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1 Kings 8 Solomon's Prayer Part 8 By Graeme Goldsworthy

1 Kings 8. While we're at it, I just think, you know, I tend to do this, I think about things that
sort of come up and sort of think of things I ought to have said before.
On the question of addressing
particular needs in sermon programs and so on,
I think one thing we need to bear in mind is that
quite often, the need which is perceived by the person in need is not the need.
That is that it is a presenting need.
I learned this from the psychologists and social workers and so on,
that there are presenting needs and real needs.
And a person will perceive a problem,
and very often, I mean, the normal human tendency is to perceive problems as self-wise
and not to see them from God's perspective.
And so that what often is needed, and as I say, it's either a matter of one-to-one counseling
until you winkle this out and try and help them see the need,
or allowing the Holy Spirit to home in on a person's need
when that is dealt with in expository preaching.
Now, in 1 Kings 8, I see from my script here that I had
1 Kings 8, 22 to 30 as the reading, followed by John 17, 1 to 8.
I suppose it's partly my Anglican upbringing, but I always like to have a reading from both Testaments,
if for no other reason that, I think people need to be reminded that
we have both Testaments in the Bible as Christian scripture.
When we were in the States for 3 years,
we attended a Southern Baptist church for a while because it was the closest church
and we didn't have a car to begin with.
When the preacher told us that he didn't believe that Jonah swallowed the whale,
I said, enough is enough, and by that time we had wheels and we went off to a Presbyterian church.
I think in the whole 3 years we were there, we attended 2 services at an Anglican church,
and I said to my wife as we came away, wringing our hands, I said,
well at least we heard the Old Testament read, because they followed the lectionary.
End of sermon.
1 Kings 8.
Again, without going into any kind of attempt to bring out an introduction,
I think that's a very personal thing in the sense of how you
perceive what you do when you first get up to grab their attention and so on and so forth.
I think the shorter it is the better,
but you certainly may need to do, depending on your congregation,
have some way of sort of getting them thinking along the same line as you are.
By the way, this is another thing, just thinking back to the previous problem,
I'm reminded of the time when, of what was told me about when Harry Goodhue first went to St. Stephen's, Coorparoo.
He inherited a very middle of the road, very sort of churchy Anglican set up.
And they said in his own quiet way, he just consistently and in a regular fashion just preached Gospel sermons,
because his perception of the real need there was to get people out of churchianity and to Christ.
And I think he was largely successful, there were people converted right left and centre in that place,
and provided a good foundation for an ongoing evangelical ministry that succeeded Harry.
The first part of 1 Kings 8, at the first 13 verses,
has the notion of, following on from what we saw in 1 Kings 7, of the Lord coming to the temple.
Solomon assembles the elders of Israel and they bring the Ark, verse 1,
they do this to bring the Ark of the covenants of the Lord out of the city of David which he has sown,
and all the people of Israel assemble to the King Solomon at the festival of the month of Ephraim and so on.
Verse 4, so they brought up the Ark of the Lord.
Now this follows on from 2 Samuel, chapter 6, where David gets the Ark and brings it to Jerusalem.
And so the Ark is introduced here as part of the theme of how the Lord is perceived to dwell amongst his people.
And if you felt disposed, you might want to fill people a bit in on the history of the Ark,
which is a very interesting history, and there again you see some of the same lessons
coming out in the early chapters of Samuel, where the people treat the Ark as a means of domesticating God.
When things aren't going well in their fight against the Philistines, you take the Ark in while they're sure to win.
And the Lord lets them down with a mighty wallop, and so they discover not only do they not win, but God gets captured.
Surprise, surprise.
And when he's captured, he does all sorts of terrible things to the Philistines.
Yeah, that was a life full of surprises for the Israelites, you see.
So anyway, I don't think there's any sense of doing the wrong thing here though.
He brings up the Ark of the Lord, and as he does so, he sacrifices sheep.
Now, if you try to be a realist about this, and this is not anything you'd want to have any sort of visual aid to,
sacrificing so many sheep and oxen that they could not be counted on them.
But I mean, the mind boggles as to what the scene must have been,
because we sort of think of this whole thing of pomp and circumstance,
you sort of think of, you know, outside Buckingham Palace at a royal wedding or something.
And they're wading through blood, practically.
It must have been hideous.
And yet, here it is, the stark horror of it, anticipating, if you like, the stark horror of the cross.
