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How Lovely is Your Dwelling Place

Word of the Day

1 Kings 8-9

When it comes to extremes, God seems to have poured out an extravagant amount of grace upon Solomon's ancient Israelite kingdom. Solomon was the wisest person to have ever lived by God's grace, and through God's wisdom Solomon made his ancient kingdom likely one of the richest to have ever exist. Chapters 5 through 7 of 1st Kings goes into seemingly excruciatingly boring detail about all the preparations and materials that went into building the Temple of the Lord. I am convinced that at least part of the reason for these details is to express to the reader the extreme nature of this building project. I looked up several estimated values of this temple and found them to range between 10 billion U.S. dollars at the lowest, to 140 billion dollars at the highest. Most estimates are around 100 billion dollars, seriously, no joke. For comparison, the University of Phoenix Stadium cost about 500 million dollars, the White House is valued at 300 million dollars, and Buckingham Palace at 5 billion dollars. Solomon's projects of building the Temple and his palace still rank among the most expensive building projects ever. And of-course it helped that he covered nearly everything in gold.

But don't get caught up in the extravagant wealth God poured out on Solomon's kingdom. As though to say the extravagance of the Temple, and the worship, sacrifice, and religious work that took place there mattered very little, God shuts the place down. When the Temple was finished and the Ark of the Lord was brought into the Temple, in 1 Kings 8:10-11, "a cloud filled the house of the Lord, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud, for the glory of the Lord filled the house of the Lord." Look closely at those verses and ask yourself, what is the point of the Temple? The point of the Temple had nothing to do with its extravagance or what was done in it, but had everything to do with the Lord. The value and works of the Temple were absolutely nothing in comparison to the Lord. In reality, the Temples only value came in the fact that it was God's chosen location of where His name shall be (8:29). Even Solomon saw how the greatness of the Temple pales in comparison to the greatness of God, when he says in 8:27 "But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you; how much less this house that I have built!" As Solomon's prayer of dedication continues in chapter 8, he expresses over and over that the Lord, and not the Temple itself is the focus of the Temple. The Temple itself was to simply be a tool in pointing people towards the Lord.

As I think about the unbelievable extravagance of the Temple, I am reminded of Psalm 84:4 where it says, "blessed are those who dwell in your house, ever singing your praise." In other words, it is a great blessing to dwell with the Lord. For He is a God who is so unbelievably amazing that a 100 billion dollar temple pales in comparison to Him and is counted as nothing. As followers of Christ, in-dwelt by God's Spirit, we can claim this amazing fellowship with this amazing God, no matter where we are at, no temple needed. Far too often we get caught up in the values of the world finding ourselves in sin. We quickly forget that we dwell with such an amazing God through His Spirit. If our eyes would be opened to the great "value" and glory of God we would not get caught-up in the temporary values and sin of this world. May God open our eyes to truly know Him for who He is!