Solomon’s Temple

Many years ago, I was commissioned with an incredibly important building project. Our oldest son was about 15 months old and Holly consecrated me to build a swing set. Wasn’t gonna be a store-bought swing set.

We were gonna buy the wood and order the pieces online that connected everything together, find plans online. And I started building and it was kind of fun. It was mostly a pain, but it was kind of fun.

And pretty soon I got to a point where I couldn’t do it by myself. I needed a couple guys to help me who could help lift it up and move it around so we could attach different things. And only one of them could come over and this guy came over and he got under the swing set that weighed hundreds of pounds, very heavy with all the wood and the beam and everything else.

And he went, lifted it up. And I was like, well, this is nice. And then I did what I needed to do while he lifted it up.

But there was a point in that project where I needed help. I couldn’t do it by myself. Now, Solomon was consecrated for something that was just a little bit more important than what I was consecrated for.

He was consecrated to build a temple of the Lord. When he was anointed, he was anointed as king, but he had a special calling to build the temple that came clear back from his father, David, who when God said David had too much blood on his hands from all the wars, that his son or his heir would build the temple. And so Solomon was called to build the temple.

Now, they’d had a temple before called a tabernacle that was built when they were out in the wilderness and everywhere they would go, they would move this tent and reassemble it and put it back together, which was similar to how the temple was built, just not permanent, not solid. Now, we also moved from, we built that when we were in Plainville, we moved it to Valley Center, and then we moved that swing set to Salina. And then the people buying the house from us in Salina asked if we would leave the swing set there.

And we thought, wow, the boys are old enough. This is perfect. This is a great way to pass it on to someone else.

And so I don’t have to take it apart and move it again. Last week, we had been talking about Solomon and Solomon’s wisdom and Solomon’s prayers. And last week, we talked about Solomon’s pride.

But before all that happened, I saved it for today, basically because of Labor Day. Solomon’s greatest labor of love was building the temple of the Lord, building the house of God. And if you listen to this, listen to how many times you hear the word house, that they don’t call it a temple as much as they call it God’s house.

We stand as you are able, 1 Kings 9, verses one through nine. As soon as Solomon had finished building the house of the Lord and the king’s house and all that Solomon desired to build, the Lord appeared to Solomon a second time as he had appeared to him at Gibeon. And the Lord said to him, I have heard your prayer and your plea, which you have made before me.

I have consecrated this house that you have built by putting my name there forever. My eyes and my heart will be there for all time. And as for you, if you will walk before me as David, your father walked with integrity of heart and uprightness, doing according to all that I have commanded you and keeping my statutes and my rules, then I will establish your throne over Israel forever.

And I will promise David, your father, saying you shall not lack a man in the throne of Israel. But if you turn aside from me, you or your children, and do not keep my commandments and my statutes that I have set before you, but go and serve other gods and worship them, then I will cut off Israel from the land that I have given them, and the house that I have consecrated for my name, I will cast out of my sight. And Israel will become a proverb and a byword among the peoples.

And this house will become a heap of ruins. Everyone passing by it will be astonished and will hiss and they will say, why has the Lord done this to the land and to this house? Then they will say, because they have abandoned the Lord and their God and brought their fathers out of the land, who brought their fathers out of the land of Egypt and laid hold on other gods and worshiped them and served them. Therefore, the Lord has brought all this disaster on them.

The word of God, inspired by God, for the people of God. Thanks be to God. Amen.

You may be seated. Now, Solomon has had a lot going on to come to this point. I love the prayer that Dana shared with you before when Solomon consecrates the temple.

In fact, in other places in the Pentateuch, it talks about how the spirit came down like fire with that prayer. It was so amazing. And Solomon had so much work to do.

David, his father, fought wars. Solomon had battles and things going on in his lifetime, but in his lifetime as king, but his anointing as king came with a consecration to build the house of God. And when he goes to build the house of God, he does a draft.

We should have implemented a draft when we started work on our place, too. But in this draft, it said the people were drafted into service to build the temple. The only place I know of, there’s probably others, but where they were drafted.

They were brought into service not to go to war, but to build the house of God. And in order to do this, he had so many thousands and tens of thousands of people helping out. And he bought wood from places around and stone, and it was a huge project.

Solomon could not build the temple on his own. It’s just way too much to do on his own. And so he had so many people helping him.

He had craftsmen that were experts in their field helping and working through that process together. And Solomon, in this labor of love, built the house of God, built the house of the Lord, built a place that was gonna be permanent, where that would say, you no longer have to wander through the desert. Here is where we are gonna go to worship.

And he prayed. And in our scripture today, it says that God himself consecrated the temple by putting his name on it. God consecrated the temple and made it his house by putting his name on it.

And then he doesn’t sit back and go, you did a great job of building this. It’s beautiful. People are gonna marvel at how awesome this structure is.

