The Promise

--- Welcome to our women's Bible study called Solomon and the House of the Lord. Today we're going to cover 1 Kings chapters 8 and 9, which is predominantly about the dedication of the house of the Lord, which God had promised to David that his son would build. So this lesson is called The Promise. This dedication has a lot of similarities to when David brought the Ark of the Covenant into Jerusalem. Not the first time, not the first attempt, but the second time. For one thing, the priests carried the Ark in and people gathered from all around. And it was a great celebration that lasted for days. This is similar. I'm going to start on verse 5. So chapter 8, verse 5.

But actually, at the end of this chapter, they do count them and number them. But verse 6,

Verse 9,

This phrase, this moment is the high point of Solomon's reign. OK, the purpose of the house of the Lord was so that God could dwell among his people. And here was the witness that he was actually there now to dwell among his people. This cloud, how do we know this is a witness? Well, it is the same thing that happened 500 years ago when they finished the tabernacle. So I'll show that to you on the screen. Exodus chapter 40. Look what happened then.

The exact same wording. 500 years later, we're seeing the same thing. Now, we just spent last week really looking at the glory of this building like it was amazing. But I want to make the point here that the glory of the Lord did not fill the temple because it was such an awesome place. OK, just because it cost probably what would be the equivalent of like five billion dollars in our dollars today to build that place. That didn't impress God enough for him to come and dwell in it. It's not like God was saying that old tent that was so 500 years ago. I am just so ready for you to build me something cool with gold that I can, you know, no, no. God would have invested himself in another tent. He would have done in another tent that was even smaller. What was the important part? The important part was that this temple told the story just like the tabernacle told the story. And that is why God was able to come and dwell there. It told the story of God's mercy. The ark and the mercy seat were prominent in the features of both the tabernacle and the temple. And so it was reflecting who God was. Plus, he had promised. So, you know, I don't know if this last weekend, if you guys also watched parts of the coronation of the new king of England. It's a pretty big deal. There has not been a coronation of a king or queen in England in most of our lifetimes. Some of you, but you weren't aware of it at the time, even if you did. But, you know, it had been planned for months, this coronation. And I feel like the temple dedication is kind of similar in some ways in that the temple has been finished for a while. But now this dedication had been planned for months until it finally arrived. When I watched little pieces of the king's coronation, I noticed that those that were attending had a program. I could see that they were all sitting with papers and presumably it had a program of it's going to go this, this and this. So I thought to myself, I'll give you a program of the dedication of the temple. And so here it is on the screen. You don't want you don't want to write these down. You can take a picture if you want. But six elements to the dedication that are in the next 54 verses. We already just talked about the placing of the ark and God's presence. And then number two, Solomon reminded the people of God's faithfulness. And then Solomon reminded God of his faithfulness and forgiveness. And then Solomon explained seven situations that would require God's attention or his forgiveness. And then he gave a benediction. And then they had seven days of sacrifices and feasting. So it's kind of the program of events that we see in this chapter. So again, we've already read about the ark. So let's move to the item number two on our program. Solomon reminded the people about God's faithfulness. Verse 14.

And then Solomon is going to say something now to the people that we know very well. It's a very familiar to us because we have been studying this for a long time, but they didn't know it at the time. They've been busy living their own lives. They've been busy growing their crops and having this might have been new information to them, he says in verse 17.

The key theme that Solomon wants the people to hear is that God keeps his promises. God promised things. And here you have seen that he has kept those promises. The word promise is used three times in that section on your program. And also another key is the word covenant. Solomon made a place for the ark, which is and which holds the covenant of God. This was very important to the people, the covenant and the ark are central to their relationship with God. So next, number three on our program, Solomon reminded God of his faithfulness, which did you know that's an OK thing to do even for us today to remind God of the things that he has said? He likes to be held to his promises. Verse 22, then Solomon stood. And by the way, Second Chronicles, the companion passage tells us that they had built a very large bronze stand for Solomon. So you can picture him standing above everyone, helping his voice to carry and all of that. But Solomon stood before the altar of the Lord in the presence of all the assembly of Israel.

And I want to connect this down to verse 27, where he says,

In other words what Solomon is saying is you have described your character as a God who forgives, a God of mercy. Even the ark itself has a mercy seat. You are a forgiving God. You are a powerful God. We, your people, are going to enter into all kinds of situations in life where we will need that mercy, we will need that forgiveness, and we will need that power. And so the next item on our program is that Solomon then goes on to describe seven situations where it may require God's attention or forgiveness. And I'm going to summarize these because you studied them once already, but each of these situations has a similar format. Someone or the whole community of Israel sins or falls into need. Someone or the whole community of Israel reaches out to the Lord and humbly turns and asks for God's intervention. And then Solomon says, God will you please, when those things happen, will you please heal? Will you please restore? Will you please forgive? And the first one that he mentions is when someone might be in trouble with the law. And Solomon asked God to punish the guilty and vindicate the innocent. In other words, would you bring truth into our community? And then the rest go on to describe situations where maybe Israel's army is defeated because of sin, or they face drought, or famine, or pestilence, or calamity. And Solomon says, if your people will turn to you, pray toward this place, acknowledge their sins, stretch out their hands toward you, would you please work with your power? Would you please hear and act on their behalf? And then he goes on, second to number six on the list of seven, even says, even if a Gentile were to come and sort of graft themselves into the nation of Israel, and even if that person were to look at this place and pray toward and seek you, would you please even act on that person? And then the last one is prophetic, where Solomon finally speaks of a time when Israel might sin so grievously against the Lord that they would be carried into captivity away from the land of promise. And in verse 48, look what Solomon asked of the Lord,