And even then, they, you know, half the time they couldn't see it.
So, the history of the Ark reaches its grand climax,
and Solomon brings it out of its temporary resting place in Jerusalem, to this now completed temple.
We also see in verse 5 that it was a moment of great rejoicing, but also a solemn moment.
So, it's the rejoicing accompanied by this rather gory mass holocaust.
And holocaust, of course, is simply two Greek words of a whole burnt offering.
What does it tell us?
Well, I would say one thing it tells us is this, that the glory of the temple is also its limitation.
So, how many more did he need to sacrifice?
Why did he think he needed to sacrifice this many?
And what is it saying?
If you've got to sacrifice that many, and still you've got to carry on sacrificing,
of course, Hebrews ponders on this when it talks about how the high priest himself had to go on making sacrifices,
but when Christ had made the one sacrifice to sin, he sat down at the right hand of God.
And so, here the glory of the temple is seen to be its limitation.
No matter how many, they could have filled Jerusalem and the neighbouring towns and cities
with all the blood of all the rams and cattle and sheep and so on,
and it still would not have sufficed to take away sin.
Hebrews 10, 4 and 12, if you want to make that leap there.
Another thing to note there is that the movement of the ark had not always been accompanied by manifestations of the Lord's blessings,
as we know from the history of the ark.
But since it had been given by God as a witness to his willingness to be with his people and to bless them,
so now as the ark is brought to its appointed place, as we see here in verses 6 to 8,
there is something which does speak of the Lord's blessing.
So verse 6, when the priest, then the priest, brought the ark of the covenant of the Lord to its place,
in the inner sanctuary of the house, in the most holy place, underneath the wings of the cherubim,
for the cherubim spread out their wings over the place of the ark,
so that the cherubim made a covering above the ark and its poles.
The poles are so long, etc, etc, etc.
They could not be seen from the outside, where are we? Yeah.
But in verses 10 to 12, and when the priest came out of the holy place, a cloud filled the house of the Lord,
so that the priest could not stand to minister because of the cloud.
And it is sort of, again, it's one of these things that it's almost impossible to imagine what the visual effect would be,
and how if you ever set out to try and draw a picture of it, how you would do it.
It's probably a warning not to try and draw pictures of holy things,
which people insist, keep on insisting on doing.
When the priest came out, the cloud filled the house of the Lord, says the said,
for the glory of the Lord filled the house of the Lord.
So, here's something that you think is the dead opposite.
A cloud, which seems to, you know, obscure things, bring darkness,
and yet it's described here as the glory of the Lord filling the house.
And then Solomon says, the Lord has said that he would dwell in thick darkness.
I have built you an exalted house, a place for you to dwell in forever.
And that, I suppose, is either a concept that you either spend time on sort of picking apart and unpacking for people,
but what it means when the Lord will dwell in thick darkness.
And it's not explained at this point, it's something you'd have to dig around for,
and maybe even conjecture, which is always dangerous.
So, the glory of the Lord becomes one of the themes that's brought forth here.
And, say, it's a matter of your style and what you think is important as to how much you dwell on that.
But it is a theme that occurs, and it's a theme that will link you with the New Testament.
When the word becomes flesh, the glory is of the only begotten and so on.
So there is a sense in which the dwelling of God in the Immanuel, God with us, is the bringing of the glory of God.
And I suppose the irony again is that people don't see it.
Also, in this passage, it links it with the Exodus event.
So in verse 9, there was nothing in the ark except the two tablets of the stone that Moses had placed there at Horeb.
Now you could deduce the link simply by the fact of the ark, that this is Moses' ark, but here it is specifically stated.
The glory also, and the cloud, would also link it with the Exodus event,
the cloud that descended and ascended and filled the place and what have you.
So Solomon stands in succession to Moses.
For instance, if you want the link specifically made, you can find it there in Exodus chapter 40, verses 34 and 35.
It's the conclusion pretty well of the book of Exodus.
Then the cloud covered the tent of meeting and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle.
So you've got cloud and glory together there, and that's what is said in the 1 Kings 7 bit.
Moses was not able to enter the tent of meeting because of the cloud that settled upon it,
and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle.
So glory and cloud are once again.
Well, what is it saying? It's saying something like,
God is veiled, and He's unapproachable, and yet He is glorious.
