The Place

--- Welcome to our women's Bible study called Solomon and the House of the Lord. Today we're going to cover 1 Kings chapters 6 and 7. So in this series now, we've already talked about God's plan to dwell with his people. We've talked about the person that he would use to build his next dwelling place, who is Solomon. We've talked about God's purpose that this new dwelling place would tell a story just like the first dwelling place, the tabernacle, told a story. And so now in this fourth lesson today, we get to investigate the place, the place. What did the new house of the Lord end up looking like? And I have some pictures for you. So it's been a very, very long time from the tabernacle to the temple. Almost 500 years have gone by. That's a long time. Our country is not even 500 years old. So we get kind of a perspective of, wow, lots of time has gone by. And in fact, that's where our text starts is with a timestamp. So 1 Kings chapter 6, verse 1, in the 480th year after the people of Israel came out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon's reign over Israel, in the month of Ziv, which is the second month, he began to build the house of the Lord. Now, note that the writer is giving us, he's linking this dwelling place with God's deliverance of his people from out of Egypt. And then, of course, the first dwelling place, because that was built right then in that first year at Mount Sinai. So verse 2, the house that King Solomon built for the Lord was 60 cubits long, 20 cubits wide, and 30 cubits high. In your study guide on page 44, I had a little chart for you to fill in those dimensions. And as I was looking at it to study, I can't remember if I directed you to find the dimensions of the original tabernacle. I couldn't find it in the study guide. So if you didn't have that, let me give it to you. The tabernacle was 30 by 10 by 10. Now, this is in cubits. So you can tell that the temple is twice as long, twice as wide, and three times higher than was the tabernacle. All right. And then the verses 3 to 10 give us some additional exterior dimensions and construction plans. But a particular note to me was verse 7, where it said, When the house was built, it was with stone prepared at the quarry, so that neither hammer nor axe nor any tool of iron was heard in the house while it was being built. That really grabbed my attention because about 17 years ago, we built our house. We didn't build it. We had it built. And as soon as we moved in, the contractors built five houses all around us. And so that year was loud and it was chaos and it was dust. And it was, you know, the trucks backing up and the compressors. It wasn't a lovely time. So I really like this little statement in here. All the noise was kept away. I like that. But I noticed in this chapter as I was looking at it, I noticed that there was a Hebrew literary mechanism just like we talked about at the end of 2 Kings. 2 Samuel. Do you remember? We spent those last two lessons, if you weren't with us in 2 Samuel, we spent those last two lessons talking about a chiasm, which is a Hebrew way of writing things where the top and the bottom match and maybe the second and the fourth match. And it's a mirror image and you're intended to look in the middle. Let me put this up on the screen for you. I don't know if this is properly applied. This is just what I saw in this. So look at this chapter. The beginning is a timestamp and the end is a timestamp. And number two and four, the first one is exterior construction details and then interior construction details. And the creamy middle that we are intended to look at is the word from God. And that's right where we're at right here. I want you to start looking at verse 11 now. It says, now the word of the Lord came to Solomon. We don't know how the word of the Lord came. We don't know if it was a prophet, if it was a dream like before. If God spoke out audibly, we just don't know. But this is what God said concerning this house that you are building. And then he says nothing about the house.

