The God of Bethel

‘I am The God of Bethel’ – This title conveys a fresh lesson. Does it not mean, the God our Lord Jesus Christ? What is ‘Bethel’ but ‘the house of God.’ Brethren, I hear that term constantly applied to your buildings that are made with stone or iron, with brick and mortar, or with the lathe and plaster, or whatever it may be.

Every little conventicle that is put up, and every hugh cathedral this is reared, be it a biuilding with lowly porch or lofty spire, is called the house of God. Well, did you never read where it is said, ‘God that made heaven and earth dwelleth not in temples made with hands, that is to say, of this building’?

Have you never read that magnificent sentence of Solomon at the consecration of the temple, ‘Behold, heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain Thee; how much less this house which I have built’? Think ye then that He will dwell in any of these classic buildings, be they of Greek, or Gothic, of Norman or medieval architecture?

Oh, sirs, God is great and greatly to be praised, as much outside as inside of your petty structures. He is everywhere; He filleth all things; and God’s house is not a place that you can build for Him, artistic as your tastes may be. Your memorial windows are not His remembrancers. They may charm you, they cannot cheat Him. But there is a place where God ever dwells. What habitation hath He prepared for Himself, and what tabernacle hath He builded?

There is one abode mysteriously fashioned. We speak of its strange conception and its matchless purity of architecture. It was the Body of the Lord Jesus Christ. ‘A body hast thou prepared me’. And the house of God, the true Bethel, the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ, for ‘in Him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.’

For ‘the word was made flesh and tabernacled among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the Only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.’ The house of God is first the Person of Christ, and then the church of God, which is the Body of Christ mystically. This is the house and the household of God, even the church of the living God…