When, for instance, you come to Ezekiel's description, he doesn't see it as a glory veiled,
he sees it as a glory going and coming back, going away, leaving the temple as it's about to be destroyed,
and going off into Babylon or over to the east,
which is interesting because Ezekiel is writing, of course, for the benefit of the people in captivity.
He himself is over there, and he's not writing for the benefit, it would seem,
of the people left back in Jerusalem, but he's interpreting for the exiles what is going on.
The desecration of the temple, the idolatry is there, and God's glory leaves it and comes over to them.
Jeremiah makes the same point with the bastards, the figs, and so on.
God is not tied.
See, here again, it's the non-domestication of God.
You can't tie God to a sanctuary just because you've got the building built,
but that therefore makes everything holy.
God will go where He wants, and when His people are in exile, He'll go with them if He wants to,
and He will return when He's ready.
And I suppose the point that I would lead to from that is that Ezekiel doesn't see the glory veiled,
but when we come to John 1.14, we do see the glory veiled.
Veiled in the flesh of Jesus, but as the most explicit expression of the glory of God that we have seen.
And Hebrews, again, takes that up in the opening of the epistle, as you will remember,
that in these last days He's spoken thus by His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things,
and through Him He also created the world.
He is the reflection of God's glory.
In other words, reflection is the best word there of the Greek,
and some of the older versions have effulgence and never knew what effulgence was.
Anyway, somehow Christ is the image of God's glory,
whom He appointed heir of all things, and through Him He created the world.
Okay, well that is then, I would say, my first point,
that the Lord comes to the temple in that the Ark comes and God is seen to be there.
He, if you like, validates the presence of the Ark by the supernatural manifestations of cloud and glory.
And I suppose the point is, we don't even have to know how exactly it would have appeared to those who saw it.
All we know is that it's real and God's doing it.
And He's putting His imprimatur, if you like, upon the bringing of the Ark up to the temple.
So my second point is that Solomon gives expression to his covenant convictions in chapter 8 verse 14 and following.
The king turned around and blessed all the assembly of Israel while the assembly of Israel stood,
and he said, Blessed be Yahweh the God of Israel, who with His hand has fulfilled
what He promised with His mouth to my father David, saying,
Since the day that I have brought my people, Israel, out of Egypt, I have not chosen a city.
So this is Solomon quoting what the prophet Nathan said to David.
I have not brought my people of Israel, since I have not chosen a city from any of the tribes of Israel
in which to build a house that my name might be there, but I chose David to be over my people.
My father David had it in mind to build a house for the name of the Lord the God of Israel,
but the Lord said to my father David, You did well to consider building a house for my name.
Nevertheless, you shall not build the bayit, but your son who shall be born to you shall build the bayit for my name.
And also, as in 2 Samuel 7 reminds us, God will build a bayit for David in his dynasty.
Now the Lord has upheld this promise that he made, for I have risen in the place of my father David.
I sit on the throne of Israel as the Lord promised, and have built the house for the name of the Lord the God of Israel.
And there I have provided a place for the ark in which is the covenant of the Lord that he made with our ancestors
when he brought them out of the land of Egypt.
I don't think there is any doubt at all that the narrator wants us to understand that this is a grand climax
to the whole process that began with Abraham, had its redemptive expression in Moses,
and came to a fulfillment in the promises made to David, and now in this capping off of the promise
in the building of the temple.
And in that same part of the text, you see that the covenant of David is related with the covenant of the old
redemptive event of Exodus.
There are some who tend to draw too much of a distinction between the covenants,
whereas I think we need to recognize both the unity and the distinctions that are there.
I'm, I think, on the side of the covenant theologians who point out that there is the one covenant
with a number of different expressions of it, and there is not a hard and fast difference to be made,
and separations to be made, say between the covenant of grace, as some will put it,
and the covenant of law or works and all the rest of it.
It's all the one covenant.
But on the one hand you have sometimes the emphasis upon the unconditional gracious nature of the covenant,
when God calls Abraham and simply makes promises to him.
On the other hand you have the conditional nature of the covenant,
when God having saved Israel by grace lays upon them a whole structure for living.
And it is very easy for people to get the impression from the conditional nature
that the covenant is the means and the basis of their salvation,
because they're told that if they break the covenant they're out of the land and all that sort of thing.
Okay, I come then to Solomon's prayer in verses 22 to 53.
What I tried to do here was to try to understand some of the dimensions of prayer that Solomon uses.
This is, I think, the longest expression of prayer that is given to us at this point in the Old Testament.
