By Okeke Kaosi "But will God really dwell on earth? The heavens,even the highest heaven,cannot contain you.How much less this temple I have built" - 1 Kings 8:27. It came as a shock to the whole Christian community and indeed to the secular world that Hagia Sofia, would return to be a mosque as it was before it became secularised in 1934, and was made into a museum. The year 2020 had been a bad year for the church particularly as the churches remained closed due to lockdown restrictions imposed by almost all the governments of the world unanimously to curb the spread of COVID-19.To some, it is an apocalyptic scheme to destroy the church, and as such Christians all over the world should fight against it because the gates of hell shall not prevail against it, while to the rest the parishioners lives are at stake so stay at home order is proper with its requisite social distancing measures. But the crux of the matter is that the structure of cathedrals and large cathedrals had been closed for a long time,and there is a fear that this might be the new normal.Clearly, it is evident that even worshippers that are used to bright coloured chandeliers hanging over their heads;a mass choir leading them in praise and worship session; and being in the presence of thousands of people in the house of God can testify that their testimony and worship was still as valid in the small gathering they had to get used to because of the pandemic as it is now in the lifting of lockdown on large gatherings recently in some countries. So what was the fuss all about? Don’t we need to investigate the true meaning of worship as Christians? or, have we forgotten the eternal words of our master, Jesus Christ, to the samaritan woman at the well that the worship done in “spirit and truth ” is the acceptable form of worship to God? We are not alone in all of this and history has taught us better. King David, the warrior king of Israel, got up from his throne and looked around his cedar palace with a golden throne adorning the middle covered with porcelain cloth matching his purple robe thought to himself what the house of God was like.He knew all things had a place of habitat,and even the stars and heavenly bodies are perfectly placed in their positions. But where does God live? So this King decided to build a temple for God. But his heir, King Solomon, took the task of building God a temple that was completed in 957 BC which by all standards was magnificent,all the materials used for worship were all made of gold.That marked the golden era of Israel and what followed was nothing short of glory;Israel became a centre of international emissaries even hosting Queen of Sheba,who was swept off her feet by the splendour of this Kingdom and the wisdom with which it was built.Surely everything seemed perfect. And Israel worshipped the “God of Abraham, Isaac,Jacob and ‘Gold’. The decline began when Israel was split into the Kingdom of Israel and the Kingdom of Judea. King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylonia invaded Israel and plundered the temple of Jerusalem and took many of its citizens captives. The Persian conqueror, Cyrus the Great,ruler of the Achaemenid dynasty, conquered Babylonia not only with his army but with his benevolence . He felt prompted by God to help Israel to rebuild their temple which he did by first releasing Jew slaves in exile.Customary worship returned at the temple until it was desecrated and plundered by Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who was radical with the ideal of hellenization of the world,which sparked the war of Maccabes and today its victory is celebrated as the feast of Hanukkah. The empire of Rome rose and rebuilding was started by King Herod of Judea which took 46 years. But the prophecy of Jesus to his disciples about its destruction took place in AD 70 to crush the Jewish insurrection. The tale of the temple has been full of ‘desecrate,collapse and rebuild’. By making Christianity as a state religion by Emperor Constantine,when his mother,Helena,was converted by her maid to Christianity; it was not long before the Roman Empire was split into two-the West practicing catholicism while the East holding on to Greek Orthodoxism as constantinople as its capital. Emperor Justinan I constructed the Hagia Sophia called the church of the Holy Wisdom.The cathedral impressed the Byzantine emperor that he famously declared, “I have outdone Solomon”.For more than a millennium it was the cathedral of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. After the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453,Mehmed II had it repurposed as a mosque. In 1934 Turkish President Kemal Atartcirk secularised the building, and in 1935 it was made into a museum. In 1985,the Hagia Sophia was designated a component of a UNESCO World Heritage site called the Historic Areas of Istanbul, which includes that city’s other major historic buildings and locations. Plans to rededicate it for Muslim worship,long hinted at by Turkish officials, were confirmed in May by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and given final got ahead on July 10,when Turkey’s Supreme Court over tuned Atartcirk’s 1934 decree.The move was also criticised by the U.S and 27-country European Union, with Greece’s Culture Minister, Lina Mendoni, denouncing it as an “open provocation against the whole civilised world.” But Turkey’s President thinks otherwise as he said that “hopefully it will serve as a mosque until eternity. It is the cultural heritage of all humanity that everybody can come and visit.” For the first time for more than eighty years, muslims were invited to pray at the mosque but due to the lockdown restrictions, only 500 people were invited. This was a welcome development to Turkey’s muslim fundamentalists in a country that boasts of 34.3 million sunni muslims but the total eradication of all hopes of that edifice being returned to its original beneficiaries. Some readers may ask, “where was God in all of this?” and “what is to be learned from all of this?” Well God is where He was before He built the heavens and the earth. God was never and cannot be in human made structures just as a pet dog cannot build a proper house for his master; it should be the other way around, and God already did that on the Cross of Calvary. Therefore we are God’s temple, His house and ‘Hagia Sophia.’ So He lives in us and we live in Him. And even Burj Khalifa or the Pentagon does not delight him like a simple Christian. So what now? Every human has a natural instinct to construct impressive structures from the Gaza pyramids to World Trade Centre in New York which can be seen in the Genesis account of the building of Tower of Babel. In worship of God, the gathering of two or three should not be the exception but the norm because we become many not when we gather but when we spread abroad. We should have more of ‘household of Onesiphorus’ all over the world.That would beat the communist schemes of China or the persecution in Iran.That has been the case from history and will always be the case. Remember, “For where two or three are gathered in my name,there am I with them”-Matthew 18:20. All the bible verses were taken from the New International Version (NIV).