So this directive is very clear. If you do this, then this will happen. It is the same way that God has spoken to Moses and the entire nation. The point was that God was looking for a people that would reflect his character. God cared more here about Solomon's relationship with him than he cared about the work that he was doing for him. Now, back when Samuel was talking to Saul, Samuel said that he said obedience is better than sacrifice. And here God is saying obedience is better than service. And I thought to myself about our own lives and the ways that we serve the Lord, the things that we do. And I thought about God saying to me concerning this women's Bible study that you are leading and then saying nothing about it, but talking about our relationship and my obedience and my conformity to him, my reflection of him. What are you doing? You're all busy. You're all doing something for the Lord concerning this worship ministry that you're in, concerning this fifth grade class that you're teaching, concerning this place that you volunteer every Thursday afternoon. That's fantastic. But what about our relationship? What about obedience? What about being conformed to my image? So hold on to this. We're going to circle back at the end. Verse 14. So Solomon built the house and he finished it. He lined the walls of the house on the inside with boards of cedar from the floor of the house to the walls of the ceiling. He covered them on the inside with wood and he covered the wood of the house with boards of cypress. And the difference here is that in the tabernacle we had this finely woven linen on the inside, but the temple is not portable. It is permanent structure. So we don't need lightweight linen, I guess. So now we have wood on the inside. Verse 18. The cedar within the house was carved in the form of gourds and open flowers. All was cedar. No stone was seen. The inner sanctuary he prepared in the inmost part of the house to set there the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord. The inner sanctuary was 20 cubits long, 20 cubits wide and 20 cubits high. So it is still the inner sanctuary. This is the Holy of Holies. This is still a cube, 20 by 20 by 20. The tabernacle was 10 by 10 by 10. So there's still cubes. This is twice as large. OK. And now here comes a new feature in the temple that we did not read about in the tabernacle. These huge cherubim. Verse 23. In the inner sanctuary he made two cherubim of olive wood, each 10 cubits high. All right. Let's stop and talk about a cubit for a minute. A cubit is the length from the elbow to your fingertip. So at home I got out my tape measure and mine is 16 inches. A typical male would be about 17 and a half inches. There are physiological differences between men and women. And so in the Bible a cubit was somewhere between 17 and 19 inches. OK. And so these cherubim were were 10 cubits high, which if you translate into feet for us, that's 15 feet high. Now I think this room is about 10 feet high. And so these cherubim were half again as large as this room. That's enormous. Enormous cherubim. And you know what? No one saw them. They're in the holy of holies. Only the high priest saw them. So this is really an interesting feature. Verse 27. He put the cherubim in the inmost part of the house and the wings of the cherubim were spread out. So the wing of one touched the one wall, the wing of the other cherubim touched the other wall, and their wings touched each other in the middle of the house. And he overlaid the cherubim with gold. Verse 31. For the entrance to the inner sanctuary, he made doors of olive wood. The lintel and the doorpost were five sided. He covered the two doors of olive wood with carvings of cherubim, palm trees and open flowers. And he overlaid them with gold and he spread gold on the cherubim, on the palm trees. So here's another difference between the tabernacle and the temple. You'll remember the tabernacle had this curtain or veil. Well, now the temple has doors, solid doors. And you're thinking yourself, didn't it say someplace that when Jesus died, the curtain of the temple was rent from top to bottom? Well, it does. That's in Matthew. Chapter 27, it says the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. And you're saying, but now we have doors. What's up with that? Okay, we have to remember in history, this is Solomon's temple. This is not the temple that was standing at the time of Jesus. This temple that we are reading about will be destroyed by the Babylonians. 70 years after that, some exiles will come back and rebuild a different temple, which we often call the second temple or Zerubbabel's temple, which will be improved by Herod. And that is the temple of Jesus's day. So we don't know if they went back to a curtain. It's never told us again, but in this temple, maybe there was a door and a curtain, but that's what's going on here. Verse 33, so he made for the entrance to the nave, which is a new way of saying the holy place, doorposts of olive wood in the form of a square. And the text tells us that they were folding doors. We're all trying to get rid of our bifold doors in our house. They're out of fashion, but they were in fashion there. 35, they were carved with cherubim and palm trees and open flowers, and he overlaid them with gold evenly, and he applied, evenly applied on the carved work. And then the chapter ends with another timestamp. Verse 37, in the fourth year, the foundation of the house of the Lord was laid. That means the fourth year of Solomon's reign in the month of Ziv, and in the 11th year, in the month of Bul, which is the eighth month, the house was finished in all of its parts, and according to all of its specifications. He was seven years in building it. Hold on to that number. Put it on your little shelf, and then take a deep breath with me. Chapter seven. Solomon was building his own house 13 years, and he finished his entire house. All right, so seven years for the temple, 13 years for his own house. Now, we don't know why. You know, we can say, well, maybe he applied his energy more vigorously to get the temple finished, or we can say, well, maybe his own house was so much larger and grander that it took more time. We'll just read the text and see what we think. Verse two. He built the house of the forest of Lebanon. Its length was 100 cubits, its breadth, 50 cubits, and its height, 30 cubits, and it was built on four rows of cedar pillars