LIVING STONES

In likening believers to living stones, Peter doubtless had in mind something of the grandeur of the temple built by Solomon, accounts of which formed a large part of Jewish oral history. The skill of the craftsmen who raised that house for God was amaz­ing, and it is recorded, And the house, when it was in building, was built of stone made ready before it was brought thither: so that there was neither hammer nor axe nor any tool of iron heard in the house, while it was in building’, 1 Kgs. 6. 7. Every stone in that house was absolutely unique in its size, shape and position. The builders would send word back to the quarry that they needed a stone of certain exact dimensions and there, in the quarry, it was perfectly fashioned before it was ever brought to the house. What a delightful picture of the sovereignty of God in our lives, whereby each of us was saved with a view to a particular place in God’s house!

Paul tells the Corinthians, when speaking of the church as a body, ‘But now hath God set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him’, 1 Cor. 12. 18. Nothing God does is ever haphazard, and we as individual believers have been divinely set as members in the body and stones in the house. What grace! What assurance! What dignity!

Divine placement in the body and in the building means that every saint is not only precious to God but indispensable to the fulfilment of divine purpose. The body would be marred if one member were either missing or lost, and the building would never be finished were there a stone not prepared and brought thither. There are no redundant believers!

It would have been pointless to have asked a stone in Solo­mon’s temple if it felt the weight of dignity and purpose it possessed. It was simply a stone, passive and dead. But we are living stones, not only conscious of such divine favour but able, and expected, to take our alignment from the chief corner stone, the Lord Jesus Himself. It is as the stone that the builders once rejected that the Lord Jesus will one day be the glorious topstone that completes the ‘spiritual house’. We will eternally bless the God who so linked us by grace with Christ!