This is perhaps the strongest warning in the New Testament against taking the church lightly and destroying it with the world's wisdom and division.
3:16 The Corinthian church was a temple that God's Spirit indwelt. Paul was not speaking here of individual believers being temples of God, though we are (6:19), nor of the church universal as the temple of God, though it is (Eph. 2:19-22; 1 Pet. 2:5). He meant the collective body of believers that made up the local church as is clear from his use of the plural "you"in the Greek text and the singular "temple."The local congregation was not just any building (v. 9) but a sanctuary (Gr. naos) that God inhabited. The presence of the Spirit alone marked them off as God's sanctuary in Corinth.
The New Testament writers spoke often of the church (a group of believers) as God's temple. They did not make the distinction between the holy place and the holy of holies that existed in the Israelites' physical temples. They viewed the temple as a whole. However here Paul did distinguish the place of God's dwelling, the temple building itself (naos), from the temple precincts that surrounded and included the sanctuary (Gr. hieron).
3:17 If any servant of the Lord tears down the church instead of building it up, God will tear him or her down (Acts 9:1-4). He usually does this by sending temporal discipline in one form or another (cf. 5:5). The Greek word translated "destroys"(phtheiro) also means "defiles."It is a very serious thing to destroy or defile a holy temple, and that is what the local church is. In the ancient world destroying a temple was a capital offense. The church is holy in that God has set it aside to glorify Himself even though it is not always as holy in its conduct as it is in its calling.80
Paul ended his discussion of the local church (vv. 5-17) as he did to stress the importance of the work that all God's servants were doing at Corinth. He also did so to stress the need for unity of viewpoint in the congregation.
". . . this is one of the few texts in the NT where we are exposed both to an understanding of the nature of the local church (God's temple indwelt by his Spirit) and where the warning of v. 17 makes it clear how important the local church is to God himself."81