I could be wrong there, but I think that's the case.
And I think you have to see it in the understanding of the covenant that has just been given.
The covenant, redemption, ark, temple are all part of the theological framework
within which now Solomon gives expression to his relationship to God as the son of God,
as was promised to David.
I will be his father, he will be my son.
So as I've done elsewhere, I've tried to see the ingredients of Solomon's prayer.
And the first one I would say is the basis of his prayer,
that is which makes prayer possible, and I'll extrapolate this in the book I did on prayer.
I looked at the finding the reality of prayer in God as Trinity,
the basis of prayer which is our sonship in Jesus Christ,
the source of prayer which is the sovereignty of God the Father,
and the enabling of prayer which is the blessed work of the Holy Spirit.
Now I think that you have, that of course is looking at it in biblical theological plus dogmatic theological framework,
but I think you have a good many of the makings of that more flawed Christian understanding of prayer
in what we have here with Solomon.
So the basis of prayer, if you look at chapter 8 and verse 23,
so this third section, I've really just followed the chapter structure through,
point 1 was verses 1 to 13, point 2 was verses 14 to 21,
and point 3 is verses 22 to 53, obviously that's a lot of text,
and again I think you have to pick the eyes out of it, you're going to deal with all this in 25 to 30 minutes.
Okay so the basis of prayer in verse 23,
Solomon stood before the author of the Lord in the presence of all the assembly of Israel
and spread out his hands to heaven, and he said,
O Lord God of Israel, there is no God like you in heaven above or on earth beneath,
keeping covenant and steadfast love for your servants who walk before you with all their heart.
In other words, what is Solomon doing but addressing God,
who has shown himself to be faithful to his covenant.
In verse 24 there, he says,
The covenant that you kept for your servant my father David, as you declared to him,
you promised with your mouth and you have this day fulfilled with your hand.
So that is the basis upon which Solomon feels constrained to approach God.
The means by which he can do it.
He acknowledges the grace of God as the covenant keeping faithful God.
There's probably more you could say about the source of prayer,
but I don't want to wander from the text too much.
I think it's important that we try to follow through the way the text itself unfolds the subject of Solomon's prayer.
The second thing it seems to me is that we're given something about the source of prayer here.
It's prayer that God will confirm his word to do what he said he would do.
In verse 25,
Therefore, O Lord, the God of Israel, keep for your servant my father David that which you promised him,
saying, There shall never fail you a successor before me to sit on the throne of Israel.
And so on.
And if you go back to David's prayer in 2 Samuel 7, you'll see a similar thing.
First of all, you get Nathan the prophet promising to David certain things will happen.
And what does David do then?
He turns around and prays to God and saying, Lord, do what you have promised.
In other words, the content of David's prayer, the source of his prayer, is what God tells him is his will to do.
And I think that's an important lesson to learn.
We see it in other places.
We see it in, say, Jeremiah, where God tells Jeremiah in chapter 29
that he is going to bring the people out after the 70 years and so on.
He says, And this is what I'll lay in defense.
You will call on my name and you will ask me and I will answer you.
So God actually tells Jeremiah what he's going to do and includes in that,
that he's going to get them to pray to God to do it.
And of course, this raises the whole question.
If God knows he's going to do it and he tells us he's going to do it,
well, what's the point of praying for it?
And my rejoinder to that is, if it's not like that, what's the point of praying anyway?
If we don't know God is going to do it or can do it, then what's the point of asking him to do it?
In other words, it's the sovereign will of God that makes prayer a feasible thing.
They would ask God to do something that he can't do.
I can't see any point in praying to God that certain persons will get converted
if conversion is something we do.
If all God can do there is stand on the sidelines of the great football field of life
and hope that a few people will come his way.
So I believe that biblical prayer is an expression of our acknowledgement of the sovereignty of God.
So in that sense, I think the great Augustine, I think it was,
who said that prayer is thinking God's thoughts after him.
So what's the point of it? Well the point of it surely is this.
That prayer changes things, yeah, of course it does.
But prayer changes things because God's plan and purpose is that the way he is going to bring things about
is sovereignly and part of his sovereign working is to get us to pray for something.
In other words, he is gracious enough to allow us to share in his will
and to ask him to do something that he knows he's going to do anyway.
So God is not impotent if we don't pray.
It's just that he wants us to have this fellowship with him
and call upon him to do those things which he says he wants to do.
