Acts 17:24  The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands.

   

When you look at religions of the world, one of the signs of their existence are buildings – temples and shrines where the gods are said to live. Such places are signs of people with minds that are too small, who do not understand the one true God. God made the whole world – every single galaxy. That is how big He is, and so one small building will not house Him.

 

Yes, in the life of Israel the Lord instructed they construct a Tabernacle and later a Temple that would be a meeting place between God and man, but that was simply a focus point for men to encounter the Lord, but God was far, far bigger than that one building. See the Tabernacle or Temple more like one end of a telephone line, a means of encountering the Lord. If I speak to a friend on the other end of a phone line, they know that I'm not ‘in' their hand piece; it's merely a means of conveying my voice.

 

Paul's point when he was preaching and saying this, was to make the people realise that God is greater than our ideas and we cannot control Him by thinking of Him in human frameworks. Today God's ‘temple' is the church, all the believers, but even then He is much bigger than that. The God we worship is much greater than anything we can construct or even dream of. Worship Him.