“In Him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in Him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.” Ephesians 2:21-22

Our final picture of being no longer Gentiles is one of being and becoming. First the whole picture that Paul has been building up is seen: a holy temple in the Lord, a sacred place where we are that temple (1 Cor 3:17). Yet we also see a process, of being built together in the form of the Spirit’s dwelling.

So there is being and there is becoming in Christ. But our becoming, our growing into an ever perfect dwelling for the Spirit, where we no longer grieve Him, it is not a blind road. Rather it is a becoming in sight of and in the knowledge of our already being complete in Christ, of being joined together in Christ as a Holy Temple, a perfect and complete joy to Him.

Our lives in Christ are a being in the heavenly realms and becoming here on earth, where we are at once secure in our identity and yet still coming to the fullness of knowledge of Christ, where we are already seated at Christ’s right hand in the heavenly throne room, yet also now experiencing daily anew the incomparable riches of God’s grace expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus, and where we are dead to sin and yet waging war against the law of our minds—the sin at work in our flesh.

Thus in Christ, there is no being without becoming, no becoming without being. How unlike many Gentile philosophies where there is either being, but no sense of becoming, or becoming, but no sense of being. These Gentile philosophies are in their frustrating singularities made foolish by Christ who binds the paradoxes together through the cross, so that we are made one in Christ, complete in being part of a whole temple in order to be free to become into the full glorious dwelling of the Spirit.

And we have this, the joy of our certain identity, but the pain of our being made perfect in Christ, because we have “a high priest, who sat down at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in heaven, and who serves in the sanctuary, the true tabernacle set up by the Lord, not by man,” (Heb 8:1-2). Therefore we know what we are becoming—we are becoming what we are, no longer Gentiles, but “a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God that [we] may declare the praises of Him who called [us] out of darkness into his wonderful light,” (1 Pet 2:9).