There are two questions to which we must find answers so we can make sense of our lives. First, who am I? Second, how do I fit into something bigger than myself?
Scientists tell us that “we are stardust.” That is, the elements that compose us were forged in the atomic fires of supernovae, spewed out into the void, eventually coalescing into planets-and people. This idea sounds grand and moving somehow, until you realize that we go from dust to dust, even if it is stardust. Nothing in the vastness cares; nothing knows our name. We are evanescent flashes in a mostly dark immensity of cosmic space and time.
By contrast the Bible tells us that “We are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand so that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10). Later, in v.19, it says that we are “no longer strangers and aliens,” but instead are “fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.” We are not outsiders, wandering lost and forgotten in a vast darkness. We have a place and a name. We have somewhere to go, somewhere we are welcome. And it is the household of the one who created us in the first place.
But there’s more. We are not simply useless lurkers idly watching the life of the household go on without us. We are essential. We are “being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.” We are not just the inhabitants of the house, but the house itself. Without us there is no house!
And what a house! It is a “holy temple in the Lord,” a special place for God to live, for his exclusive use. Apostles and prophets are the foundation and Christ Jesus is the cornerstone, the basis for it all. This, of course, is an image of the corporate entity that we will be in eternity: “his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all” (Ephesians 1:23).
And so we have answers to both of the questions that were raised at the beginning. As individuals we are not strangers. Instead we are known and welcomed into God’s household, fully qualified members of that household, belonging there as much as anyone else. And we are not left with no purpose. We constitute the household itself. We are the building blocks and “living stones” that make up this unique temple for the only living God.