Sermons

A prophet from Judah comes to Bethel and boldly proclaims the word of God before the king. The judgment comes to pass there and then, exactly as spoken: the altar is split apart and the king’s hand withers. The prophet firmly refuses the king’s invitation to a meal and, as he was commanded, sets off home by another road.

Yet when the old prophet of Bethel falsely invokes the name of God to call him back, the man who moments earlier had stood unshaken before the king gives way all too easily. Relieved at having finished a great task, and swayed by the authority of one who was a prophet like himself, he watered down the word with his own reasoning. People are most easily brought down not in the place of fear, but in the smooth stretch where they believe they have done the work well.

In the end he is killed by a lion on the road home. The word he delivered was fulfilled to the letter, yet he himself failed to obey to the last. For those who have received the word of God, faith is measured not by knowledge or long experience but by whether they live that word out, and whatever temptation or hardship they meet, they must not turn back from the way they were going.

When Nahash king of the Ammonites died, David sent envoys to his son Hanun to offer condolences, repaying the kindness Nahash had shown him. Swayed by his officials, Hanun humiliated the envoys, and then, driven by fear, started a war himself and paid a heavy price.

Years later, when Solomon died and Rehoboam came to the throne, an opportunity was given once more: the people asked him to lighten the heavy taxes and forced labor laid upon them. Rehoboam set aside the counsel of the older advisers, followed the young men instead, and declared that he would rule the people even more harshly; as a result the kingdom was torn in two. Jeroboam, too, had been given his throne by God and had received a promise like the one made to David, yet he feared that the people’s hearts would turn back toward the temple in Jerusalem, so he made golden calves and opened the way to idolatry.

When God warned of judgment, that judgment would fall only on those who stayed where they were; it was a chance to escape it by turning back. Rehoboam and Jeroboam alike let that chance slip through fear and a sense of their own inadequacy, and Jeroboam’s kingdom fell after twenty-four years. A heart that trusts God without doubting and waits on him is the way to be remembered as David is.

From his birth Solomon was loved by God and given the name Jedidiah. While he relied on God, he received wisdom and made the kingdom prosper, yet one by one he broke the laws a king was bound to keep: that no foreigner be set on the throne, that he not multiply horses, nor take many wives, nor heap up wealth.

In the end his marriages to foreign women turned his heart, so that he built high places before the temple in Jerusalem and led the whole nation into idolatry. This was no mistake born of ignorance but apostasy, committed by a man who knew the truth. Yet God did not cut him off completely, as he had done with Saul. He did not take away the whole kingdom, but left one tribe for David’s sake.

In his last years Solomon repented of his sin and turned back. Through that one remaining tribe Jesus Christ came as a son of David. Though human faith may waver, God keeps his covenant faithfully to the very end.

The Queen of Sheba hears of Solomon’s fame only by report and travels a long way to see him. When she meets him in person, she finds that the report had actually fallen short of the truth. Deeply moved, she praises God and presents many gifts.

Solomon’s fame came through the name of Yahweh. Yet even at that very moment, Solomon was handing over to foreigners the land God had given, putting to work as slaves the peoples God had commanded to be utterly destroyed, and bringing in a culture of idolatry through trade with foreign nations. Behind the glory on display, a crack of disobedience was already growing.

There are times when God does not stop a hardened heart right away but leaves it as it is. This is because of his love, which waits for people to turn back. God’s people must examine whether, drunk on success and prosperity, they have lost sight of God, and must make the grace they have received the place where they turn their lives around.

When Solomon had finished building both the temple and the royal palace, God appeared to him once more and told him that his prayer had been heard. Yet what God spoke was not blessing alone; it came with a charge to walk with a whole heart, as his father David had done, and to keep God’s statutes. With it came a warning: if they were not kept, the temple would be destroyed and Israel cast out.

Solomon prayed for the sins of the people to be forgiven, yet he never looked at his own sin. He had taken a foreign woman as his wife and kept her close to the ark of the covenant. God’s promise is a law in which blessing and curse are set side by side. Obedience brings blessing from one generation to the next, while disobedience means judgment comes to pass just as it was spoken. In the end that prayer was answered. In later years the kingdom was divided, the temple lay in ruins, and Israel was carried away into captivity.

The warning of judgment is not meant to make people afraid. It is a word of love, calling them to turn back without delay from where they stand. The moment of thinking something has been achieved is the most dangerous moment of all, for then pride smothers gratitude. God’s people must therefore take care lest they fall, and before praying for others they need first to ask that they themselves be broken.

After Solomon has brought the ark of the covenant into the Most Holy Place, he sees the glory of God filling the temple, and he intercedes for the people and blesses them. He confesses that even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain God, yet he pleads that this same God will keep his eyes on the temple and hear the prayers of his people.

The temple is precious not because of the building itself, but because it is the place where God’s mercy and the prayers of his people meet. The confession that God keeps his covenant with those who walk before him with all their heart carries the same weight as the obedience of Abraham, who did not hold back his son but gave him up to God. Solomon’s intercession embraces Israel’s sin and repentance, and even the prayers of foreigners, showing that God is Lord not of one nation alone but of all creation.

Now the true temple is not a building but Jesus Christ, and those united with Christ are themselves that temple. As we take hold, day by day, of the hand of grace that God holds out to us, we find strength to live in obedience to his commands. Not only when we gather but also in the scattered places of our everyday lives, we are being built into a temple where God dwells.

