There are a few things in the verses we just read that I’d like you to be aware of as we move through this chapter. One is timing, and I want to explain this by borrowing a distinction from the Greek of the New Testament between two kinds of time. One is chronos, which means time in the quantitative sense—an hour, a week, a day, how old I am, how long I’m going to preach, and so on. The other is kairos, which is time in the qualitative sense: the opportune time, the time God has appointed for a given purpose.
Chronos time is absent from this passage—we aren’t told how much time has passed since the structure of the temple was finished in 1 Kings 6—and that’s striking. The author or authors of the books of Samuel and Kings structured them deliberately with careful attention to detail, including how much time has passed . . . but not here. I think it’s safe to say the omission is deliberate; we’re meant to notice it and ask why. It makes me wonder if Solomon lost track of finishing the temple interior because he was so busy building his own house. I can’t say for sure, but put a pin in this and we’ll come back to it.
While chronos time is absent from this chapter, kairos time is highlighted. For context, the covenant God made with Israel through Moses at Mt. Sinai was established at the time of Pentecost, which is a firstfruits festival—a feast to thank God that the work of plowing and planting is just beginning to yield a return. The dedication of the temple, 1 Kings tells us, took place during the Feast of Booths—which is to say, Harvest.
This is significant in two ways. First, the ark is moving from a tent to a permanent house as the people of Israel are moving from their permanent homes back into tents for a week. Just like the Israelites, the fact that it has a house doesn’t mean the tent can be forgotten. The point here is the continuity of God’s relationship to and with Israel—the details may be different, but nothing important has changed. Unfortunately, over time, Israel lost the plot. I talked about Iain Provan earlier this year; in his commentary on this passage, Dr. Provan observes, “they imagined that God had left the past behind—that the Lord was now a static deity tied to city and temple, bound to legitimate the status quo, rather than a dynamic deity free to move, bringing judgment on sinfulness and oppression in all its forms.” In a historical narrative which shows how the centralization of human authority reduced Israel’s concern for God’s authority, this is significant.
Second, the temple is meant to bring in a harvest of nations. For one thing, building the temple was a joint project of Jews and Gentiles, the product of an alliance between the king of Israel and the king of Tyre. For another, when verse 2 tells us the temple was dedicated in the seventh month, it doesn’t use the Hebrew name, it uses the Phoenician name—the name the king of Tyre and his workers used. Most of all, Solomon will tell us so in his prayer.
Another point to note in this chapter is the picture it paints of Solomon’s divided heart. That’s why I suspect Solomon got busy building his house and forgot about finishing the temple for a few years, because that would fit. Look at verses 12-13: “The Lord said he would dwell in a dark cloud; I have built you a magnificent house.” Is it just me, or is that completely incoherent? It almost sounds like Solomon is trying to one-up God here; I can’t believe that, but I have no idea what else he thinks he’s doing. He will acknowledge in his prayer that the temple can’t actually contain God, but even as he praises God, part of him keeps trying to make it about Solomon. Look at verses 14-21:
He says “I have built the temple,” a claim he repeats four times in his prayer. Does he ever give God the credit, or the king of Tyre, or the people who did the actual work? Not once. You’d think he’d done it all himself. But you know what? Here’s the most important point: however mixed Solomon’s motives may be here, God shows up. He doesn’t condemn Solomon for his divided heart or demand Solomon get himself right, he just—shows up.
And after God fills the temple and Solomon reminds the people of God’s faithfulness (and his own divine claim to the crown), the king turns to pray; I’ll read his prayer in sections and offer some comments along the way. First, verses 22-26:
Solomon knows he will only remain king if God continues to keep his promises to David, but it’s worth asking how he understands them. Look how he quotes God’s promise in verse 25: “You shall never fail to have a successor to sit before me on the throne of Israel, if only your descendants are careful in all they do to walk before me faithfully as you have done.” This is how David reported God’s promise to him in 1 Kings 2:4: “If your descendants watch how they live, and if they walk faithfully before me with all their heart and soul, you will never fail to have a successor on the throne of Israel.” But are David and Solomon quoting God accurately? Here’s what God tells Nathan to say in 2 Samuel 7:16: “Your house and your kingdom will endure forever before me; your throne will be established forever.”