with cedar beams on the pillars, and you noted that in your chart as well on page 44. Now, this house, this house of the forest of Lebanon ended up having a footprint, square feet footprint, that was four times the size of the temple. I wanna just, for perspective's sake, I wanna put a picture of the tabernacle again. I just want us to have the original tabernacle in our minds, the prominence of the tent of meeting in the courtyard, just for the sake of, you know, just remembering what 500 years ago, what this looked like, the simplicity. Now, in all fairness to Solomon here, again, this house of the forest of Lebanon was probably a banquet hall and probably had lots more people coming and going than the temple itself, which only had the Levites serving in there, but I just wanna point out that it's much, much, much larger, and so in the temple space, the temple did not have prominence like we see here in the tabernacle. Let's keep looking at these, and he made the hall of pillars. Its length was 50 cubits and its breadth, 30 cubits. There was a porch in front of the pillars and a canopy in front of them, and he made the hall of the throne where he was to pronounce judgment. Even the hall of judgment, it was finished with cedar from floor to rafters, so we're beginning to understand that this is a temple complex. This isn't just the house of the Lord. This is an entire complex that had both this temple and many government buildings. Okay, Hall of Justice, that's a government building, so we've got residences. This is a big complex. Verse eight, his own house where he was to dwell in the other court back of the hall was of like workmanship. Solomon also made a house like this hall for Pharaoh's daughter, whom he had taken in marriage, and I just thought it was quite interesting that after almost 20 years, she's still called Pharaoh's daughter. She's not called Solomon's wife, although she was, but the writer wants us to remember she came on the scene because of an alliance with Egypt, okay? And then verses nine to 12 just give us more details about the stone, and there's a statement there that some of these stones were eight to 10 cubits, very costly, very large, very difficult to haul, but I wanna move on to the temple features here and get some of this in our mind. Verse 13, and King Solomon sent and brought Hiram from Tyre. He was the son of a widow of the tribe of Naphtali, and his father was a man from Tyre, a worker in bronze, and he was full of wisdom, understanding, and skill for making any work in bronze. He came to King Solomon and did all of his work. So verse 15, he cast two pillars of bronze. 18 cubits was the height of one pillar, and a line of 12 cubits measured its circumference. Let's take a look at this. Now, as you know, this is not a photograph. There were not photographs back then, so everything we're looking at is artist renderings based on the same text that you and I have, but look at these pillars. Isn't this amazing? 26 feet high. So again, three times the height of this room, okay? 17 feet around. I was standing working at this at my kitchen island, which is eight feet long. Not enormous by kitchen island standards, but pretty big. So I'm thinking to myself, if it was, as you're facing this pillar, like looking right at it, it's just like looking at the length of my kitchen island. It's enormous all the way around. So he also made two capitals of cast bronze to set on the tops of the pillars. The height of the one capital was five cubits. The height of the other capital was five cubits, and then we have more detail, but the interesting thing about this feature, these pillars, is that these pillars take up the most space in the text of any other feature that we're going to look at, and yet they have zero function in terms of the temple itself. So we kind of get the idea they were built to impress, which isn't bad. There's nothing wrong with that, but pagan temples were also built to impress, too. So there they are. The south pillar was named Ajakin, and the north pillar was named Boaz, and Hebrew names always hold meanings. So as you're reading right to left in the direction of Hebrew writing, the phrase would have indicated in strength he establishes. So that's awesome. Let's move on to, let's put up another picture here. Verse 23, it says he made the sea of cast metal. It was round, 10 cubits from brim to brim. 10 cubits, twice the size of my kitchen island. So I was picturing that. First I pictured my kitchen island as being filled with water. Like, that's a lot of water. Now you run it twice the size, and it's just enormous. And five cubits high, a line of 30 cubits measured its circumference. Under its brim were gourds in two rows, and it stood on 12 oxen, three facing north, three facing west, three facing south, and three facing east. The sea was set on them, and all their rear parts were inward. And then in verse 27, it says he also made 10 stands of bronze. Each stand was four cubits long, four cubits wide, and three cubits high. And the text tells us that they were also carved with cherubim, lions, palm trees. And then verse 38, he made 10 basins of bronze. Each basin held 40 baths. Each basin measured four cubits, and there was a basin for each of the 10 stands. And he set the stands five on the south side and five on the north side of the house. And he set the sea at the southeast corner of the house. So this is 10 times plus what we had with the tabernacle. Which, you know what, the nation has grown. This is a very practical service, this washing basin. It does make some amount of sense. But another very interesting detail about this text is that we're told all about the sea and the basins, but you know what? We read nothing about the altar that you see in that picture. Did you notice that when you were reading? Not a word about this altar was given to us here. Now, if we move on over to 2 Chronicles 4, verse one, it says here he made an altar of bronze, 20 cubits long, 20 cubits wide, and 10 cubits high. And this is why artists often put those stairs on it, because it says it was 10 cubits high, so it was pretty high off the ground. I don't know why. Now, listen, it may have been stairs. We don't have a photograph. It may have been earth mounded up to it, which would have pleased us more because we also say, doesn't it say someplace back in the Bible you're not supposed to make an altar with steps? Yes, it's in Exodus 20.

