The Plan

--- Welcome to our women's Bible study on 1st and 2nd Kings, which is called Solomon and the House of the Lord. Before I say a thing about the Bible study, I want to ask you a question. Have you ever heard the phrase, ask Jesus into your heart? Of course you have. Probably you have. What I wonder is, have you really thought about that phrase? Have you really wondered about it? Do you think it is possible for God to actually live in our hearts? Do you think he wants to? Does God come and live in humans? It's an important theme in this Bible study, and it's an important theme in the Bible, the subject of God dwelling with man. The Bible does show us that it's always been an important part of God's plan of redemption for him to dwell with his people from the Garden of Eden to the temple in Jerusalem and right up to the current time when he dwells in his people. And so we're going to get started on our study and see what we discover. This is going to be a six-week study, which I call Part 1 of 1st and 2nd Kings. I don't know how many parts we'll have in 1st and 2nd Kings, but this one is going to cover chapters 1 through 11. There is a study guide for these teachings. And if you don't have it, it's available at ccontario.com. Also, if you do have your study guide, you can open it to page 4 and 5. Open it up, and on page 4, you'll see that there's an outline of our six weeks of study. And then on page 5, there's a place where you can log a few key words or phrases from this introduction, otherwise known as filling in the blanks. It might help you keep engaged. But the Book of Kings picks up the story right where we left off with Samuel. In the Book of Samuel, we learned about the first two kings of Israel. Let's review them. I called the people's king Saul, which is what 1st Samuel was all about. Saul was reigning at that time. And then in 2nd Samuel, we had what I called God's king, who was David. And those are your first two blanks to fill in, and that was in 2nd Samuel. 1st and 2nd Kings continues now the history of all of the rest of the kings in Israel after David. First of all, we have Solomon, followed by 19 kings of Israel and 20 kings of Judah. Now, some fun facts about Samuel and kings. And I might say throughout the course of this Bible study, rather than saying 1st and 2nd Samuel, 1st and 2nd Kings, 1st and 2nd Chronicles, I'll probably be known to say Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, because they were one book when they were compiled. But interesting, both Samuel and Kings have roughly the same amount of words. They are roughly the same length. Neither Samuel nor Kings discloses the author. Likely, there were compilers and then a final editor. But the Bible doesn't tell us, the text itself does not tell us who the author was. This study is part one of Kings, which I called Solomon and the House of the Lord. The only king that we will focus on in this six-week study will be Solomon. In his reign, his story actually takes up a quarter of all 40 kings. So we're going to be 25% done by the time we finish this study. Solomon was a great king in his own right, just like his father, David. He ran an orderly kingdom. He was known for his wisdom. He extended the boundaries of Israel farther than any king before him or after him, even his father, David. And there's a map on page 8 that will show you the extent of Solomon's kingdom, plus the nations that brought him tribute. But his most noteworthy accomplishment was building the House of the Lord. David had it in his heart to build a great house for God, someplace where he could put the Ark of the Covenant. But it was actually Solomon who built it. Now, if we think about David's and Solomon's reign, there are some high points in their reign. And both of them have to do with the House of the Lord. The high point in David's reign was in 2 Samuel 7, when God came and made a covenant with David, saying, David, you're not going to build a house for me. I'm going to build a house for you. In other words, a lasting dynasty for David. And the high point for Solomon will be in 1 Kings 9, when Solomon dedicates the House of the Lord that he will build, and the presence of the Lord will come to dwell with his people once more. And that is a key word in this Bible study, the word dwell, the concept that God dwells with his people. Actually, like I said, it's an important concept in the whole Bible. So what I do is I want us to pause here for a moment to think about God's dwelling places. And you might naturally think to yourself, well, God dwells in heaven, and that's all there is to it. Do we not say, our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. And if you think that God dwells in heaven, you're not wrong. You're half right about that. But God has also desired to dwell with his people. Isaiah 57, 15. I'll put this on the screen for you. Look at, for thus says the one who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is holy. I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite. So you see, God has always desired to dwell among his people all along in the days of the Old Testament, or I should say the Old Covenant, and to dwell in his people in the days of the New Covenant. So let's take a look at God's dwelling places from Genesis right up to this point that we are at in Scripture. We'll