There are two key differences here. One, backing up a couple verses in 2 Samuel, look what God says about David’s successor: “When he does wrong, I will punish him with a rod wielded by men, with floggings inflicted by human hands. But my love will never be taken away from him, as I took it away from Saul, whom I removed from before you.” In its original form, God’s promise is not conditional. It’s David and Solomon who take it that way, and so in that sense we might say they’ve weakened it.
But, two, notice how they report the content of God’s promise: “You will never fail to have a successor on the throne of Israel.” It’s an understandable interpretation of the prophet’s words, but it’s not—quite—what God said. God says David’s throne will be established forever, but doesn’t actually promise a descendant of David will be sitting on it at every point in human history. I think this might be God drawing a distinction between establishing David’s house forever and establishing David’s worldly power forever.
Verses 27-30:
I want to note two things here. First, Solomon understands two key things about God—what theologians and other big-word people call God’s transcendence and immanence. Transcendence boils down to the core theme of this congregation’s creed: God is bigger. He’s bigger than the entire universe can contain, never mind one house. At the same time, God’s biggerness doesn’t mean he’s too big to care about us, or even to pay attention. Instead—immanence—his bigness means he’s always right with us to hear our prayers.
Second, the center of Solomon’s prayer is a full-throated plea for mercy. As Solomon understands it, God will keep his promises to David as long as Israel doesn’t turn away from God. But Solomon sees they are going to turn away from God; and in Deuteronomy 28, Moses laid out the consequences in a blood-chilling set of curses. When the people of Israel turn away and bring those curses down on their heads, Solomon asks God to be merciful—to hear their confession and repentance, lift their punishment, and restore them to right relationship with God.
Verses 31-32:
To have any hope of keeping Israel faithful to the Lord, its leaders will have to be able to deal justly with those who harm others. Some of those will be brazen enough to go to the temple and swear their innocence. What do you do when someone lies under oath to escape punishment? Solomon asks God to show a particular kind of mercy here: to be the God of justice when human justice fails, and to reveal the truth of the matter by vindicating the innocent and bringing the consequences of guilt down on the guilty.
Verses 33-34:
Note that: he says, when Israel’s sin has grown so grievous that God allows them to be defeated in battle; it’s coming, it’s going to happen, Solomon can see it. He seems to envision a scenario in which some have been taken into exile while others remain in the land, able to pray in the temple, but the details aren’t critical. What matters is, if disaster is followed by national repentance, that God would respond with mercy. “If your people return to you,” Solomon asks, “please return them to the land you gave their ancestors.”
Verses 35-40:
Look at verse 38, because this is rather extraordinary. To this point, Solomon has asked God to respond to national repentance with mercy and forgiveness; here, he asks God to respond “when a prayer or plea is made by anyone among your people Israel—being aware of the afflictions of their own hearts, and spreading out their hands toward this temple.” Imagine one person, walking closely enough with God to be humbly aware of their own sin, standing up before the Lord to confess and repent on behalf of the nation, and God responding to that as if the whole nation had repented and turned back to him. It might seem unbelievable—but we do see this happen in Scripture. In Daniel 9, Daniel reads Jeremiah’s prophecy that Jerusalem would lie desolate for 70 years and realizes that as that time is nearing its end, the people of Israel have not turned back to God; so Daniel puts on sackcloth and ashes and repents for them—and God honors his prayer, albeit in a good-news/bad-news fashion.
