“The call into fellowship with Christ (1 Cor. 1:9) is also a call into the fellowship of his Spirit-baptized body (12:13). The bodies of believers are, individually, temples of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 6:19; cf. 1 Thess. 4:6, 8), while the church itself, as a whole, is God’s temple (1 Cor. 3:16-17). Further, that is so in the context of the entire creation ‘anxiously longing’ for the future (open) ‘revelation of the sons of God,’ when it will be ‘set free from the bondage of corruption’ (Rom. 8:19, 21). To polarize personal and corporate, or personal and cosmic, concerns in matters of the gospel is simply foreign to Paul.” (Richard B. Gaffin, By Faith Not by Sight, p. 48).
(for this evening’s 101 Bible Study in Astoria)
“To be sons is to be in possession of the Holy Spirit of the Son; to be in possession of the Holy Spirit of the Son is to be adopted, and therefore obedient sons. Adoption entails possession of the holy, sanctifying Spirit of Christ (Rom. 8:9-17). . . . The sons in the Son enjoy the fullness of Christ’s resurrection status and power. While not yet resurrected bodily, the new sons possess the Spirit of the resurrected Son of God, who delivered full resurrection power for their willing filial obedience.” (David B. Garner, Sons in the Son: The Riches and Reach of Adoption in Christ, p. 99).