start with Genesis, and I'll put these, I'll number these and put them up there. God's first dwelling place on earth was in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve. We've read that passage that God walked with them in the cool of the day. God was dwelling among his people until that experience was corrupted by sin. And Adam and Eve were sent out of the garden, and no longer was God dwelling with them because they were sent out. And it says that there were cherubim stationed at the garden to protect the entrance for them not to return in. And it will be interesting to us as we go through this study to find out the cherubim are sort of a constant theme in God's dwelling places. And then God's second dwelling place was actually on Mount Sinai. For a short time, God reached out to the children of Abraham that were in slavery in Egypt and divinely delivered them out of that, miraculously brought them to the base of Mount Sinai. And we read in

So it was a short dwelling place for the Lord. And that is where he shared with Moses his character. And he explained to him the guidelines that his people would need in a free people now would need in order to live in harmony with one another. We call it the Ten Commandments. And then also from that location, God began to share with Moses how to construct a place where God could dwell among his people as they went into the land that God promised them. I call this the Wilderness Tabernacle. This is the third place that God dwelled among his people. But right there at Sinai, we have like 20 chapters in Exodus where God first gives Moses the vision. Here's how I want you to build this tabernacle. Build it exactly according to these instructions. Then we have the narrative in Exodus where it says, and they built it according to those instructions. And then the final words of Exodus show us that God accepted that. And it says, it says the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. And so God actually came to dwell in that tabernacle. It was something mobile. They could take it down. They could move in their travels, set it back up. But God was among them. God was with them. And then before they entered into the promised land, God began to speak of a more permanent place of worship. And he told Moses in Deuteronomy 12 about the place where he would put his name and make his habitation. Once they were in the promised land, there would be a place where God would put his name and make his habitation. And as we studied the reign of David and we watched him seize the city of Jerusalem, Jebus, name it the city of David. And we watched him bring the Ark of the Covenant into that place. We wondered, will that? be the place where God will place his name and make his habitation? And we found out we were right. We'll read it right here in our introduction this morning. So now we've arrived in our little history of the Old Testament at God's final dwelling place among his people in the Old Covenant. And I call it the house of the Lord. I'll also refer to it as Solomon's Temple occasionally, but I really like the name the house of the Lord, and you'll read in your study guide why. Now there's one more New Testament dwelling place of the Lord, but we're going to save the best for last. So we'll just set that aside for a minute, and in the meantime, I want to connect our previous study in 2 Samuel with the opening of 1 Kings. Now you're going to study 1 Kings chapters 1, 2, and 3 this week. This is a five-day study, so you have to figure out five days. You pick the days that you're going to study, but I don't want to jump right into that since you're going to study it. So I'm going to take a little bit of a different tack, and I'm going to remind us of where we've been by using 1 Chronicles chapter 21. You can turn there in your Bible, or you can follow. I'll put it on the screen as well, but 1 Chronicles chapter 21. So since I'm going to Chronicles, I want to share some interesting notes about Chronicles. It was written quite a bit later than Kings was written. We can tell that much of the source material was the same, because there are some things in Kings that it is word for word the same in Chronicles. So they obviously had shared some source material, but Chronicles has a completely different focus than Kings does. In Chronicles it focuses on the line of Judah, the throne of David, and there are 19 chapters dealing directly with either the Ark of the Covenant or the temple itself, 19 chapters. If you throw out the genealogies at the beginning of Chronicles and you just add up the rest of the chapters, 40% of it has to do with the house of the Lord. And so that's a real focus in Chronicles. So what I want to do here is remind us, review what was happening at the end of 2 Samuel. Now some of you were not in the studies of 1 and 2 Samuel with us, and I want to say to you, you're going to be just fine. Let me kind of give you an illustration of what I mean. The last couple weeks Paul and I had an itching to watch that 90s movie Sarah Plain and Tall. We have fond memories of taking our kids down to the library and they'd look through the VHS tapes that you could check out, you know, and Sarah Plain and Tall, and we'd grab it and we'd check it out, and I couldn't find it to stream anyplace. So Paul had to actually order a DVD in the