So, but yet most artists put steps on it. I don't know why it had to be tall like that. Like you all barbecue, right? You have a bar, the altar is like a big barbecue grill, right? You all have barbecues. I have not one friend that puts it up, like way out of reach. Like, you know, it's 30 inches is where is our nice surface for doing things. I don't know why it needs to be so much taller, but verse 40, Hiram also made the pots, shovels and basins. So Hiram finished all of the work that he did for King Solomon on the house of the Lord. And then we're given a recap again about the pillars and the stands and all of that. Verse 46, in the plain of the Jordan, the King cast them in the clay ground between Sukkoth and Zarethan. And Solomon left all the vessels unweighed because there were so many of them. The weight of the bronze was not ascertained. It was just so big, so much. Verse 48, so Solomon made all the vessels that were in the house of the Lord. Not personally, it means that he had them commissioned to be made, which were the golden altar, the golden table for the bread of the present. So now let's take a look at the interior of the temple and what that may have looked like. Verse 49, the lampstands of pure gold. Now remember in the tabernacle, we had one lampstand that now we're 10 X. Now we have 10 lampstands, okay? And it says five on the south side, five on the north before the inner sanctuary. The flowers, the lamps and the tongs of gold, the cups, snuffers, basins, dishes for incense and firepans of pure gold and the sockets of gold for the doors of the innermost part of the house, the most holy place and for the doors of the nave of the temple. So now let's look at the next picture, which actually shows looking inward to the holy of holies and you can see this door and again, steps leading up to this and this large door. Verse 51, thus all the work that King Solomon did on the house of the Lord was finished and Solomon brought in the things that David his father had dedicated, the silver, the gold, the vessels, and he stored them in the treasuries of the house of the Lord, but not the Ark of the Covenant. That's for next week and the Ark of the Covenant is gonna be brought in and set in place in a grand dedication ceremony. Now, you know, this is clearly, clearly a much grander construction project than was the original tabernacle and as we discussed in the study guide, was that proper? Well, we don't know. David may have given these, but let's just say it was big, it was enormous. But we have to, at the end of this, ask ourselves, what's in this chapter for me? Like, that's interesting, okay, that's history. But I've been mentioning that in the text, there's always a construction layer and then a spiritual layer underneath, okay? And the construction layer is filled with dimensions and descriptions, but the spiritual layer is what has application for us, okay? On the construction layer, the writer wants us to grasp all this gold stuff. He wants us to consider everything grand and prosperous and plated with gold and carved to perfection, almost as if, I'm saying it's so amazing that it's only the mind that really wants to push through, can find the spiritual layer. But in the spiritual layer, he's been leaving these little nuanced breadcrumbs for us. And then there was that one section that we already talked about a little bit where it's not very nuanced. The spiritual layer came right up to the surface and I wanna go back to that. It's in chapter six, verse 12. I want us to read again what God told Solomon. I'll put it on the screen for you. God said,

What should that have meant for Solomon, okay? Well, again, this wasn't new information. This is the same message God has been saying to all his people since the deliverance out of Egypt. This is the same thing that he said to Moses and for 500 years, he's gonna be saying this. The question is, will Solomon be faithful? And then in our study guide, we looked at some specifics of faithfulness for a king. So I'm gonna take us to that. It's Deuteronomy chapter 17. This is what the Lord had said for the sake of kings. When you enter the land the Lord your God is giving you and you say, let us set a king over us like all the nations around us. Be sure to appoint a king the Lord your God chooses and then he says four things this king must attend to. First of all, the king must not acquire great numbers of horses for himself or make the people return to Egypt to get more of them for the king has told you you are not to go back that way. That is a reversal of what I've done in your life. Don't do it. And what have we learned? We have learned that Solomon has already sent people back to Egypt and up to Kiwi to bring horses not only for himself but to trade and to sell to the nations around. Okay, second