oikodomeō

This is the everyday meaning the word carried all over the Greek-speaking world. It was the plain term a mason or contractor used: you build a house, a wall, a barn, a tower, a city. The New Testament keeps this ordinary sense throughout, especially in the parables, where:

• a man builds his house on rock or sand
• a farmer tears down his barns to build bigger ones
• a king sits down to count whether he can finish a tower before he starts it

Within this concrete sense the same act takes on extra weight when the thing being built is the Jerusalem temple, or when Jesus speaks of destroying that temple and rebuilding it in three days. The verb is still the builder's word, but the structure in view is loaded with meaning, and the Gospel writers play on the gap between a literal building and what Jesus actually means.

A recurring fixed phrase belongs here too: "the builders" who rejected the stone that became the cornerstone, a quotation from the Psalms applied to the leaders who rejected Jesus. The word keeps its trade meaning even as it is turned into a pointed image.

Outside the Bible this figurative use is almost unheard of. You did not, in ordinary Greek, "build up" a person. The sense grew up inside the Greek Old Testament, where God promises to build up his people Israel (בנה) the way one raises a house, and Paul made it the central word for what Christians are meant to do for one another. To build someone up is to strengthen their faith, settle their convictions, and develop the whole community toward maturity.

The key thing to grasp is that this word is not automatically a compliment. It points in a direction rather than naming a virtue. Paul can use it warmly (love builds up), but he can also use it sharply against itself: a weak believer can be "built up" right into doing something that destroys them, and someone can "rebuild" the very thing they were right to tear down. What decides whether building up is good is what is being built and whether it serves the genuine good of others.

So for Paul this becomes the test of healthy church life. A gift, a practice, or a word is measured by whether it strengthens the community, not just the individual. Speech, worship, and disputed freedoms are all weighed by the same question: does this build people up? The picture reaches its fullest form in the image of believers being joined together and growing into a temple where God himself lives.