And why should God do this? He goes on in verse 53 to say,

In other words, God, you started this. You separated out first Abraham and then Jacob, and then you separated out the people out of Egypt and you brought them, you started this, so would you bring this to completion, bring it to a successful conclusion? And then on our program of the dedication, we have a benediction in verse 54,

What Solomon was saying was that God had kept all of his promises. He had brought them out of Egypt, he had brought them into the land of promise, he had given them rest as he had promised, he actually came to dwell among them. He set them up in a perfect situation for them that all the peoples of the earth may know that he is God. It was set up perfectly at this point. It was the happiest of days. What I love about chapter 8 is that we see Solomon in an extremely high view right here, like he is on point. He is theologically sound, he is historically sound, he is prophetic, he speaks like a statesman. If this were the only snapshot we had of Solomon, we would think, wowzers, what a guy. But we know we have some other things on either side. But still, we can love this chapter, can't we? Alright, so point number six on our program of the dedication is more sacrifices and feasting. For seven days, it says in verse 63,

Fantastic chapter. Are you ready to do chapter nine? Not as fantastic. 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. Now, can you do something with me? Verses 3 through 5 here in 1 Kings chapter 9, I just want to swipe them away, and I'm going to replace them by swiping in 2 Chronicles chapter 7, because it's just a little more robust. I'll put it on the screen so you don't even have to turn, but I like some of the wording that's additional things that are given here. Plus, we have a very famous to us verse to enjoy. So 2 Chronicles 7.12,

I love the simplicity of how God appears to Solomon and says these things. First to the nation of Israel, he says, look, life is going to happen, guaranteed. Like things are going to happen. But if you will act humbly, and if you will ask me, and if you will repent of your wicked ways, I will be there for you. I promise you, I will be there for you. And then he says to Solomon, look, it's really simple. Just walk according to my plan. This is what you have. Moms, do you remember when your kids were little and you'd say, listen, we can have a happy day. It's up to you. If you'll just do what I tell you, we'll have a happy day. And I feel like that's what God was saying to Solomon. We can have a happy life here. We can, you know, this promise I made to your father can go on indefinitely. All you have to do is just do what I tell you to do. Okay, let's now, we're going to swipe back to 1 Kings 9, and we're going to finish picking it up in verse 6. And the heart of the matter here, what God is getting at, is spiritual fidelity. Verse 6,