Once again, the mystery here we see is that of the present absence of God in this whole passage.
He can't be contained in the building, so may he continue to regard it as the place where his name dwells.
If you look at 27,
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.
You see Solomon understands that you can't domesticate God.
You can't contain him in a temple built with hands.
As I said before, that's the point that Stephen ends up on,
which gets the Jews who have accused him of speaking against the temple so riled.
He quotes Isaiah 66 at them.
Most high God does not dwell in the temple made with hands.
And Solomon realizes that even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you.
Now you see, he's not saying you can't exist because there's no where you could be.
What he's saying is we just can't conceive of you as being confined to any space.
Because heaven, don't you get, from the Old Testament's perspective,
is a way of describing phenomenologically what they see above them.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
He's God created terra firma and the rest of the universe that we see stressed out above us.
The new heavens and the new earth is a new universe.
It's just that heaven then comes to double up for, because God cannot be contained here,
we think of him as there, wherever there is.
And so heaven, which just meant the sky above, now comes to also signify the place where God is.
And it's interesting to me, this is a little bit of a sidetrack,
but it's interesting to me that the popular Christian way of sort of telling you we go to heaven when you die
is not really the biblical way of looking at it.
The biblical way of looking at the confirmation is not that we all gather in heaven,
but the heavenly Jerusalem, that is the Jerusalem formed in heaven, comes down onto the new earth.
That's the dwelling place of God with men.
I had a long tussle with a couple of Jehovah's Witnesses over this one day.
They hang over my garden gate while I was pulling weeds.
And they started on this and I said, yeah, I believe that.
They said, didn't you say you were an Anglican?
I said, well, Anglicans don't believe in the new heavens and the new earth.
I said, how do you know?
I said, that's exactly what I believe, because that's what the Bible says.
They just thought we believed, you know, when you die, your soul goes to heaven.
I said, that's rubbish.
That's paganism.
Oh, I didn't get very far with them.
I went on pulling weeds and they went on troubling people down the street.
Okay, so, what are we saying here?
The source of prayer is God who speaks his word, draws his people graciously into fellowship with himself.
Okay, well, I think we've looked at that.
That's the source of prayer.
The third aspect that comes out in the prayer of Solomon, I've said, is the circumstances of prayer.
That is, when is it appropriate to approach God who is so great and so glorious
and to do so in this so intimate a fashion?
I think, you know, we try to preserve that and sometimes we wince when somebody prays in a prayer meeting
like they're just rushing up to God and slapping him on the back.
And, yes, it's nice to know that we have access to God because we have a great high priest
who is in heaven for us and it's through him that we have constant access to God.
But it also, we perhaps need to be known, you know, to recognise and to remind people
that it is a very gracious act for this great God to allow us to do this.
So, when is it appropriate to approach him?
Well, I've just suggested a few things out of this passage from verse 31 and following.
In verses 31-32, when truth is at stake and righteousness needs vindicating.
If someone sins against a neighbour and gives an oath to swear and comes and swears before your altar in this house,
then here in heaven enact and judge your servants condemning the guilty
by bringing their conduct on their own head and by vindicating the righteous
by rewarding them according to their righteousness.
In other words, righteousness and evil need to be sorted out.
But notice the constant refrain that keeps coming up.
Here in heaven, that is Solomon, or for all that has been said about the name of God dwelling
in the temple and the tabernacle before it being the dwelling place of God,
has no doubts about, as he said, even heaven and the highest heaven couldn't contain you.
So, he has no illusions about the fact that when he or anybody else prays towards this place,
it is not an idolatrous act as if God was somehow encapsulated and captivated
or captured or whatever you like, imprisoned in the temple itself,
because he wants God to hear in heaven.
Then in verses 33 to 34 it might say that when sin which threatens the blessings of God is confessed,
or when the provision of the promised land is threatened by sin which is confessed, in verses 35 to 40.
So any threat to the covenant blessings through to the sin of the people and when the people turn to God
and pray towards this house, and I take that to mean lift up their hearts to God
who is representatively present through the house.
I don't think there is any indication here that if they had their back to the temple
because they were tied to a tree, that their prayer wouldn't be heard.
If they lie flat on their backs with a broken leg, their prayer wouldn't be heard.
It's the symbolic representational character of it as the means of reminding them who God is
and how he acts for them.
Verses 41 to 43 is interesting because it deals with foreigners.
Likewise when a foreigner who is not of your people Israel comes from a distant land because of your name.