He said, thanks for building it, but you need to follow me. You need to worship me. My house needs to be a place where you worship me and no other gods.

If not, you’re cut off from the land and the temple will be destroyed. So anybody who knows history that doesn’t come too long after this, what happens to the temple? It’s torn down. It’s destroyed.

It is made a mockery and passers-by, like the prophecy says, saying what has the Lord done to Israel? And people would say, well, guess they worshiped other gods. And the Lord wasn’t happy with that. But he was saying the most important part of the temple is not the looks of the temple and not even how sound the structure is of the temple, but it is how you worship me, how you come into my presence, how you avoid and stay away from all other gods.

And that’s hard to do. Last week, we talked about idols, idols of pride, how even wisdom being such a gift for Solomon could become an idol that’s worshiped instead of God himself. These things would make this prophecy come true.

Now, the temple, which God says is my house, and Solomon, even in his prayer, talks about it being my house. But what is the temple known as historically? Solomon’s temple. There’s an irony in that.

When in the book of Ezra, when they rebuilt the temple after it was destroyed, after the Babylonian exile, they came back and they built the temple and they put it around and they went to consecrate it with a prayer and reading scripture. And it was so powerful. And the elders of the church saw it and they weeped.

Why did they weep? They wept because it wasn’t as big as the old Solomon’s temple. Sometimes with the temple, we get things mixed up on the priorities and the importance and what that all is. Now, if we go through kind of a survey of the Bible and we see what a temple is used for, one of the things is, in 2 Chronicles, it said it is a place for sacrifice.

As soon as Solomon finished his prayer, fire came down from heaven and consumed the burnt offering and the sacrifices, and the glory of the Lord filled the temple. That was a huge part of the temple itself that the Bible talks about was to make sacrifices. What would the sacrifices provide? Anybody know? I heard atonement.

I heard in a whisper atonement. And when you’re atoned, what do you receive? Forgiveness. You get the forgiveness.

Now, we’re saying, okay, where’s our grill that we’re gonna throw our sacrifices on? Who? Who’s our sacrificial lamb? Jesus. Now, with Jesus, we still have, he was our sacrifices, so we don’t make sacrifices, but a house of worship is a place where we come and we repent and we ask God to forgive us, and we come back into the presence of God. Repentance and forgiveness are cornerstone to what the house of the Lord should be.

It’s a basic part of who we should be as God’s people. We have the sacrifice of Jesus, so we just need to lean on that sacrifice and say, God did this for me. Forgive me.

Help me to turn. Help me to follow you. Forgive me for the ways in which I strayed since I have been here.

Another one in Isaiah 56, seven, he says, these I will bring to my holy mountain and make them joyful in my house of prayer, but their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar, for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples. Who else emphasized that God’s house is a house of prayer? Jesus emphasized that when he came at the beginning of the festival and they were selling like at exorbitant prices, lambs and chickens and things that people could offer for sacrifices, and he turned over the tables and his words were, you have made it a den of robbers, a place for thieves. You’re stealing from my people, but I have called this, God has said this will be a house of prayer, that we come here and we pray and we turn to God and everybody has an opportunity to pray and to offer themselves before God, no matter what circumstance they have been in.

First Peter, Peter says it like this. You yourselves, like living stones, are being built up as a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. God’s house is a spiritual house.

It’s a place where God’s spirit is. Now note what Peter said there. He said, you yourselves are a spiritual house.

Paul said, we, with Jesus, are a temple of the Holy Spirit. In Solomon’s prayer, he talked about the Holy Spirit dwelling, the God spirit dwelling in the house, but he also knew, as we see, that his place was also in heaven, that he wasn’t limited by the temple. And we, in Christ, become the temple.

We become the dwelling place of God. We become a place and the temple is supposed to be a place where we can come and get refreshed by being in the presence of God’s spirit. Even though in God’s house is not the only place where the Holy Spirit is.

Where else is the Holy Spirit? Within us. And we take it with us. Take God’s spirit with us.

We take God with us wherever we go. And we are the spiritual house. Some of this doesn’t just come in what we’re doing here, but it comes with our Hope Builders groups.

It comes with education. It comes with spiritual growth. It comes with things that we gather together and learn about God and grow closer to God and give opportunities for the spirit to dwell within us more richly and deeply.

Now here’s one you probably could have guessed. Also in 2 Chronicles, it says, when all the people of Israel saw the fire coming down from glory and the Lord on the temple, they bowed down with their faces to the ground on the pavement and worshiped and give thanks for the Lord saying, for he is good. His steadfast love endures forever.

This is a house of worship. It’s a place where we come and we worship God and God alone. That is the key ingredient for God with the temple was not how cool it was.