And that is the end of God speaking to Solomon. He won't speak to him anymore. But because God is long-suffering, because God is patient, he doesn't do things without first speaking truth and speaking warning. And that's what's happening here. We know, because we have the Bible that's complete, that these exact things will happen. The people will abandon God. The people will worship other gods. They will be cut off from the land. They will be sent into exile. And the house of the Lord that is just now dedicated will be completely demolished. And all, everything of value will be carried to Babylon. And Lord willing, if we do the second part of 1 and 2 Kings next spring, by the time we get to chapter 25, that's when it all happens. From the beginning of Kings to the end of Kings, all this transpires. The only thing that remains after that is that God will hear his cries, his people's cries for mercy. And he will forgive them. He will restore them. They will be permanently cured of their spiritual adultery. And that is the focus here, is that God is saying to them, don't go serve other gods. I'm your God. Be content with me. Be happy with me. And yet, in our next lesson next week, Solomon will do exactly that thing. So let's finish the last chapter, and then let's talk about what's in it for us. At the end of 20 years, in which Solomon had built the two houses, the house of the Lord and the king's house, and Hiram, king of Tyre, had supplied Solomon with cedar, cypress, timber and gold, as much as he desired. Now it was time to pay his debts. King Solomon gave to Hiram 20 cities in the land of Galilee. Big problem we got going on here, on two levels. On the spiritual level, is this is the land that God gave to Israel. Solomon has no business giving it to another country, another kingdom. Second problem, it's more humorous, and a little bit less, it was worthless, anyway. And so Hiram says in verse 13, he says, what kind of cities are these that you have given me, my brother? So they're called the land of Kabul to this day, good for nothing. And then verses 15 to 23, basically just recap again, the forced labor, the store cities, the chariot cities, for the sake of time, I'm going to encapsulate those. And I want to go down to the final verses here. In the last verses, and we'll start on verse 24, but I want to tell you first what we're going to see from 24 to the end. We're going to see sort of a sandwich, like an Oreo, okay? First we're going to have another reminder of Pharaoh's daughter, and then at the end, we're going to have a reminder of how ardently Solomon was collecting gold. And in the middle, it's going to tell us, but he worshiped God three times a year. So let's read. Verse 24, Pharaoh's daughter went up from the city of David to her own house that Solomon had built for her. And what that means is that she had been living in Jerusalem, okay? The city of David. And now there was a point when her palace was ready, and Solomon brought her from Jerusalem proper up into the temple complex, okay? Verse 25 says, three times a year, Solomon used to offer up burnt offerings and peace offerings on the altar that he had built to the Lord, making offerings with it before the Lord. That sounds pretty good, doesn't it? Verse 26 says, King Solomon built a fleet of ships at Ezion-Geber, which you can see on your map. It's way down at the bottom by the Red Sea. And Hiram sent with the fleet his servants, seamen who were familiar with the sea, together with the servants of Solomon. And they went to Ophir, and they brought from there gold, 420 talents, and they brought it to King Solomon. I can't help but do a little bit of investigative work when I see those kind of numbers. And I'm like, what, 420 doesn't sound like a lot to me. But I did the calculations, and we're talking about almost a billion dollars worth of gold, okay, in today's money. So he went and got a billion dollars worth of gold. Remember last week when we said, well, how much is too much? I think all of us can agree, well, a billion is like a lot of money. So let's interpret what these final verses, what is the writer trying to get us to see here. First, Pharaoh's daughters moved into the temple complex. And then he arranged business ventures to amass these billions of dollars. But in the middle we see, but he went to church on Christmas and Easter and Mother's Day, three times a year. What more can you expect of someone? It's really easy to be hard on Old Testament characters, isn't it? I mean, their life is just written for us. But rarely do we like to turn that mirror around and ask, but what does it mean to me? But we have to do that. And when I ask the question, what does it mean to me, it's like, watch out. That's what I hear. Watch out. Because especially in times when God has given rest, it is so easy to become double-minded. The writer wanted us to see that Solomon was double-minded. He wanted to go worship the Lord at the temple. He wanted to go get a billion dollars of gold. And he wanted Pharaoh's daughter close to him. Have you ever been double-minded? You want multiple things? Like we want God. We love God. We want him. We like him. But we want other things just as ardently sometimes. And they get a little bit mixed up. And that is double-mindedness. So a question we have to ask in this season, Israel had been given rest. Are you at rest? Are you in good times right now? Are you at rest? What does a person do when they're at rest? Let's say you're in Christ and no one is at the doctor right now. All of your cars are working at the same time. The pile of bills has been taken care of. You might be even planning a vacation. That's being at rest. What do you do in good times? Do you say to yourself, well, now's the time to build a bigger house. Now is the time to take a longer vacation. Now's the time to start a business and make more money. Or do we say to ourselves, now is the time to invest in the kingdom. I'm at rest. I'm not running to the hospital three times a day. I can do some things for the Lord that he's put on my heart before that maybe they've gotten a little bit dusty. You know, there's a saying, maybe you've heard this. The saying goes this way. Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times. And you can take those, that cycle, those four things, you can overlay it to any point in the history of mankind and see that that is true. And I noticed in Solomon's prayer that he asked that God would hear the prayers of the people when they were in. hard times. But I never heard anything about seeking God in good times. And that's kind of what I want us to land on here. If I asked you, are you in good times right now? You'd say, oh, no. Like, I got things. I got things going on. In the same way, if I said to you, are you rich? You'd say, oh, no. I'm not rich. And then I'd ask you to compare yourself to the population of the world, and you'd go, oh, okay. Maybe I am rich. Same thing with the good times. You'd say, no, no, no. I'm in hard times. And maybe some of you are. Okay. This is legitimate. This comes on us. There's grief, and there's things like this. That's okay. But compared to the population of the world, are you in good times? Yeah, probably most of us are. So what will we do with it? And again, we looked at these, Lord, when this problem is, will you hear from heaven? Well, how about if we end this with saying, how about if right now we look at, things are pretty good. I'm at rest. Lord, what do you want me to do with that? What do you want me to do with the season of rest? I kind of don't want to do what Solomon did with the season of rest. What do you want me to do with the season of rest? Father, I just pray that you would help these things resonate with us, Lord. We so appreciate the fact that knowing you promise to hear us, you promise to never leave us nor forsake us. And Lord, when we are going through a difficult time, when things come upon us, we see these promises that we can cry out to you. We can reach out to you and you will hear us. You will answer us. And Lord, we thank you for that. And we thank you for your promises. But we also want to take this time right here to say, Lord, what do you want us to do with good times? What do you want us to do when things are relatively at rest so that we don't inadvertently create hard times because we're not paying attention to what you want us to do? So speak to our hearts, Lord. And thank you for this lesson in Jesus name. Amen. ---