ACTS BIBLE
From Judges to the Temple's Fall week 5 · 1 Kings 8:22-30; 1 Kings 11:1-13
The wisest king builds the house and confesses at its dedication that heaven cannot contain God. Then his wives turn his heart, and the kingdom is promised away.
Solomon begins the Temple in the four hundred and eightieth year after the children of Israel were come out of the land of Egypt (1 Kings 6:1), in the fourth year of his reign. Counting back from the kings who follow puts that around 966 BC. The figure rests on the Bible's own arithmetic; scholars who put the Exodus later take the 480 years as a round number. The building took seven years. The stone was cut and dressed at the quarry, so that there was neither hammer nor axe nor any tool of iron heard in the house, while it was in building (1 Kings 6:7).
It was not large, roughly ninety feet long and thirty wide. Inside it was lined with gold. Two bronze pillars stood at the porch, named Jachin and Boaz, and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the ark rested with the two tables of the law inside it, under the wings of two cherubim carved from olive wood and overlaid with gold.
When the priests carry the ark in, the cloud fills the house and they cannot stand to do their work, for the glory of the LORD had filled the house of the LORD (1 Kings 8:11). Then Solomon stands before the altar, spreads his hands toward heaven, and prays at greater length than anyone else in the historical books.
In the middle of that prayer he says something that keeps the whole building in proportion: But will God indeed dwell on the earth? behold, the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house that I have builded? (1 Kings 8:27). The Temple was the place God had set his name, where Israel could pray toward him and be heard. Solomon did not imagine God lived inside it. Seven times he asks that when the people sin and are beaten in battle, when the rain fails, when they are carried off captive to a far country, God would hear from heaven and forgive.
That last petition was answered four hundred years later. The exiles in Babylon did pray toward the land and the ruined house; Daniel kept his window open toward Jerusalem for it (Daniel 6:10).
Deuteronomy 17 gave Israel's future king three rules: he was not to multiply horses, or wives, or silver and gold. Solomon broke all three. He had twelve thousand horsemen, silver as common in Jerusalem as stones, and seven hundred wives with three hundred concubines besides. For it came to pass, when Solomon was old, that his wives turned away his heart after other gods (1 Kings 11:4). The man who built the house of the LORD built high places for Chemosh and for Molech on the hill across the valley from it.
God's sentence is in 1 Kings 11:11-13. The kingdom will be torn from Solomon's son, all of it but one tribe, which God keeps for David my servant's sake, and for Jerusalem's sake which I have chosen (1 Kings 11:13). The covenant with David holds. But no son of David will rule the whole nation again until the Son of David comes.
Solomon asked God for wisdom and got more of it than any man before or since. He wrote proverbs about the strange woman and still married seven hundred. Knowing what is right did not make him do it. The judges had shown the same thing with far smaller men. Israel did not lack instruction. It lacked a heart to follow it.
Jesus set himself beside this king and this building. A greater than Solomon is here, he said (Matthew 12:42), and in this place is one greater than the temple (Matthew 12:6). In him the wisdom of God lived a whole human life and never once turned aside, and God came to dwell among men in a body.