Now why would they do that?
Well Solomon would seem to understand something of the covenant promise to Abraham.
That through the defense of Abraham all the nations of the world will be blessed.
And maybe the writer wants us to anticipate the coming of the Queen of Sheba.
They shall hear of your great name, your mighty hand and your outstretched arm.
What is he saying?
They will hear of your saving grace, the outstretched arm of God above all.
It was the way of describing the way God acted in Egypt to bring them out from their captivity.
When a foreigner comes and prays towards this house then hear in heaven your dwelling place
and do according to all that a foreigner calls to you.
I can't help making the link between this refrain about praying towards this house,
the place where your name dwells, for the valid prayer as we find it in the New Testament
as being prayer in and through the mediation of Jesus Christ.
As I was saying before, you find a lot of confusion about this.
Not only as to how Christians should pray but as to what is the liberty of non-Christians praying.
Does, for instance, a Muslim truly pray in a biblical sense?
Does, and here's the sticky one, Peter was mentioning this one earlier about, you know,
at what stage does the pious Jew who doesn't accept Jesus sort of find himself outside the real covenant?
When a Jew prays is he praying in a biblical sense?
And a lot of Christians, I think, take a very sort of easy come easy go thing on this.
They've been brainwashed with this sort of pluralism.
That as long as somebody prays sincerely to whatever God then they're praying.
That seems to me, Solomon makes it clear, he doesn't say when a foreigner prays
but when a foreigner prays towards this place where you have made your name to dwell.
Now what else can that mean in Christian terms than when a foreigner, that is a non-Christian,
a non-Jew if you like, comes to the covenant fulfilment in Jesus Christ and prays to God.
Then he says, hear from heaven.
Hear in heaven your dwelling place and do according to all that the foreigner calls you to do.
Now he knows from the Abrahamic covenant that God has a blessing for the foreigner.
Okay, 44 to 45 deals with holy warfare.
This is a naughty one because what is holy warfare now?
Holy warfare is a big theme in the Old Testament and people have written books on God the warrior.
People like Frank Moore Cross and others have written books on God the warrior.
The holy war of the Old Testament.
The Lord is a man of war and all the rest of it.
And this of course, I think hermeneutically you're really on a skid if you just take warfare
and sort of think that praying over the soldiers before they go off to slaughter the enemy is creating holy war.
I always remember Charles Trautman who came from Chicago to be the federal secretary of
what was then the Intervarsity Fellowship, now the AFES, was telling us how in World War II
and he and other Christians in the American army used to get together for prayer meetings
when the battle was raging.
And it came as a blow out of the blue when they realised that over there there were
German Christians doing exactly the same thing.
So the holy warfare one, be careful about that.
If your people go out to do battle against the enemy by whatever way you shall send them
and they pray to the Lord towards the city that you've chosen and the house that I have built
for you and your name, then here in heaven their prayer and their plea and maintain their cause.
Well I suppose the way through if you want to dress that one up and expand on it is to ask
what is the warfare which we have now?
And we don't need John Bunyan to tell us that I think.
Okay, then finally the 46 to 53, when exiles from sin or force sin and they repent
and you can work out what that one is going to be about.
If they sin against you, verse 46 at the beginning, middle of 47, and they repent,
48, if they repent, and middle of 48, and pray to you towards their land,
because they've been sent out of the land, and the house which I have built for your name,
then here in heaven your dwelling place their prayer and their plea and maintain their cause.
Whether Daniel when he prayed towards his open window and prayed towards Jerusalem,
you know whether he got his orientation right really doesn't matter does it?
Because I think to pray towards this house means to pray as we would say in the name
which has been given to them and revealed to them.
So what can we say about that?
Perhaps this, that each one of these different circumstances of prayer involves
the vindication of God's name, the vindication of his grace and of his redemptive processes
or the promises which lead to the process of redemptive acts of God.
In other words, and this I think is an important point which comes out of this whole thing
of God telling us what his mind is, even if we see that in general terms so that there
are times when we have to say Lord if it is your will because I don't know if this is
the way you're going to act and I don't think there's anything lacking in faith in that,
in fact I think it is showing faith in that we hand over to God those things that he hasn't
revealed to us, like which individual is going to get converted and things like that.
That all prayer is towards the work of the Gospel.
All prayer is towards the work of the Gospel.