At the dedication of the temple, Solomon confesses that Yahweh dwells in the thick darkness. The God known only as light appeared in thick darkness both at Mount Sinai and in the Most Holy Place.

This darkness is not evil; it points to God’s infinity, which human wisdom and knowledge can never fully contain. Just as no light, however great, can light up an infinite space, the more one comes to know God, the more one’s own ignorance only grows. Even so, God set his name in the temple and, confining himself to a lowly place, chose to be with his people.

The temple was not a place where people confined God but a place of meeting that God had granted, and his presence depended on obedience to the covenant. Later, when Israel forsook the covenant, the temple was finally destroyed. Remembering that the more one knows, the more the boundary of what one does not know grows as well, it is right to become all the more humble before God as the knowledge of him grows.

Solomon had every furnishing for the temple made new, yet the ark of the covenant alone was brought over unchanged from the tabernacle, where it had served. The priests carried it into the Most Holy Place beneath the wings of the cherubim, and the poles by which it was carried were left in place rather than drawn out.

The poles remained because God had commanded that they stay in the rings and never be removed. Inside the ark there was no jar of manna and no staff of Aaron that had budded, only the two tablets of stone, a sign that God’s concern lay with the covenant alone. Through all the years before, he had held unwaveringly to the covenant he made with Israel.

Neither God’s grace nor his miracles amount to anything if his people do not live by the Word. When the ark was at last set in the Most Holy Place of the temple, the glory of God filled it in the cloud, and the priests could not stand to minister. To believe and follow that covenant, which never changes, is the only way to remain in a beautiful relationship with God.

Solomon built the temple, and after it his own palace. The palace was twice the size of the temple and took twice as long to build, yet Scripture gives it a mere twelve verses, set in the middle of the account of the temple’s construction.

Measured by size or by time, the palace was the greater undertaking, but what Scripture keeps at its center is the temple, not the palace. The furnishings of the temple were made by Hiram, the son of a Jewish mother and a Tyrian father, who grew up without his father. God, who does not judge by outward appearance, made this man the one in charge of the temple’s building. The two pillars raised at the temple entrance, Jachin and Boaz, likewise declare that it was established not by man but by the power and authority of God, and the bronze Sea and the basins show that only after being washed clean could anyone enter the holy place, filled with gold.

Temple and palace alike are nothing more than instruments, given so that God’s people might fulfill the calling he has entrusted to them. Just as the temple, not the palace, was meant to stand at the heart of Israel’s history, so God, not self, must stand at the center of our lives. When the work of God comes first, we come to live a life that God himself establishes and fills.

Solomon begins building the temple four years after he becomes king. Yet the text dates this moment alongside another fact: it was the four hundred and eightieth year since Israel came out of Egypt. The tabernacle had wandered through the wilderness, and now it was becoming a temple settled in one place. The promise God had given Israel through Moses was fulfilled only after all those long years.

Neither the tabernacle nor the temple is itself God. Each is simply the place God appointed for meeting his people, and no amount of human devotion can confine him within its walls. God said the same to Solomon once the temple was finished. What matters is not the building but obedience that keeps his statutes, and he will never go back on the promise he made to David.

The faithful God always brings to pass what he has spoken. The same promise of his presence runs from the tabernacle to the temple, then to Jesus Christ, and on to us, his people. Even when we are troubled and weak, we can lean on the faithful God and go forward one step at a time. That is the way of faith that shines to the very end.

When Solomon came to the throne, Hiram king of Tyre sent envoys to congratulate him. In return Solomon asked him to send cedar and craftsmen for the building of the temple, and Hiram, greatly pleased, praised God and gave his help gladly.

David had shed much blood in war, and so building the temple was not his calling. That calling passed to Solomon, to whom God had granted peace throughout the land, and he made it plain to Hiram that this temple was both his father’s wish and the fulfillment of the covenant made with God. The riches, the workers, the friendship of a foreign king: all of it God had prepared beforehand.

Weigh up the credit for building the temple, and Solomon himself did not do a great deal. Even so, as a foreshadowing of Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, he took up that precious charge. We too have no merit to claim, yet God has called us his children and entrusted us with the task of living through the last days carrying the lamp of truth.

Solomon is the only king in Israel’s history to have ruled over all Israel from the beginning of his reign to its end. He appointed twelve district governors and charged them with providing for the royal household. The people grew as numerous as the sand by the sea, the land stretched as far as the Euphrates, and the people enjoyed peace under their vines and fig trees.

This abundance was not the reward of Solomon’s own brilliance. It came because God fulfilled, just as he had spoken, the covenant he made with David and the promise he gave at Gibeon. Yet even Solomon, for all his wisdom, stirred up resentment among the other tribes, Ephraim above all, through a policy that spared the tribe of Judah alone from taxation, and by multiplying horses and chariots he broke the command God had given concerning Israel’s kings. Even the wisdom and breadth of heart that God bestows become an opening for corruption when they are not used according to his will.

The cracks of Solomon’s reign became the seed of the kingdom’s later division. Had he gone on trusting God alone with the faith he first had, walking in humble obedience, the outcome would have been different. God looks for those who lean not on the strength of the world but on him alone, and still today he works in those who take one humble step of obedience.