Transcript
Solomon’s Temple
First Baptist Richmond, October 26, 2025
The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost
1 Kings 8:1-13
And when the priests came out of the holy place, 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.
We’ve been using the Narrative Lectionary for almost two months now, making our way through the Bible’s best stories from Genesis to Revelation. I’m still trying to figure out how to preach stories and not just tell them, but in case someone should ask you what you’ve been learning let’s do a quick review:
§ We started with the story of Creation in Genesis 1, which serves as a kind of Call to Worship for the entire Bible.
§ And then there were the stories of origin, of how we got here and what went wrong: Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah’s Ark, and the Tower of Babel.
§ And then the saga of the founding fathers and mothers of Israel: Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob, Rachel, and Joseph.
§ And then, of course, the Exodus from Egypt, the Covenant at Sinai, the wanderings in the wilderness, the Law of Moses.
§ That was followed by the conquest and settlement of Canaan, the period of the Judges, and the beginning of the period of the Kings, which is where we are today.
We started with Saul, who turned out to have no heart for the job, and then David, “a man after God’s own heart,” and then Solomon, his son, who seemed a
little half-hearted. After him the kingdom was divided between Israel in the North and Judah in the South, and what followed was a string of mostly terrible kings who were regularly confronted by the prophets. We’ll hear about one of those prophets—Elijah—next week.
But today I want to spend a little more time on Solomon who was, as you may have heard, the wisest man who ever lived. Most of the wisdom literature in our Bible—the books of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon—are attributed to him. The Lord had told him to ask for whatever he wanted and that’s what he asked for: wisdom. Not long after that his wisdom was tested, when two women came to him who were fighting over the same baby. Remember them?
The Bible says they were prostitutes, but they came to Solomon because they had been living in the same house and one of them had had a baby, and then, three days later, the other one did, too. But the second woman’s baby died in the night, and she got up and put her baby in the first woman’s arms, took her baby, and went back to bed. When the first woman woke up the next morning she found that her baby had died, but when she looked more closely she saw that it wasn’t her baby. She asked for hers back but the other woman said she didn’t know what she was talking about. So, they went to King Solomon who listened to both sides and then called for a sword. He said, “Let’s cut the baby in two and then each of you can have half.” That seemed fair to the second woman, but the first woman—the real mother—said, “No! Give her the baby!” And that’s how Solomon knew it was hers.
And then, after Solomon’s wisdom and wealth had become legendary, there was that visit from the Queen of Sheba, remember? She came to test him with riddles, traveling in a caravan of camels loaded down spices and gold and precious
stones. But when he answered all her questions, and when she saw the magnificence of his palace and the abundance of his wealth, it took her breath away. She said, “Happy are your wives!” Which makes me think she may have wanted to be one of them. She would have been in good company. At one point Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines from everywhere in the ancient world and some would say that was his downfall: that his love for foreign women wooed his heart away from the Lord. But in the beginning his love for God was strong, and he proved it by building a temple.
It had been a dream of his father’s. In 2 Samuel 7 it says, “Now when [David] was settled in his house, and the Lord had given him rest from all his enemies around him, the king said to the prophet Nathan, “See now, I am living in a house of cedar, but the ark of God stays in a tent.” Nathan said to the king, “Go, do all that you have in mind; for the Lord is with you.” David was going to build the Lord a house, but that night the Lord came to Nathan in a dream and said, “No. One of David’s sons will build me a house, but he won’t build me a house. I will build him a house, that is, a dynasty, so that his kingdom may continue forever.”
The next morning Nathan came to David and broke the news. David accepted it and moved on to other things, but near the end of his life he wants to offer a sacrifice to the Lord and doesn’t have a good place to do it. He goes up to the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite, on the hill above the city, and Araunah offers to give him everything: the threshing floor, and his two oxen as a sacrifice, and the wooden cart they are pulling to build the fire. But David says no. He says, “I will not offer to the Lord that which cost me nothing.” So, he paid Araunah 50 shekels of silver, and preachers have been using this story ever since as a reminder that what you offer to God should cost you something.
But after Solomon becomes king, and after he has been given rest from his enemies all around, he decides to build the temple his father wanted to build, and to build it right there on the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite. Like his father he believes that he shouldn’t offer anything to the Lord that doesn’t cost him something. But Solomon has so much! He has to dig down deep into his pockets before he even begins to feel it. So he makes a deal with Hiram, King of Tyre, for all the cypress and cedar timber he will need, and sends 30,000 men to Lebanon to cut it. And then he sends 80,000 stonecutters to the hill country of Judea to quarry out great, costly stones, and 70,000 laborers to haul them back to Jerusalem. And then, when all the materials are stacked and ready, in the 480th year after God’s people had come out of Egypt, Solomon begins to build.
The temple he built was ninety feet long, thirty feet wide, and forty-five feet high, which is not that big, but it didn’t have to be. It was mainly for housing the Ark of the Covenant, the sacred chest that God’s people had been carrying around with them since they left Mount Sinai, containing the two stone tablets on which the Ten Commandments were written.
Solomon built the entire temple out of dressed stones and paneled the inside with finished lumber cut from the cedars of Lebanon. If you had walked in during construction it might have looked and smelled like a gigantic cedar closet. The thirty feet at the rear of the temple he made into an inner sanctuary—the Holy of Holies. It was made in the shape of a cube, thirty feet each way, all of it plated with gold. And in it, to guard over the Ark of the Covenant, were two enormous cherubim, carved of olivewood and covered in gold. As Eugene Peterson puts it in The Message: “Everywhere you looked there was pure gold, with gold chains strung in front of the gold-plated Inner Sanctuary—gold
everywhere—walls, ceiling, floor, and Altar. Dazzling!”