mail, and it had all three movies, Sarah Plain and Tall, Skylark, and Winter's Long End. And so we had a great time watching this. But here's what I'm building up to. If you just sat down with us and you just watched the second movie, Skylark, you would get up and go, oh, that was a great movie, that was really, you'd love it, you'd be fine. But it would make you want to maybe go back then and watch Sarah Plain and Tall and find out how did they get there. Well that's what's going to happen here. If you're a first-timer here, you're going to do 1 Kings, Solomon and the House of the Lord, and then you're going to say, I need to go back now and I need to do 1 and 2 Samuel. And you have all summer to do that. It's 22 lessons. You can either just listen to them or whatever. But enough of that. Here's where we left off in 2 Samuel. David was the king. He ordered an unlawful census. He wanted to count his fighting men. And his commander Joab said, no, no, don't do such an evil thing in the sight of the Lord. But David prevailed. And so Joab went out and counted all of the people and came back and reported. And David was conscience-stricken because it displeased the Lord. And the Lord actually leveled a judgment on David and Israel because of this. And there was a plague that had come upon them. And it got to, you know, Jerusalem. And David said to the Lord, he goes, listen, this was all my fault. They are innocent. Those people are innocent. Just punish me, but not everybody else. And the Lord spoke to him about a sacrifice that David should make at a certain location. And David purchased the threshing floor of Aranah at that time and made the sacrifice. Now, what I'm going to do is pick up that exact narrative in 1 Chronicles chapter 21. I just need to tell you that the name is different. It's not Aranah who owns the threshing floor. It's Ornan. And sometimes the Bible shares different names. They're the same person. For example, Peter Cephas, same guy, two different names from a kind of a different angle, okay? So 1 Chronicles 21, starting at verse 25. So David paid Ornan 600 shekels of gold by weight for the site. And David built there an altar to the Lord and presented burnt offerings and peace offerings and called on the Lord. And the Lord answered him with fire from heaven upon the altar of burnt offering, which was a sign that God indeed accepted David's offering and the plague was stopped right there. So we go to chapter 22, verse 1. And then David said, here shall be the house of the Lord and here the altar of burnt offering. The place where God's mercy prevailed would become ground zero for the new place of worship. So now we drop down to verse 6 and we begin to understand the plan a little bit more. And in fact, this session is called The Plan. We hardly heard about Solomon in all of 2 Samuel. He was hardly mentioned. And now we're starting to understand the plan. So verse 6. Then he called for Solomon his son and charged him to build a house for the Lord, the God of Israel. Solomon is not even king yet at this point, okay? But it's the house of the Lord that's on David's mind. David said to Solomon, my son, I had it in my heart to build a house to the name of the Lord my God. But the word of the Lord came to me saying, you have shed much blood. You have waged great wars. You shall not build a house to my name because you have shed so much blood before me on the earth. Behold, a son shall be born to you. Now stop. So we get an understanding of when God said this to David. A son shall be born to you. This is before Solomon was born. Who will be a man of rest. I will give him rest from all of his surrounding enemies for his name shall be Solomon and I will give peace and quiet to Israel in his days. He shall build a house for my name. He shall be my son and I will be his father and I will establish his royal throne in Israel forever. Verse 11, now my son, the Lord be with you so that you may succeed in building the house of the Lord your God as he has spoken concerning you. Only may the Lord grant you discretion and understanding that when he gives you charge over Israel, when you become king, you may keep the law of the Lord your God. Then you will prosper if you are careful to observe the statutes and the rules that the Lord commanded Moses for Israel. Be strong and courageous. Fear not. Do not be dismayed with great pains. I have provided for the house of the Lord a hundred thousand talents of gold, a million talents of silver and bronze and iron beyond weighing for there is so much of it. Timber and stone too I have provided. To these you must add. You have an abundance of workmen, stone cutters, masons, carpenters, all kinds of craftsmen without number skilled in working gold, silver, bronze and iron arise and work the Lord be with you. And it goes on and on from there. And we can tell by reading this that of central importance to David is the house of the Lord. And we can also tell that David wants it to become of central importance to Solomon to build the house of the Lord. He's not talking about subduing the Philistines anymore or anything else. This is all that's on his mind and this is what he is conveying to his son. And the next five chapters in Chronicles go on and on about all the preparations that David now in his elder years put in place so that Solomon