terms—that is, as a realm that God intends to fill with his glorious presence, a domain formed to be subdued as sacred space for the dwelling of a holy God with holy people, a cosmos that bears all the marks of the soon-to-be-completed house of the Lord.10
The heavens above are spread out by God “like a tent to dwell in” (Isa 40:22), pitched like a tabernacle curtain (יְרִיעָה, Ps 104:2) over his cosmic house as the original curtain of which Israel’s tabernacle’s curtain-covering (יְרִיעָה, Exod 26:1) was an evocation in miniature. When we lift our eyes to the heavens where angels minister and spy the blue and purple and scarlet hues reflected in the sky, we catch a glimpse of the model that supplied the pattern for the colorful, cherubim-studded curtain atop the tabernacle. And as surely as “the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle” (Exod 40:34) beneath that cloth curtain, his glory will fill the cosmos beneath the curtain of the heavens (Num 14:21) when Jesus the royal priest, the Son, the image of God finally subdues and cleanses creation to make it the sacred space it was always intended to become.
The firmament is a veil separating the heavens from the earth even as it is the floor of God’s throne room—the underside of God’s upper chamber upon the waters (Ps 104:3), “as it were a pavement of sapphire stone” (Exod 24:10)—the sight of which sparks a longing for God to “rend the heavens and come down” (Isa 64:1) to take up his heavenly throne upon the earth.
The celestial heavenly host stand guard in the firmament like the cherubim upon the tabernacle’s veil (Exod 26:31), angelic heavenly host defending the way to God’s dwelling till God unites heaven and earth. 11
The sea is a basin (cf. 1 Kgs 7:23)—creational waters in the house of the Lord—established and held within its bounds so that God’s priestly people may serve him on dry ground.
The lights in the heavens whose blaze is softened by cloud shine upon the earth like the lamplight in the Holy Place amid the cloud of incense, a visual emblem of God’s luminous glory-cloud that will shine upon and fill up his people and his world when sun and lamp both give way to the true light of God’s presence (Rev 22:5).
The tended and developed landscape surrounding us—curated vegetation, built environments, edifices and the institutions they represent, all the rightly-ordered, transformative works of human culture—are hospitable ornamentations of the house into which God is moving, like the arboreal decorations and hand-crafted adornments that dressed up the walls of the temple with the skills of faithful ingenuity.
When we behold the world, we behold the furniture and flourishes of the soon-to-be sanctuary of God.
The heavenly lights do not radiate indiscriminately as the earth rotates and revolves. They are set in the firmament for cultic communication, appointed to mark out appointed times for festal gathering, calling God’s new creational people every eighth day—the first day of the new week, the day of new creation—to assemble before the Lord and to feast at his Table.
They are also given for “signs” (Gen 1:14), to point past themselves to a larger reality. The Sabbaths marked by the cosmic lights are a sign of God’s Sabbath resting and refreshment at creation, a resting which his people regularly embody in order to know that God—not anything that we do or offer—sanctifies us (Exod 31:12–17), and throughout the Bible, signs in the heavens function like the signs God performed in Egypt: to reveal the judgments of God.12 But there is a sense in which they function like the signs of the rainbow and circumcision as well,13 as a sign of God’s covenant promise.
With each new day, the darkness of night gives way to dawn’s first light as the sun enters from the east the tent God has pitched (Ps 19:4). And indeed, all of history is moving through darkness toward the dawning day when God in his glory rises to enter the temple of creation from the east:
Then he led me to the gate, the gate facing east. And behold, the glory of the God of Israel was coming from the east. And the sound of his coming was like the sound of many waters, and the earth shone with his glory. . . . As the glory of the LORD entered the temple by the gate facing east, the Spirit lifted me up and brought me into the inner court; and behold, the glory of the LORD filled the temple. (Ezek 43:1–5)
Though darkness covers the earth, “the Lord will arise upon you” (Isa 60:2), and “the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings” (Mal 4:2). Day broke initially when the light of the world shone into darkness and tabernacled on the earth (John 1:5, 14),14 but the “children of the day” (1 Thess 5:5) yet wait for the glimmer of dawn and the rising of the morning star (2 Pet 1:19) when God fills his cosmic temple with the light of his glory. “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Ps 19:1), indeed—not only as evidence of his glorious creativity and power but also as messengers who proclaim the Lord’s glorious and inexorable westward march into his creational sanctuary through the wordless choreography of the skies.
To return once more to our initial question: What difference does it make? What difference does it make that we understand the Bible’s opening chapters to be presenting creation as the temple of God? In short, a whole world of difference—for these brief chapters introduce us to and induct us into an utterly different kind of world, a world in which we ought nearly to sense the ground trembling beneath our feet with the glory it will soon attain as the consummated holy house of the King of kings.
Trevor Laurence is the Executive Director of the Cateclesia Institute
Image: James Tissot, Bezalel, as in Exodus 31
- Herman Bavinck, Reformed Ethics, Volume One: Created, Fallen, and Converted Humanity, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2019), 35.[↩]
- Meredith Kline, Kingdom Prologue: Genesis Foundations for a Covenantal Worldview (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2006), 46: “To be the image of God is to be the son of God.” Cf. Peter J. Gentry and Stephen J. Wellum, Kingdom through Covenant: A Biblical-Theological Understanding of the Covenants, (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), 194–5.[↩]
- Augustine, Confessions, 1.1.1.[↩]
- Bruce Marshall, The World, the Flesh and Father Smith.[↩]
- G. K. Beale, The Temple and the Church’s Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God, NSBT 17 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 81–87 rightly contends that the royal and priestly callings of humanity are interwoven: humans exercise royal dominion through priestly service and guardianship.[↩]
- Bob Dylan, “Gotta Serve Somebody,” Slow Train Coming, Special Rider Music, 1979.[↩]
- Cf. Sandra Richter, “Are We, Indeed, the Stewards of Eden?” https://cateclesia.com/2020/06/17/are-we-indeed-the-stewards-of-eden/.[↩]
- On this theme, see my “Gospel Conquest,” https://cateclesia.com/2020/04/10/gospel-conquest/.[↩]
- https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/solar-system/sun/overview/.[↩]
- Particularly illuminating is the discussion of James B. Jordan, Through New Eyes: Developing a Biblical View of the World (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1988), 41–67.[↩]
- The phrase “host of heaven” (צְבָא הַשָּׁמַיִם) is used for both heavenly bodies (e.g., Deut 4:19) and angels (e.g., 1 Kgs 22:19), and in other texts, angelic beings are referred to as stars (e.g., Job 38:7).[↩]
- In Exod 31:17, the Sabbath is a “sign” (אוֹת), and Exod 7:3; 8:23; 10:1–2 refer to the plagues as “signs” (אֹתֹת), the same term utilized in Gen 1:14 of the heavenly bodies.[↩]
- Gen 9:13, 17; 17:11 also utilize אוֹת to refer to each sign of the covenant.[↩]
- Cf. Luke 1:78[↩]