The House of God

We build dwellings, but we cannot make them stand.  Sometimes I watch my children building towers with Legos and blocks, only to watch the forces of nature (in the form of little brothers) destroy them.  It’s better that way, I know: when children make a tower that stands unsullied too long, they almost always begin to idolize it, as if there were some power that the tower had in and of itself that made it stand.

Nothing we build has the power of standing.  Nothing we build has any power.  It stands or falls at the whim of greater powers, and these greater powers are as nothing before greater powers still.  “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”

Hope tells us this: that although we build nothing lasting, we might be built into something lasting.  Though I am (teleologically) nothing, yet I am part of something.  Although the bricks that I stack are as nothing before the wind, yet by being carried away by the wind I might become a part of the wind.  The house of God is not a place where we stay, but rather a place that we become.  It is living and active, and it will not be contained by any tent that we might fashion.

~ by Daniel on November 7, 2011.