would be successful. We read about the Levites and the priests and musicians and gatekeepers, treasurers and other officials until finally we arrive at the final passages of first Chronicles, which says this 29, 26, thus, David, the son of Jesse, reigned over all Israel. And then he died at a good age, full of days, riches and honor. And Solomon, his son, reigned in his place. All right. Now you are ready to begin your study of first Kings chapters one through three. But when you do that, it's going to back up slightly. We just read that David died. But as you start your study, David's not going to be dead. He's merely going to be old and unable to even keep his body temperature up. And so the opening verses will enter in a certain amount of drama and it won't let up for three chapters. You will enjoy. All the drama we enjoyed in 2 Samuel, because it's going to go into great detail that's completely missing from Chronicles about the transfer of the kingdom from David to Solomon. And whenever there's a transfer of power, it doesn't matter if it's a new president of the United States of America or if it is a new king in ancient Israel. There's always a certain amount of conflict and conspiracy that goes with it. And that's what next week's lesson is going to be about. I promise you, it will not be boring. But what I want to do here is just wrap up this introduction by circling back now to the idea of God's dwelling places. Moses actually wrote a song, which is a psalm in our Bible. It is Psalm 90. And I want to show you the opening verses of Moses' song. He says,

And as Moses writes it, it's rather poetic. It is formal. It is reverent. Lord, you have been our dwelling place. So how does that psalm fit in with the question I asked you at the beginning about asking Jesus into your heart, which handles differently? It's much more friendly, much more familiar, kind of Sunday school-esque. Which is it? Is God our dwelling place? Or do we become his dwelling place? Well, the Gospels teach us both. And I want to take the beginning and end of the Gospel of John to show us this. First, in John 1, 14, John says, and the word became flesh and dwelt among us. And we have seen his glory, the glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. And so we learn that God, Jesus, came into our world to dwell among us, to walk among us, and to show us what God was like, not terribly dissimilar to the presence of God in the Old Covenant, but now flesh. So not very much like it either. But by the end of John, after Jesus was crucified, after he was resurrected, now it became possible for Jesus to not only dwell among, but to dwell in. So let's look at the end of John. Chapter 20, verse 22, Jesus is with his disciples there after his resurrection and says, he breathed on them and said, receive the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit was now able to dwell in humans. And the Apostle Paul put it this way to the Corinthians, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. This is the idea of Jesus in our heart. It presupposes a person's belief that Jesus is who he said he was, that he is, in fact, the Son of God. It presupposes a person's understanding that I have sinned, I am a sinner, and it separates me from God. And so now the sacrifice that Jesus has made, which we celebrate today, this has given me the opportunity to apply the forgiveness that is required now for me to make peace with God. So all of this now helps us understand how it relates to this Bible study that Solomon's temple was an important dwelling place in the Old Testament, and a new living temple now exists in the New Covenant, okay? And this is, again, how the Apostle Paul said it to the Corinthians 3.16, do you not know that you are God's temple, and God's Spirit dwells in you? So in preparation for this study, I just wanna share these questions again. Do you know that God has always desired to dwell with his people? Do you know that you are God's temple? And maybe I should say here, you are God's potential temple, because we always have a choice to either open ourselves up and invite the Lord and say, yes, please come dwell in me, or we can resist and say, I would prefer to be the king of my own temple. I would prefer to be the God of my own temple. So we are a potential temple, but then once we have invited Jesus into our heart, then we become the temple of the living God. So that is the most important question as we prepare for this Bible study. Have you invited him in your temple to be the God of you, to be the king of your life? Let's pray. Father in heaven, we thank you for this understanding of you wanting to dwell with us, not just staying aloof in heaven, Lord, as a God that created something and now it's spinning out of control, but Lord, we get the understanding from scripture that you have always designed to reveal yourself to us, to dwell among us, and Lord, now we have this opportunity for you to actually dwell in us, to be our God, to guide the way, and Lord, we need that so much. So I pray, Lord, if there's anyone listening or in this room, Lord, that this would be a question that is answered today with just that simple prayer, Lord, I know I'm a sinner, and I pray that you would enter into me, forgive my sins, and live in me and guide me in my path. I pray this in Jesus' name, amen. ---