But don’t take his word for it. Read through 1 Kings 6 sometime and be amazed by the sheer opulence of the temple. Everywhere you looked there were gorgeous wood carvings, and hand-woven tapestries, and expensive furnishings. It must have cost a fortune—a king’s fortune! One source estimates that in today’s market it would be worth more than 300 billion dollars (that’s billion, with a “B”), and that Solomon himself would have been worth 2 to 3 trillion dollars (take that, Elon Musk!).i
It took seven years to build, with crews of master craftsmen and artisans working around the clock. But finally, it was finished, and on the day of dedication all the people of Israel gathered together, and Solomon and the priests and elders brought the Ark of the Covenant up from the tent where David had kept it, sacrificing sheep and oxen every step of the way, carrying it up the broad front steps of the temple, across the porch, and into the sanctuary itself, and then placing it gently in the “Holy of Holies” with those two, gigantic cherubim standing guard. When the priests came out the glory of God filled the temple like a bright cloud.
Then Solomon dedicated the temple, and he blessed the people. He said some things about how the wanderings of God’s people had finally come to an end, and how the promise God made to David had now been fulfilled. But then (in a moment of touching humility) he said, “But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built! Nevertheless, let your eyes be open night and day toward this house, and let your ears be open night and day to my prayers, and not only to mine but to the prayers of anyone who comes to this house, or prays toward it, or
reaches out toward it.” When I read that passage last week I could almost see the people of Israel closing their eyes, reaching out toward the temple, offering their prayers to God, and it didn’t seem all that different from what we do here.
The temple in Jerusalem became one of those “thin places” the Celtic Christians used to talk about, where heaven came especially close to earth, where the presence of God was almost tangible. Thomas Merton once said it like this: “Life is this simple. We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, and God is shining through it all the time. This is not just a fable or a nice story. It is true. If we abandon ourselves to God and forget ourselves, we see it sometimes, and we see it maybe frequently. God shows himself everywhere, in everything—in people and in things and in nature and in events. It becomes very obvious that God is everywhere and in everything and we cannot be without Him. It’s impossible. The only thing is that we don’t see it.”ii But occasionally we do see it, and we see it in the “thin places,” the places where heaven and earth come together. It doesn’t have to be a physical place, but it can be. The temple in Jerusalem was one of those thin places, and for many of us this building has been one, too.
Like the temple, it took some time and cost some money to build it back in the 1920’s. It’s taken time and money to maintain it. Since I’ve been here we’ve done a full renovation of the sanctuary, where we built scaffolding to the ceiling and gave everything a fresh coat of paint. We took the pews out and shipped them to North Carolina to be refinished. We put down new flooring to enhance the acoustics. And that wasn’t the end of it. We’ve restored the stained glass windows, we’ve created new gathering spaces, and we continue to refurbish what I’ve been told is the largest pipe organ in the state of Virginia, all of this at enormous cost. Some people don’t think it’s worth it. They ask, as Judas asked,
“Why wasn’t all this sold and the money given to the poor?” Well, here’s one answer:
In a book called What’s Right with the Church William Willimon writes, “[I stepped into a Byzantine church in Italy once that was drab on the outside], but inside it was a riot of color. There were glistening walls and ceilings encrusted with mosaics that dazzled and confused. I realized then that there was a time when the church bid people to withdraw from the illusory world where Caesar rules and the poor are oppressed and the sick and hungry are nobodies and enter the real world, where the first are last, and the last, first, and the poor are royalty.” And then Willimon writes, “This is the function of the delightfully nonfunctional world of Sunday worship—to withdraw to the real world where we are given eyes to see and ears to hear the advent of a Kingdom that the world has taught us to regard as only a fantasy.”iii
And this is why the followers of Jesus, who was poor, spend so much money on church buildings: because they love him, and love tends toward excess. This is why they pool all their resources, and sell anything they don’t absolutely have to have in order to fill their beautiful sanctuaries with hand-carved pews, and stained glass windows, and glorious, glorious music. They strive to create those “thin places” where heaven and earth come together, where they can catch a glimpse—or get a taste—of what the world will be like when the Lord’s Prayer is finally answered: when God’s kingdom comes, and God’s will is done, on earth as it is in heaven. And of course they don’t always get it right. Sometimes they fight over the color of the carpet in the sanctuary or walk out complaining that they didn’t like the music very much. But sometimes it happens in a place like this: you sit in your pew in a moment of silence and feel the presence of God so close that you
can almost hear him breathing beside you; or you stand to sing a favorite hymn and hear your voice blending with the voices of others around you, so that the harmony is beautiful even if it isn’t perfect; or you listen to someone say a prayer, or read a passage of Scripture, or preach a sermon, and hear God speak as if he were speaking only to you.
Solomon was trying to build a place like that, where God’s presence could be felt, and God’s praises could be sung, and God’s voice could be heard. He did the best he could, and it was a lot. He threw the full weight of his considerable resources behind the construction of the temple, and when he finished it was something to behold. But perhaps his best moment came when he recognized that the magnificent temple he had built couldn’t contain the magnificence of God. “Even heaven and highest heaven cannot contain you,” he said, “much less this house that I have built.” Nevertheless, he prayed that it would be a place where God’s presence could be felt, and the prayers of God’s people heard; a place where God’s kingdom could come and his will be done; a place where heaven would regularly come to earth.
So may it be for this place.
And so let us pray.
—Jim Somerville ©2025
