Week 16 I Kings
Solomon’s great temple took seven years to build.
It was meant to be the geographical place of the Lord’s residence, the earthly address where people would come to worship God. And it was as lavish and beautiful a piece of architecture as Solomon could build.
But on the big day when it came time for the public dedication Solomon realized that his temple wasn’t really as phenomenal as he thought. It’s more like it was laughably inadequate.
You can see that when Solomon asks: but will God really live on earth? Why, even the highest heavens cannot contain you. How much less this Temple I have built?
Will God really live on earth? It’s a good and legitimate and sensible and logical question, and pretty clearly the answer is no. God doesn’t live on the earth. He doesn’t live in the sky. He’s not geographically constrained. He has no spatial limitations.
I get the feeling that Solomon is weighted down thinking about the dimensions of a Big God, an authentically titanic God. And it’s not only his size, it’s his unqualified difference. God is different, alien and antithetic.
Fortunately Solomon doesn’t travel very far along the God-and-I-are-so-mismatched-that-I’m-basically-a-meaningless-zero tangent. Instead he admits that we’re impossibly qualitatively different but in spite of that incompatibility please, please, please watch over this temple and the people who come here to prayer and please: hear us from heaven…and when you hear, forgive.
Note: quotes from I Kings 8:27 & 30 (NLT version)