<p>6:16 <i>And what agreement has a temple of God with idols?</i>- Paul here appeals to the Jewish obsession with the sanctity of the temple. To have idols within it was the greatest sacrilege. And yet the Corinthians were worshipping idols within the church, which is God's temple.</p><p><i>For we are a temple of the living God, even as God said</i>- God 'lived' in the temple in that His glory and Spirit were present there; and He has placed His Spirit within each person who has believed and been baptized into His Son. But the Corinthians refused to be aware of this; hence in their personal and collective lives they were unaware of His presence and activity, and the need to keep themselves from defiling that holy space with idolatry. The quotation is not from any one place, but as was commonly done by Rabbis, is a mixture of language from Ex. 29:45; Lev. 26:11,12; Ez. 37:26,27; 43:7 and Zech. 2:10,11.</p><p><i>I will dwell in them and walk in them, and I will be their God and they shall be My people</i>- God now dwells in His people through the Spirit (&quot;In whom you also are being built up together for a dwelling place of God by the Spirit&quot;, Eph. 2:22). John's Gospel records the many times where the Lord Jesus speaks of abiding or dwelling within His people, especially through the Comforter, which is the Holy Spirit. Paul has questioned whether the Corinthians appreciate that the Spirit is indeed within them, thereby making them the temple of God (1 Cor. 3:16,17). The presence of the Spirit makes our hearts and lives exclusively God's. But because Corinth failed to permit the Spirit to function and were wilfully ignorant of it, they therefore failed to perceive the exclusivity of God's claim upon them, and were involved with idol worship. Paul is writing to a church which included Gentiles who had fallen under the influence of Judaism. He is saying that the Old Testament people of God are now the baptized Christian community, indwelt by the Spirit, for whom holy place and space is now the heart of the believer and the collective church of God. If God is walking amongst us and within us- then to be yoked together with an unbeliever is going to be impossible (:14).</p><p>The experience of God as &quot;their God&quot; was only if they came out from the world (:17). Paul has earlier stated that some of them have no relationship with God; &quot;some have not the knowledge of God&quot; (1 Cor. 15:34). God was not &quot;their God&quot;; for in practice, they refused to be indwelt by His Spirit, which was His stamp of exclusive ownership of them. Paul spoke of how those who join themselves with unbelievers (and marriage must surely have been in his mind) had to retract or repent of that relationship, and <i>then</i> God would receive them and <i>be their God</i> (2 Cor. 6:14-17). He was referring back to the Abrahamic promise of Gen. 17:7, that God would be the God of Abraham's seed. Although baptism makes us the seed of Abraham, we can step out of that covenant; and it seems this is what the Corinthians had done.&nbsp;</p>