Verses 41-43:
As I said earlier, part of the purpose of the temple was to bring in a harvest of nations, and Solomon now makes that explicit. Here, too, his motives are mixed, but I think we see God honor this part of his prayer in chapter 10 with the visit of the queen of Sheba.
Verses 44-51:
The possibility of Israel going to war because God calls them to do so, Solomon raises and addresses in one sentence, then moves on. He seems to suspect most of Israel’s wars will not be fought under God’s direction. Instead, at a time when everything is going well for Israel, Solomon looks ahead to the time of exile and prays for a second Exodus. He even anticipates that Israel’s return to the Promised Land will come not through a second Moses but through the mercy of their captors.
The prayer concludes with verses 52-53:
From my observation of my own tendencies and those of others, when we ask God to forgive us and show us mercy, our instinct is to promise if he’ll just forgive us this time, next time we’ll do better. We don’t throw ourselves on his mercy, we try to bargain for it. Solomon doesn’t. Instead, he tells God, “This is your people. You chose them.” This is an implicit appeal to God to think of his reputation among the nations, echoing Solomon’s prayer for the foreigner; it’s also a reminder of all the time God has spent on Israel and all he has already done for them, which will all be for nothing if he gives up on them as a bad job. Mostly, though, it’s a simple, elemental plea: “Even at our worst, we’re still yours. Don’t forget us.”
Solomon wrestles in his prayer with the reality that obedience to God’s will is essential for us, but also impossible for us; we won’t be faithful enough to manage it. Our hope is not in our faithfulness, but only in God’s. As Dr. Provan observes, “In Kings, monarchs are judged good or bad in terms of their adherence to the law, particularly on matters of worship. Yet Solomon holds out hope for restoration beyond failure, for he holds out hope that grace will have the last word.” And it will, because the fundamental reality of our relationship to God is not law but promise, not merit but grace. God has given us many commands, but not so he can control us through fear; he has given them to teach us who he is and show us our need for mercy. Human law is a tool of fear which rests on the power to punish, and when we understand God’s word as law in that sense, we get both it and him wrong. God’s law is a tool of love which rests on grace.
This is critically important because this is how God’s law addresses our true need. The primal temptation, as we see in Genesis 3, is “You can be like God.” Falling for it produced the primal anxiety: “You have to be like God, and you’re not good enough.” That anxiety drives us to grab everything we can—taking from others, if we’re strong enough—and hold it tight-fisted. We live with fear riding our backs, its long, hooked claws piercing our souls; we try to use fear to manipulate, dominate, and exploit others. We can’t control ourselves because fear is dis-integrating us, so we strive desperately to keep life from coming apart by controlling those around us. Law is a tool for that control, and a way to keep score.
God invites us to accept that we can’t be our own gods, feel the relief that we don’t have to be, and receive that freedom; he calls us to live in that freedom by releasing our grip and living life with open hands, trusting that he will place in them what we need when we need it. He encourages us to recognize and admit our own dis-integration and inability to integrate ourselves, giving us his own integrity for our dis-integrity. Where hope in ourselves has failed, he invites us to despair of ourselves and follow him—to say with Simon Peter in John 6, “Lord, where else are we going to go? You alone have the words of eternal life.” And in a world which proclaims the survival of the fittest, which is merciless to those whom it judges unfit, God calls us to the table of mercy.
The God who made covenants of promise with his people on Mount Sinai and his chosen king in Jerusalem, the God who showed up in grace toward Solomon, is the same God who showed up as a carpenter’s son to bring those covenants to their fullness. The God who is too big for the whole world to contain made himself small enough to fit in a feed trough. The God who dwells in heaven is the same God who became one of us, living our life and dying all our deaths, taking all our sin on himself, then destroying it by rising from the grave and returning whence he came; he is the same God who gathers all his own around his table, seeing all of us here even though we cannot—yet; and the same God promises a day when we will see all of us, as we are in him, because we will all finally see him face to face. Let us pray.
Photo © 2008 flickr user vince42. License: Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic.