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This summer we are studying the life and the wisdom of King Solomon. We are tracing him, both his kind of rise and fall, and then we're going to start in a couple of weeks looking at the book of Ecclesiastes, which kind of lays his wisdom out for us. To understand that, we have to understand that Solomon It's kind of the apex of the Old Testament. He represents the golden age of Israel. If you look at the nation of Israel, it's basically a story of God bringing people out of chaos into order, giving them peace, extending their boundaries, giving them prosperity, and then they sin and slowly it's all taken away from them again. And at the top of the mountain, at their highest point, stands King Solomon. He's the representative of everything that's good in Israel and the high point of Solomon's career is the temple. So today we're studying the high point of the high point. We're studying the dedication of the temple, which is the highest point of King Solomon's career, which is the highest point of the Old Testament. And it's a beautiful thing to kind of look at and to ask ourselves, why is it so important? And that's the question that's kind of dominated my week. What was so important about this Old Testament temple? And while I was meditating on it, I was also in my car a lot this week, and there's a new radio station on Sirius XM Radio. It's a Fleetwood Mac channel for a limited time only. And so I've been listening to Stevie Nicks sing all week this song, Silver Spring. And it's just a haunting song, if you don't know it. It's a song that a betrayed woman is singing to her Derelict lover and she starts asking these questions that she ought not to ask and she says did you tell her she was pretty? Did she say that she loved you and then she stops herself. She says I don't want to know It's just kind of it just haunts you just gets inside you. I've just ruined your day by even mentioning it and I started thinking about that in the context of the temple and And what I realize is this, there are questions that we ought not to ask God. We shouldn't have to, right? We shouldn't have to ask God, are you real? Are you really there? Have you abandoned me? We should not have to ask God, have you really forgiven me? Are we okay? We shouldn't have to ask him, but we can't help ourselves. And he is so gracious and condescending that he gives us tokens to answer those questions. And the temple was the biggest token he gave to give Israel this the answer to those questions. It was a physical representation of spiritual truths to comfort their conscience, to be a seal to their faith, a sign to their thinking. Solomon's Temple was the Old Testament sign that God is with them and that forgiveness was there for them. Solomon's temple was the Old Testament sign to the Jews that God was with them. He was in their presence and his forgiveness was there for them. So let's kind of dig into the temple. Now the passage is long. It dominates the book of First Kings and Second Chronicles. If we read everything there was to say about the temple, that's all we would have done. It would have taken over an hour and we would have gone home. So I had to choose the small passage that frankly just wasn't long enough. So I'm going to have to borrow from other passages. Solomon builds the temple over the course of seven years. It begins the second he becomes king. And then when it's finally built and completed, he's ready to dedicate it. And so what he does is he goes down to the holy place. He goes down to the tabernacle, where the tabernacle was, where God had been meeting with his people in this tent, this temporary facility, for 400 years. and he brings the ark out of the tent of meeting, and he brings it up into the temple, and it goes into the temple, and they set it down, and they draw the curtains around it, and at that point we read in verse 10 of chapter 8, a cloud filled the house of Yahweh, so that the priest could not stand to minister because of the cloud, for the glory of the Lord filled the house of the Lord. And Solomon said, the Lord has said he would dwell in thick darkness, and I have indeed built you an exalted house, a place to dwell in forever. This is a great passage. What's he saying? He's pointing us to the building of the temple and he's saying, God, you're everywhere. Nothing can contain you. You dwell in thick darkness. Even this symbolic picture of your presence, this cloud, it does two things. It tells us you're there and it obscures our view. fascinating we see that cloud over and over again throughout the Old Testament with Moses and then again with Jesus he takes three of his disciples up onto the mountain of transfiguration and the cloud comes and shows us God's presence and obscures their view and then again after the resurrection Jesus ascends into heaven and the clouds come this representation of the glory of the Lord that both shows God's presence and obscures Him. In seeing that, Solomon says, you dwell in thick darkness and I've built a house for you. This is the place for your presence. You filled your temple with your presence to let us know that you're here. Because God wants Israel to know that He is there for them, He's available to them. You can think of the temple as an antenna. You know, when I was a kid, my mom's favorite movie was Coal Miner's Daughter. So I know all about Loretta Lynn because I grew up in West Tennessee and so you had to. And Loretta Lynn, when she first started, she had no idea what she was doing. Her and her husband had no idea what it meant to be a country music singer. But they went out and pressed a bunch of records, little 45s, and they just went driving around. This was before GPS. They didn't even have a map. They literally just went driving around Kentucky and Tennessee looking for antennas. And wherever they saw a transmitter tower, they would just pull in and hand them the record. And Loretta, there's this cute little scene where she's like, where are we going? Well, just keep your eyes open for a tower. All right. I'll look for that transmitter. She had no idea what a transmitter was, but she was looking for one. And it was the place where the signal went out from, right? That's what the radio transmitter tower was. And the temple is basically, you can think of it like that. In the Old Testament, it was this picture where you knew your prayers would get answered. It was a way to communicate to God. It was the place you went. It was this place where they would know their prayers would be heard. Solomon said, even if your people are taken into exile, if they will face your temple, will you hear them? It was assigned to them, not because God needed it. but because they needed to know their prayers were being answered. It was a way for them to know their prayers were being answered. The antenna was working. The temple architecture itself, not only was it this antenna, but it taught them that God was there, but you needed grace to come before him. This is basically what it looked like. I had a debate all week about how big the temple was because The building itself is pretty small. I don't think you're a building if you don't have a roof. So this is the argument. So the only building with a roof was pretty small actually. It was about the size of our youth building. Smaller than our youth building. That's where the Ark of the Covenant was. It was tall, but it wasn't that big. But then the surrounding area was, you know, the courtyard had a real tall wall around it. If you call the whole area the temple, it was big. If you call just the building the temple, it was small. And the Bible calls both the temple, so it's confusing. But, so, if when you walked in to this, there's a huge wall obscuring your view, and you would walk into the gate, and you would see down the pathway this building, thin and tall, and on the left side of it was what the Bible calls a bronze seat. Now, I've been killing myself trying to figure out, I got all kinds of questions about this seat. It was about a 15,000-gallon swimming pool on the top of 12 brass bowls, and it stood about 15 feet in the air. My questions are many. Did they get in it? Was it for the washing of the priests? It supposedly was for the washing of the priests. How did they get in it? Was there a spigot? Maybe they showered under it. I don't know. How did they keep the water clean? Being someone with a swimming pool, I'm dying to know how they kept the water clean. If the priest got in it, then all that blood would get, anyway. No, never mind. But it was there. And what we know for sure is this. It would have been the first thing you saw. And it was this monumental, literally, message that before you enter this temple, you must be cleansed. You must be washed. No matter who you are, even if you're a priest, you are unclean and you need to be cleansed to enter the temple. And we still have that sign today, don't we? The temple now is a spiritual place, it's the church. Not the church building, but before you enter the church body, and indeed many church buildings still today have what by the door? They have the baptismal basin. If you want to enter into this church body, you have to be cleansed. You have to be washed. So that's the first thing you would see. And then the second thing you would see on the right side is this bronze altar. It's tall. It would have been, the odor from the sacrifices would have been overpowering. The smoke would have always been rising up. And it would have this continual sign that your sin must be atoned for. You must be cleansed and your sin must be atoned for. A constant reminder that you can't just walk before God and expect to speak with Him as equals. You have to have your shortcomings, your failures, your outright transgressions have to be dealt with. And again, today we have those same sacraments. Not that we re-sacrifice Christ, but we remind ourselves every week that our sin has been atoned for. That the body and the blood is here. So you would walk into the courtyard, you would see the Bronze Sea, you would see the altar, and then you would see the temple, and the doors were shut to you. And that's fascinating to me. There's all kinds of interesting stuff in here. It goes on in great detail about the insides of it and how beautiful it was. And then the Holy of Holies where the huge cherubim were that had wings so big that it touched both walls. But the fascinating thing about all that is it wasn't meant to show off. And we know that because nobody ever saw it. Only priests could go in. Only priests could go in. This message that though God is here for you, you need someone to go in for you. You need someone to be your advocate. You need someone to go in and speak for you. There's a mystery to it. Someone has to go in for you. The building of the temple, the sign that God is here, that He is available to you, that you need to be cleansed, that your sin needs to be atoned for, and that you need someone to speak for you. But more importantly than just a place, the temple was a promise. The temple was a promise. It provided a place for celebration, a place for rituals, and most importantly, the temple provides a place for grace. It was a sign to the Jews that God was with them and that forgiveness was there for them. It was a place for grace. What do I mean? Well, first of all, the temple gave people a place to go. Now, why does that matter? Again, God is everywhere. He dwells in deep darkness. He can't be contained by building. We know that. Solomon knew that and he still spent seven years and all of his money to build this thing. Why? Because we need a place. We need a place. It helps us to understand that this is where we come to be close to God. This is where we come to get forgiveness. Still today, we very much need a place, don't we? I had a seminary professor who used to talk about doing evangelism, and he said, all the time people look at me and say, I don't have to go to church. I can be close to God on the golf course. And I always respond, well, you can be, but are you? Probably not. When I'm on the golf course, I play golf. I need a place. It helps me to know that I'm going to church and I'm going to meet God there. We had a friend of mine a few years ago who wanted to confess. He wanted to confess to a pastor and he wanted to confess to a pastor in the sanctuary. So I met him over here and let him do that. Why? Because he needed He needed to know that God would hear him. It was a sacrament for him, that God would hear his prayers. It's a place to get forgiveness. The temple provided Israel with a place to go to keep them centralized, to keep their heart in one place, a place to go to get forgiveness, a place to go to speak to the Lord. It also gave them something to do. Sometimes you just need something to do. I love that line in Ricky Bobby. Tell me what to do with my hands. Just give me something to do with my hands, right? Sometimes when life just kind of feels out of control, it helps to have something to do. And the temple gave them something. There were sacrifices always going on. People in Israel would bring their sacrifices. The tendency is for us to kind of look down our noses at them and go, they didn't understand that God wasn't really pacified by sacrifices. Yes, they did. They knew it. King Solomon had a father and his father was named David. David wrote Psalm 51, the same Psalm 51 that we read, right? The Psalm that ends with, you do not delight in sacrifices or else I would bring them. But the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart, Lord, you will not despise. They knew that the sacrifices didn't do anything when it came to pacifying God. They knew that God saw the heart. But they still had sacrifices. Why? Well, if it's not pacifying God, what's it doing? It's healing me. You see, this is something the Roman Catholics understood. It got perverted and over... It got contorted. Messed up perverted is a bad word. It got overdone a little bit. And so we threw it away completely and to our harm. And that's this. When you sin greatly, It helps you to do something to make up for it. People who minister to veterans call it moral injury. When you have sinned against your conscience, you've done something that you never thought you would do, it helps you as part of the therapy to do something for it. The Roman Catholics called it penance. No, you're not atoning for your sin. Jesus did that. But you're helping to heal your conscience. You're helping to heal your conscience. You need to feel the reality of your sin. You need it. And if you feel the reality of your sin and you feel what's missing, it changes you and it helps you and makes you more able to receive God's grace. For instance, Dave Ramsey does financial counseling, kind of Christian financial counseling, and he talks about a case where he had a doctor, a physician, made a lot of money, but was deep in debt. He just could not say no to anything, right? And so his credit cards were out of control, his house was out of control, he's just deeper and deeper in debt every month, and his wife brought him to Dave Ramsey saying, I can't get him in control. What can we do? And so Ramsey looked through all of his debts and found this like $670 debt, small, small potatoes compared to what he made every month. And he said, I want you to pay this off by mowing yards. You can only pay this debt by mowing yards. And the guy was like, no. So his wife said, then I'm leaving. And so he's like, okay, I will. And so the guy starts mowing yards. And he pays his debt all summer long. He mows his neighbor's yard and a couple other ones. Gets $30 a week mowing yards for 20 weeks. He pays his debt off. And then he comes back in and he says, all of a sudden his finances are in control. And Dave Ramsey said, what changed? He said, now every time I see something I want, I think, man, that would be a lot of yards. He needed to feel it. That's what penance does. Sometimes, you know, that's why when people are counseling with veterans, sometimes they'll say, you need to go find a charity and you need to work for it. You need to feel yourself making up for what you've done. Not to get God off your back, to get you off your back. That's what the sacrifices were. They were this message that I'm okay. I'm okay with God. We still need that. The temple provided a place to go. The temple provided something to do. And most importantly, the temple provided a place of grace. A place of grace. Now, what I want to invite you to do today, this afternoon, when you go home, at some point, at least read all of chapter 8. Because something fascinating happens. There's this unexpected change. Whenever you're reading the Bible, if you're trying to figure out the point, just look for the things that are unexpected. And there's something that happens in there that's unexpected, and I'll try to help you figure out what it is. In verse 22 and 23, Solomon begins praying. Now, up until now, he's kind of been talking about himself, right? God promised to David, your son will build a temple, and I did it. I've built a place for you, a dwelling place for you. And he starts praying for the kingdom. Now establish your king, which is him, right? That David would never not have a descendant. That David's descendant would sit on your throne forever. And we're told in verse 22 that he stood before the altar in the presence of all the assembly of Israel and began praying. And then in verse 54, it says this. Solomon finished offering all his prayer and his plea to the Lord and he arose from before the altar where he had knelt with his hands outstretched to heaven. Isn't that interesting? He begins this prayer like this. So all of you can hear me because I am the king that God promised. And he starts talking about this temple that he has built before the Lord. And you can feel it happen as you read the text. He asks himself this question. I don't think the prayer was written. I think he actually starts praying in the middle of his prayer. And in the middle of his prayer he says, but will God indeed dwell on the earth? And I would imagine, I think that was the point when he began to kneel. Behold, heaven, and the highest heaven can't contain you. How much less this house that I've built. He starts to become less impressed with what he's done. And he says, Lord, have regard to the prayer of your servant. Lord, my God, listen to my cries. And he says, and listen to the pleas of your people, Israel, when they pray toward this place. Listen in heaven to your dwelling place, and when you hear them, forgive them. And all of a sudden his prayer goes from this proclamation of, look what I've done, to five times he says in the course of the prayer, forgive them, forgive them. He begins to plead for forgiveness. And the last time he prays that, he says this, he says, when they sin, if they sin against you, for there's no one who does not sin. This prayer that starts out as a celebration of the day, as a dedication of the temple, turns into this pleading for forgiveness. Because Solomon realizes in the midst of his own celebration that that's what we need the most. That's what we need the house of God for. And the question that has to be at the top of our minds as we think about the temple and the new temple that is the church is this, do you believe in forgiveness? See, Solomon had to believe in forgiveness. He had to. Because he was Solomon. He was David's son. It's not that important that he was David's son. He was Bathsheba's son. He was the son of an adulterous relationship that should have never existed. And yet, from the time that he was born, the prophet Nathan came into him and said, this is the son that the Lord loves. He will be your heir. Doesn't that offend you? It's hard to believe that the Lord would love the son of an adulterous relationship, isn't it? Do you really believe in forgiveness? Do you really believe in grace? Most churches don't. You know that, right? Most Christians don't believe