Sermons

Jesus came into the world with no place even to be born, and he died on the cross by the most brutal of punishments. Yet on the third day he rose again, and as his followers looked on, he was taken up into heaven, promising that he would come again.

Because his first coming was fulfilled just as the Old Testament foretold, his second coming, though not yet fulfilled, will certainly take place. Living now in the last days, we must first examine whether our hearts are good soil, before asking what we will offer God at Thanksgiving. A thanksgiving offering, acts of service, or the satisfaction of having been zealous may not, by themselves, be the fruit God desires.

The grain in the fields is already white and the harvest is overdue, yet there are no laborers. True laborers are scarce because people heap up their devotion on top of a self they have never nailed to the cross. Now, without delay, we must deny ourselves, answer the call, and offer the fruit of faith that God is looking for in the last days.

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.

Everything in the world belongs to Jesus Christ, and people are no more than stewards entrusted with it for a time. There was a steward who did not know his master’s will, so he clung to his wealth and turned away from the poor; and there was another who began to give only once he had grasped his master’s heart.

Solomon, too, understood only late that the royal power and glory he had enjoyed had been entrusted to him by God for a season. He came to see on the brink of death that the years he had lived without sharing, treating it all as his own, had been sin. In the darkness of the cave, people think themselves special according to how much or how little they possess; but when they come out into the light of Christ, they find that all such boasting was cause for shame.

The years spent commanding with a king’s authority were as meaningless as a dead lion, while God’s persecuted people lived lives as precious as a living dog, still able to turn back day after day. To meet him, a person must die daily to their own righteousness and lean on the righteousness of God. The sermon calls its hearers to live as good stewards who understand their master’s will and obey it.

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.

In Philippi, Paul and Silas are beaten and thrown into prison for setting free a slave girl possessed by a demon. At midnight, as they pray and sing hymns, a great earthquake throws open the prison doors, and every prisoner’s fetters come loose. They could have escaped, yet Paul stays where he is and holds back the jailer, who was about to take his own life.

What people do when the chance of release comes shows what their faith really is. The earthquake struck prisoners and jailer alike, but only those who had been born again could make an honest and holy choice even in that moment. Only after seeing this did the jailer ask what he must do to be saved.

Told that if he believed in the Lord Jesus, he and his household would be saved, the jailer and his whole family were baptized that same night. Paul preached the gospel, but it is God who brings a person to faith. So the one who proclaims it is not answerable for the outcome; it is enough to be faithful to the calling entrusted to them. Once out of prison, Paul and Silas went back to Lydia’s house, that is, to the church, where they saw the brothers and encouraged them.

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.

The wicked seem to go unpunished and to prosper, while the righteous appear instead to suffer. Because God does not judge sin at once, the wicked sin all the more boldly. Yet however long a person lives, death comes in the end: the body returns to dust, and the soul goes either to heaven or to hell.

God’s delay in judgment is not indifference but patience, as he waits for people to turn back of their own accord. Long life and abundance in this world are not true blessing; the truly long life is to believe in Christ and live in the eternal Kingdom. Solomon himself, for all his power and wealth, was so lonely and empty that he lay awake at night, and only late did he come to see that the years spent away from God had been in vain.

The unfairness of the world must not be allowed to take hold of the heart; the faithful need to cling to the truth that faith in Christ is the only way of salvation. Anyone who lacks discernment can become an instrument of sin without knowing it, but the chance to turn back is only now, while there is still breath. It is in ceasing to trust oneself and leaning on God that a person at last comes to understand deeply both human frailty and the great love of God.

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.

The Bible speaks of a thousand years six times. Depending on how that period is understood, the order of the Second Coming, the Rapture and the Great Tribulation takes on an entirely different shape. Even within the orthodox denominations, differing views on this sequence have long stood apart.

Scholars disagree over whether the Second Coming precedes the Millennium or follows it, or whether the thousand years should be read as a symbol. Premillennialism itself is divided between those who hold that God’s people will pass through the tribulation and those who hold that the Church will be caught up before it begins. Each position has passages on which it rests, and since none can be declared wrong with certainty, they do not brand one another as heretical.

Scripture does not fix that order precisely. What matters, then, is not which theory is correct but whether there is faith in Christ now. Where that faith is present, one can stand before God without fear, whatever comes and whenever it comes.