The Body is a Temple
Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; (1 Corinthians 6:19)
There are certain idioms that people are used to saying, without acknowledging the depth of their words or where it came from. Within the church, one of the most famous ones is “my body is a temple”. It’s used by people and preachers everywhere, to promote exercise and good physical health. It’s to be said that many stay at that level, as it is a simple principle. It’s one of the few times in the Bible that the bible uses the spiritual to explain the physical, and not the other way around.
However, believers always need to go further in their faith and in the word of God than idioms.
To preface, understanding the writers and the readers is primordial. Common knowledge is that Paul wrote the letters to the Corinthians. It is well known that Paul was a Pharisee who understood the law (Philippians 3:5, Acts 23:6). He was speaking to the church of Corinth, which was in Greece. This was an early church, who would still go to Jerusalem for the Feasts of the Lord (Acts 18:21). A near two week long journey by foot, this was a group of people who understood the decorum of the Temple. Therefore, they knew exactly what Paul meant when he said that the body was a temple of the Holy Spirit.
To understand what they understood, one must return to the book of Leviticus and to the Law. These early believers lived by the law and by grace, knowing that there was a balance given by the death and resurrection of Yeshua (Matthew 5:17, Romans 7:7). The reality of the situation is that if the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, it means that the body must therefore also be holy (Romans 12:1). As members of the body of Christ, pure in holy and all things, they could not allow themselves to be unholy; we must be similar in our own walk
This means that they understood the purity laws, which can all be found in the books of the Torah - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Numbers. They did not eat pork as it was an unholy animal not meant to be eaten (Leviticus 11), nor touch a dead body as it would make them unclean (Numbers 19:11). Those are only some of the things that they would’ve done in addition to keeping their bodies in good standing. And if they were unable to keep it in good standing, they purified it and cleansed it within the law and asked for grace and forgiveness. King Hezekiah, in the cleansing of the temple shows us this in 2 Chronicles 29:16:
The priests went into the inner part of the house of the lord to cleanse it, and they brought out all the uncleanness that they found in the temple of the Lord into the court of the house of the Lord.
- 2 Corinthians 29:16
Even though the Temple was destroyed, what Paul says remains true: the body is a temple. To know how to act within this temple - with our own bodies - we must know the laws. Therefore, the laws cannot have been abolished. We are meant to be a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's special possession (1 Peter 2:9); a reality that cannot be met with impure and unsound bodies. The body is a temple that we must take care of by listening to the instructions of its creator.