in forgiveness and grace. They believe in condemnation and self-righteousness. And I'm better than you because you've done what I would never do. But Solomon got it. And when he was tempted to forget it, I think the Lord reminded him. The temple was a place of grace. It was a sign that God was with them and forgiveness was there for them. So where is the temple now? How has it evolved? As I was studying the temple, I've told you this before, I have a hard time reading something and getting a picture of it in my mind. And so I went to YouTube, and I was like, surely somebody's done a CGI three-dimensional drawing of this thing to help me out. And they had, there was one, and it was fairly helpful. And there were like 40 videos that were terrible. about when will the next temple be built and the rumors of the new temple. And it was frustrating. The reason why they're terrible is this. Imagine that you were taken away from your fiance. You were sent off to foreign lands for war or whatever. You were gone for 20 years and all she had was a picture of you. And when you get back, You don't look like the picture anymore. And she rejects you for the picture. That's what's wrong with this idea of wondering when the next temple is going to be built. The temple was a picture. It was a picture of Jesus. It was a picture of what's in heaven. The temple, the true temple is in heaven. It always has been. Jesus entered into that temple after his sacrifice. He offered the true sacrifice. All the sacrifices of animals were just pictures of what he would do on the cross for sin. And he entered into the true temple, the true priest. And he didn't have to be cleansed because he was already perfect, he was sinless, and yet he was baptized anyway for us. And he didn't go in before a building that had statues of angels. He is in the presence of angels. And he didn't go into a building that had the Ark of the Covenant as a symbol of God's presence. He stands face-to-face with God. He's our priest in the true temple. And there's no more sacrifices. We only remember the sacrifice that he made. And he is there demanding justice for us because sin has been completely and perfectly atoned for. And so our forgiveness is a matter of justice, a matter of God accepting His payment for our sins on our behalf. So how do we enter into that temple? We enter in that temple through the Holy Spirit. That's why Jesus said in John chapter 4, He's being asked this question by a Samaritan woman, a woman who had rejected the faith of the Jews, who believed that you were supposed to worship on this other mountain. And she said, you know, you Jews say we're supposed to worship on that mountain. We say we're supposed to worship on this mountain. Nobody really knows the truth. And Jesus said, well, that's because you don't know God. But the day is coming and is now here when true believers will worship God neither on that mountain nor on this mountain. True believers will worship in spirit and in truth for God is spirit. And the apostle Paul tells us that day has come. that God's people are the true temple of God. His Spirit indwells in us. And for today, a believer comes to the temple whenever he is together with the body of Christ. Whenever we are together with the body of believers, we are in the presence of God's Spirit. We are in the true temple. It's not buildings, but it's a people. When we worship together, we worship in the Spirit. That's why the church is so important. It's why we worship together every week. We're something when we're together that we're not when we're alone. We're the temple of God. People see God in our faces. They feel God's presence in our hugs. They believe God's forgiveness in our reconciliation. We are the home of the Holy Spirit for each other. And we don't look forward to going back to that copy, we look forward to going to the new heavens and the new earth. And John tells us that when he saw the vision of the new heavens and the new earth, one of the first things he says was, there was no temple in the city. For the Lord God, the Almighty and the Lamb were there. We won't need a temple, we'll be in His very presence. We'll need no symbol, we'll have the reality. We will need no antenna. We will be able to see Him. We don't need any signs because we're going to be where we are trying to get to. And until that day when we see Him face to face, we have each other. We have each other. And you need to understand that. You need to understand that you are the temple for me. And that I am the temple for you. That's why our fellowship matters. That's our goal, to be the presence of God for each other. To be the sign that God is with us. To be the sign that God loves us. That's why we need each other. Please pray with me.
God's Dwelling Place
Serie From Knowledge to Wisdom
ID del sermone | 52018125049 |
Durata | 29:57 |
Data | |
Categoria | Servizio domenicale |
Testo della Bibbia | 1 Re 8:12-30 |
Lingua | inglese |
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