thing God said, you must not take many wives or he, excuse me, the king must not take many wives or his heart will be led astray. And what have we learned? We already have the Egyptian wife and we'll find out at the end of Solomon's life it gives us a head count of all of his wives, over 1,000 women. I don't think he gathered them all at the last minute so I think probably he has many even right at this moment as the temple is being dedicated. He must not accumulate large amounts of silver and gold. Well, what's a large amount? What's large to you might not be large to me but clearly we already see that there is an abundance, abundance, everything is staggeringly huge. And then God said he is to write for himself on a scroll a copy of this law taken from that of the Levitical priests. He is to read it all the days of his life so that he may learn to revere the Lord his God and follow carefully all the words of this law and these decrees and not consider himself better than his fellow Israelites and turn from the law to the right or to the left. Then he and his descendants will reign a long time over his kingdom Israel. And we don't know whether or not he did write a copy of the law but if he had written a copy of the law and had meditated on it, it would have been a motivator for him to pay more careful attention to God's commands. For us, when we dwell in the word of God, is it not a motivator for us to pay more careful attention to God's commands? This is what you're doing right now. By being in a Bible study, you're dwelling in the word of God, looking for the spiritual layer. But back to Solomon, okay, we can see clearly, we can see under the construction layer that he is not, that we have our concerns. He is not being obedient in many of these areas. And yet we can also see that God is bless, bless, bless, bless. Does that make you mad? Does that frustrate you when God is blessing someone who is not being completely obedient in our mind? Kind of bugs me a little bit. Until I think about my own life. And I think about those areas that I am in denial about what God truly wants for me, or I am disobedient, having a hard time getting traction, and yet God bless, bless, bless, and I'm all okay with it. I think it's great. I think that's what he should do. But why does God do that? Because God is long-suffering. He's long-suffering with his people. Psalm 103 says

In Solomon's case, what we're reading about right here in this point of time is God is being long-suffering and he is continuing to speak truth to Solomon and to warn him in the midst of what he's doing. This was the second warning that he got. There's one more to come. And you know what? In our lives, that's how God deals with us. He continues to speak truth, even in our disobedience. Even in our denial, God doesn't come right away and cut us down at the knees. That's not how he deals with us. He comes and he speaks truth again, and he speaks warning again in the midst of blessing. So God's intention for Solomon here with everything that we've read was for him to have a humble heart, that he would dwell in the scriptures, and he wanted him, God wanted Solomon to conform his life and actions to the character of his God. And that is what God wants from us. That is the message of this chapter for me, is that God wants me to have a humble heart. He wants me to dwell in his word, and he wants me to conform my life and my actions to his character. What do we say in New Testament terms? Being conformed into the image of Christ. So just because God is bless, bless, bless, bless, doesn't mean that he isn't also wanting to get my attention. And that's what we sometimes call our conscience. Sometimes we just have this sense, I need to change this. My attitude is bad here. This little thing that I'm doing is not profitable, it is not right, and God wants us to conform. The question is, will I be faithful? Will I conform myself to the image of Christ? Father, we thank you for the spiritual layer underneath this. Lord, thank you that we don't have to be distracted with how grand Solomon's, what he was doing for God was. That's fantastic. But Lord, we get it, that even the things that we're doing for you, you desire conformity more than our service, Lord. And Lord, I just sense that there's probably a hundred different areas that this is resonating with the ladies here, because we're all so different. So we just pause for a moment, Lord, and we ask that you would do that work in our hearts. Soften our hearts, Lord, humble our hearts, so that the most important thing that we do is walk in a steadfast way with you, walk in obedience with you, walk in conformity to you, and then we can layer over our service the things that we do for you as you lead and you guide us. Lord, work in our hearts, in Jesus' name, amen. ---