in whom you also are being built together into a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.

Let's combine the last verse and this into one.

After saying Jews and Gentiles are one in Christ, he is saying that it is a starting point and that there is an end in view.

It starts in Christ and ends in Christ.

And in these two verses, which are one sentence, we have language that at the same time communicates union with one another and with Christ. As if there cannot be union with one another without union with Christ, and as if union with Christ does not exist apart from union with one another. And that is the truth.

That they may be one as we are one was the prayer of Jesus Christ before he died (John 17:21).

Now, back to that two-verse passage. Nothing is happening apart from “In Him.”

In spite of what can divide us, the languages, the skin color, the life experiences, our common ground is Christ.

There is a whole building, there is a holy temple, there is a dwelling of God in the Spirit. Note the article a.

But you wonder, if it is one building, why are there multiple churches, denominations, etc?

In truth, that, in a sense, has always been the case even before Jesus died.

When the disciples said Jesus should stop someone casting devils out in His name, Jesus said, "Let them be (Mark 9:39–40)," in a way suggesting that they were on the same team, even if they were not doing the same thing or in the same place at the same time.

And then when we come to the book of Acts, we have churches showing distinct flavors. And Paul would later refer to a church being in someone's house (Romans 16:5), suggesting to me that the church exists in the same region as others, but is still distinct from others.

This was a time when the church was not a recognized structural entity and was the brunt of sporadic persecution, as what she stood for was different from the political system at the time.

And there was an evolution of the governance structure over time, before the emperor Constantine famously had a vision of the cross and credited Christ with his battle victory, thereby becoming a Christian. That was a major cosmic-level shift in the church.

But to say we should go back to the pre-Constantine time is to deny the fact that Christ is the Lord of history; it's like saying, let's go back to riding horses as the mode of” It is a height of ignorance.

The point is, if you look at externals, you may miss what God is doing, because we may be too simplistic in our evaluation.

Someone may ask what Paul would think about the state of the church now.

I mean, that is a loaded question; even Jesus was not pleased with much of the church he wrote a letter to (Revelation 2-3). But I am sure Paul would say that he trusts God to be building us up (since Christ has committed himself to building his church [Matthew 16:18]) into Christ. But that does not mean we should, as Jude wrote, not contend with the faith once and for all delivered to the saints. But it means we should not judge things based on the flesh, meaning based on their external presentation.

Someone else may ask, how do we square that with Paul complaining that divisions in the church in Corinth, one person saying I am for this and another person saying I am for that person (1 Corinthians 1:12; 3:4)?

In a way, it is difficult to see such a problem developing right now, at least not to blatantly.

But what we can have now is some people trying to say the God of the Old Testament is different from Jesus, and they want to pitch their tent with Jesus and not with the God of the Old Testament, or other people saying that Jesus taught something different, and they want to pitch their tent with Jesus and tamp down on Paul.

But the raw problem we see in Corinth is that their view of Christianity is about identity with certain individuals (who were contemporaries: Paul, Apollos, Jesus, Peter), which becomes the source of divisions, and people are putting those individuals on the level of Christ. That is difficult for me to imagine.

So, trying to extend what happened at that time and thinking that church names and church denominations must go is, in my opinion, a sign of a corrupted vision.

When we go to Nehemiah, we see different parts of the wall being rebuilt by different people, and it took them exactly 52 days (Nehemiah 6:15) to do so, even as they faced threats along the way. Almost like the gates of Hades wanting to prevail (Matthew 16:18), as Jesus said.

Different parts of the wall of Jerusalem were built by different people (sometimes different families), and portions of the wall have different names.

There is no other line of wall that can be built, except that which has already been built in Christ. They can only build on the foundation that has been laid. That foundation is Christ.

I am speaking by analogy.

But the point is, the external names do not matter as long as we have the overall vision of being built into Christ. But if not, we have to be careful, because each one’s work will be revealed and shown for what sort it is (1 Corinthians 3:13).