The Triune God is our temple, and we are His tabernacle. He dwells in us, and we dwell in Him, and this mutual dwelling is the New Jerusalem, which to God is the tabernacle and to us is the temple. We enjoy a foretaste of this today when we abide in the Lord and the Lord abides in us (John 15:5). John 14:23 says that the Father and the Son will come to the one who loves the Son and make an abode, a dwelling place, with him. This dwelling place will be a mutual abode for the Father with the Son and the Son’s lover. This mutual abode will be enlarged in eternity to be the New Jerusalem where God will be our dwelling place, and we will be His dwelling place.
The New Jerusalem as the tabernacle to God and the temple to us indicates a marvelous mingling. God dwells in us, and we dwell in Him—a mutual indwelling. In eternity future the New Jerusalem will be the tabernacle for God’s dwelling and the temple for our dwelling.
The New Jerusalem has two natures, humanity and divinity. According to its humanity, the New Jerusalem is the tabernacle of God among men, the dwelling place of God in His humanity among men on the earth (Rev. 21:3). In the Bible the tabernacle is a human dwelling place. Likewise, the New Jerusalem is a human dwelling place because it is constituted with humanity. John 1:14 says that God was incarnated in the flesh to tabernacle among men. He is God, but He has become a man. He partook of humanity as His nature; hence, He dwells in humanity.
According to its divinity, the New Jerusalem is the temple of God as the dwelling place of His redeemed elect (Rev. 21:22). The holy city is the temple of God because it is divine. It is the temple of God, yet it is the dwelling place of His redeemed. Because this is God’s temple, the dweller must be divine. According to its humanity, the New Jerusalem is the tabernacle; God dwells in the tabernacle. God can dwell in a human dwelling place because He has become a man. According to the divinity of the New Jerusalem, it is a temple for God’s dwelling. If we are only human and not divine, we cannot dwell in the temple. As believers in Christ and children of God, we human beings can dwell in a divine temple because, having the divine life and nature through regeneration, we have been made God in life and in nature but not in the Godhead. The New Jerusalem is therefore a mutual abode. According to its humanity, it is a human tabernacle, and according to its divinity, it is a divine temple. It is a human dwelling place, but the Dweller is God. God can dwell in a human place because He became a man. In the same way, we human beings can dwell in God’s temple because we have been made God. This is the mutual abiding of God and man.
The tabernacle is built mostly with the humanity of God’s people to be God’s dwelling place, whereas the temple is built mostly of divinity to be the dwelling place of God’s redeemed. This indicates that God takes us as His dwelling place and gives Himself to us to be our dwelling place. The divine God lives in a human tabernacle, and redeemed man lives in a divine dwelling place. This indicates the mingling of divinity with humanity, in which both humanity and divinity became a mutual abode. Concerning God and His redeemed in the New Jerusalem, a new hymn says, “As man yet God they coinhere, / A mutual dwelling place to be.” The New Jerusalem as the tabernacle of God indicates that the redeemed of God are the dwelling place of God, and the redeeming God as the temple indicates that God is the dwelling place for His serving ones.
For eternity the New Jerusalem will be the fulfillment of the Lord’s brief word in John 15:4: “Abide in Me and I in you.” To abide in the Lord means to take Him as our dwelling, our habitation. When we take the Lord as our dwelling, He abides in us. This abiding is mutual, for we abide in the Lord, and He abides in us. There is no need to wait until the coming New Jerusalem to abide in the Lord and to have Him abide in us. We can testify strongly that many times we know that we are truly in the Lord and that He is actually abiding in us. When we abide in Him, we immediately sense that He is abiding in us. If we say, “Lord Jesus, how I thank You that right now I am abiding in You,” we will have the deep sense that He is abiding in us. Wherever we are—at home, at work, or at school—we can say, “O Lord Jesus, I am abiding in You right now,” and something within us will say, “And I am abiding in you.” This is a miniature of the coming New Jerusalem, which will simply be a mutual abiding place for us and for God and the Lamb.