Acts 7:44-50

CHURCH EDIFICES

44-50. Here Stephen alludes to the grand spiritual meaning of the portable tabernacle which God dictated to Moses on Sinai and the beautiful symbolic significance of Solomon's temple. As the great majority of the Christian church at the present day, preachers and people, are living in the old dispensation, three thousand years behind the age, they awfully grieve the Holy Spirit by wasting the Lord's money in costly spires, Gothic domes, memorial windows and other needless expenditures connected with their church edifices; e. g., St. Peter's church at Rome cost two hundred millions of dollars, money enough to put the Bible in every home on the earth. It is the greatest monument of idolatry beneath the skies. How strange that Protestants are all doing their best to imitate the Roman Catholics in their needless expenditure and ornamentation of fine edifices. John Wesley said, “Whenever the Methodists get to building fine houses they are a ruined people.” One hundred thousand dollars of the Lord's money are spent on a church edifice, while ten thousand are all we could possibly need, if pride were dead [and it must die before we go to heaven], leaving ninety thousand which would build a hundred churches for the poor heathens. Oh! what a victory for Jesus! No wonder the Holy Spirit has left the fine edifices. How strange that leading preachers will allude to Solomon's temple as an argument for expenditure and ornamentation in a church edifice. In so doing they betray their ignorance and attitude, demonstrating to all luminous people that they are not only living away back in the dispensation of Moses, but shamefully ignorant of the beautiful symbolic truth revealed in the Bible. The reason Solomon's temple contains so much gold and artistic ornamentation was because, belonging to the symbolic dispensation, it typified the sanctified heart of the Pentecostal age. So all of that gold and splendor do not mean that we are to have it unless we are stupid enough, like the crab, to go backward instead of forward; but it does mean positively and unequivocally that our hearts, “the temple of the Holy Ghost,” shall be sanctified wholly, literally radiant with the beauty of holiness.

48. “But the most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands, as the prophet says:

49. “Heaven is my throne, and earth is the footstool of my feet: what house will ye build unto me, saith the Lord, or what shall be the place of my rest?

50. “Hath not my hand made all these things?” It is a historic fact that a hundred and fifty years of the Christian era had passed away, and all of the apostles long been playing on their golden harps, before a church edifice was ever built. We find Paul at Troas preaching in a third-story room. Like the holiness movement at the present day, the Apostolic churches used little rented rooms in garrets and cellars, private houses and green trees. An awful tide of idolatry is at the present day running in the line of church edifices. If the house should burn down and the preacher backslide a whole modern congregation would collapse spiritually in twenty-four hours and conclude they hadn't a bit of religion. I am glad to see the holiness camps everywhere rendezvoused beneath the twinkling stars, amid the primeval forests, thus utilizing God's primitive temples. How will we ever get the heathen saved if we do not quit sacrificing the Lord's money to that hellish goddess, Pride, in needless expenditure on church edifices, thus using God's money “to sacrifice to devils.” The whole compoodle is an insult to God, as Stephen here says. He does not want His money wasted in this way, thus mocking His majesty. When all of these fine edifices dwindle into insignificance and sink into total eclipse, contrasted with the broad temples of the firmament, roofed with the glittering constellations, lighted by the sun, moon and stars, floored with the beautiful green sward, jotted with Rocky Mountain pulpits, and ventilated by the salubrious breezes wafted from the saline billows of majestic oceans whose thundering waves respond to the music of roaring thunders enlivened by forked lightnings. Instead of settling down and going to sleep amid the idolatrous incantations of a fine edifice we are to utilize the meeting-house God has already built, which is the “whole world,” and our commission is “to every creature.”