It was that we worship only God, that God is first, that God is the only God that we worship, that we don’t worship ourselves, we don’t worship any part of the worship service. Point it all to God, that it’s all about Jesus and God’s love for us and the opportunity for us to worship and praise God here and also in our lives. That is a part of the temple.

1 Kings 8, one says, then Solomon assembled the elders of Israel and all the heads of the tribes, all the heads of the tribes, the leaders of the father’s houses of all the people of Israel before King Solomon, Jerusalem to bring up the Ark of the Covenant of the day of the Lord out of the city of David, which is Zion. Now, that just came in the previous chapter. It is a Solomon assembled all the people.

In 1 Kings 8, when the people were assembled, that gives you a big key and a big clue as to what the temple is supposed to be. It is a place of assembly. It’s a place where we gather.

I mean, we can worship God alone in our rooms, in a closet, outside in nature, wherever we can do it alone, we can do it with a couple others, but there is a gathering of the assembly. So we come together and we each bringing that spiritual sacrifice with us, offer ourselves to God, and when we praise and worship God together, kind of like what we sang, there’s joy in the house of the Lord. There’s just something more powerful about singing together, about worshiping together, about the joy that comes when we gather, knowing that we gather, not just because we’re here to have a good time, not just because we sit down and we go, okay, entertain me, not just because we sit down and we go, okay, it’s been a week since I did anything at all related to God, so now you better fill me up enough to cover the bases for everything I’m gonna do in the coming weeks.

But it’s about everybody coming together with all our faults, all our failures, all our imperfections, assembling in God’s house, encouraging one another, lifting one another up, praying for one another, worshiping together. This is a place of assembly, and it’s a place, hopefully, we need to be and we want to be all the time. Now, if we look at what we have for the house of the Lord, it’s a place to offer sacrifices.

For us, that means a place to come and repent. We can repent anywhere, but repentance is built into the worship service. Repentance is built in to doing communion together like we’ll do communion next week so we can receive more of Jesus when we take in the body and the blood because we have repented and opened ourselves and received the sacrifice of Jesus and accepted the forgiveness of God.

The house of the Lord is a house of prayer, a place where we pray. It’s a spiritual house where God’s spirit dwells. It also dwells in each one of us.

It’s a place of worship where we just pour it out before God in love and adoration, and it is a place of assembly where it is our corporate worship together. It is our time of being together and letting the power of the Holy Spirit grow with each one of us as we have come together. Now, in this, we see the coolest thing in Solomon’s prayer that was read in the scripture earlier by Dana where he said, “‘But will God indeed dwell on earth? “‘Behold, the heaven and the highest heaven “‘cannot contain you, “‘how much less this house that I have built.

“‘Yet regard the prayer of the servant in my plea.'” I gotta tell ya, it has been a fun August. I have enjoyed coming here to worship. Has anybody else enjoyed coming here to worship? Has anybody else noticed that the power of God is in this place? That this is the house of God, but yet God is not contained to this space.

God lives in each one of us and goes out into the world and in a different form. God is everywhere. He is Emmanuel, He is God with us, but the temple is set apart for encountering God.

My prayer is that you encounter God here, that you seek God and that in the worship, the presence of God is palatable for you and the presence of God is here, but know that it’s not only here, but by the grace of God goes with us. So someone else during the week, let’s say you come across someone who, you probably won’t, but let’s just say you come across someone who didn’t go to church on Sunday or doesn’t ever want to go to church. Where are they gonna find the presence of God? In you, through you, working through you.

You can invite them to come, but you also take that presence with you. For One Hope Church as we are here and we have, today marks the end of the month of August, our first month in this place, in this new house of God that we have established in something new that God is doing, I remind you of what we were consecrated to do. Our vision statement is, or our calling is to build a boat where people of every generation can experience God’s grace like Noah’s family and trust in Jesus who is our one hope from the overwhelming floods of life.

And then our purpose is to build passionate worshipers, to build connections through love and scriptural holiness, and to build bold witnesses about life with Jesus who is our one hope. On our cards, if you pick one of those cards up, or when someone detects the power of the Holy Spirit in you and they say, hey, where’s that coming from? And you go, hey, come to church. On the cards, it says, we build together.

Worship, connect, witness. Kind of summarizes our purpose. We build together.

Let’s build together. Let’s go from here and build together. On this Labor Day weekend and every day of our lives, the labor of our love is building the kingdom of God.

Let’s pray. Almighty God, thank you that we could worship in your temple. Thank you that you have loved us and that you have glorified your name in this place and you have written your name on here.

Not much differently than it was on the temple, the house of God that Solomon was commissioned to build. So Lord, consecrate us for your service. We are anointed to serve you.

We are anointed to share your love with others and we are anointed to build a place of worship, a place where we can connect and a place where we can gain strength to witness to others. We do this by the power of Jesus. Amen.