It doesn't matter what we are praying, even if it is praying about the healing of the sick
or giving thanks for food and asking that God would provide our daily bread,
it is towards the work of the Gospel.
And my fourth point is that in verses 54 to 66 we have a summing up of this truly amazing
event of the prayer of Solomon over the building of the Temple and Solomon is revealed here
as the prophet, the priest, the king and the wise man.
And those are the dimensions as you know, well the first three prophet, priest and king
which in the Reformation Christology was highlighted.
Calvin was strong on the offices of Christ as the prophet, the priest and the king.
I think what was missed out was the office of Christ as the wise man because the wise man
didn't figure so prominently in the saving processes that you have in the Old Testament.
So Solomon stands as the prophetic voice to Israel.
Verses 56 and following, Solomon stands up and says,
Bless be the Lord who has given rest to his people Israel according to all that he promised.
Not one word is failed of all his good promise which he spoke through the servant Mazes.
Now there is another pointer to what I maintain as the, you might say, the watershed of the epochs.
What was promised in Abraham comes to a point where it is perceived that it is fulfilled
in some remarkable way which is never repeated.
In fact from this point on things go downhill.
So whereas some of the conservatives who write biblical theologies and so on point out key
characters like Abraham and Moses and so on.
It seems to me that Moses must be included in this whole process from Abraham to David and Solomon.
Okay it is fair enough to highlight these people but I think you can see a structure here
which is all part of the one process leading to this climax.
Verse 61 says much also,
Therefore devote yourselves completely to the Lord our God walking in his statutes and keeping his commandments
as of this day, that he is calling on the people in the light of the God whom he blesses
who has fulfilled all his promises for people to walk in the way.
That in a sense is a prophetic ministry to do that.
It is the sort of thing that Elijah did.
The sort of thing that all the prophets did was to call the people back to faithfulness to the covenant.
He is also the priestly figure and here you have as occurs in the early kingship
particularly of David and Solomon the ministries which we would tend to separate out
as actually sort of overlapping.
The priestly figure interestingly enough is the intercessor.
And in this prayerful address verses 57 to 60
The Lord our God be with us as he was with our ancestors may he not leave us in the bad enough
but incline our hearts to keep to him to walk in his ways to keep his commandments
his statutes his ordinances which he commanded our ancestors.
Let these words of mine with which I pleaded before the Lord be near to the Lord our God day and night
and may he maintain the cause of his servants and the cause of his people Israel as each day requires
so that all the peoples of the earth may know that Yahweh is God and there is no other.
So he is calling upon the people and he is also blessing the Lord.
The ministry of intercession in the Old Testament is spread around a bit and it is interesting that
while the priest is obviously interceding it is not spelled out in so many words
that one has to assume that when the priest makes the offering of sacrifice that he intercedes
what is intriguing is that the prophet is the one who is mainly seen as the intercessor
or the interceder whichever it is.
And there is even one passage where the king asks the priest to get the prophet to call upon the Lord.
Well in both these cases the prophetic and the priestly ministry it is not hard to sort of move those through
and to show how Jesus fulfills both those ministries.
Also he is the kingly figure, his whole venture has sprung up over his kingship in Israel
and we know how to move that one through particularly as the son of David and the true son of David
comes and he is even addressed as son of David in certain cases in many gospel narratives.
The other one is he is the royal wise man, we have already talked about this and we know how to take that through.
So all we are saying then is that the great offices of the Christ are anticipated in Solomon.
Each office of Solomon anticipates the fulfillment of Christ on our behalf
but also in Christ we know that we are called on to minister these roles.
That is just as Israel was recognized to be a kingdom of priests
so the people of God exercise a priestly prophetic and even a kingly role.
So that is more or less where I took it.
The conclusion I drew out of this that we see in this temple of Solomon
is the gathering up of the major theological themes relating to salvation in the Old Testament.
That is you have got the covenant promises of God,
it refers to the redemption from slavery, it is constantly referred back to the Old Testament
redemption acting through the tabernacle and Moses and the glory of the Lord and so on.
It is the dwelling of a transcendent and hidden God through his name amongst his people.
It is the focus of all God's blessing, it is the symbol of God's rule.
So the medium through which forgiveness, fellowship and prayer is channeled is there.
Only one temple truly fulfills these roles and that is the new temple that was raised in the resurrection of Jesus.
And I think that what I am saying here is that what this is, we saw with the wisdom passage earlier
that it helps us to see some of the texture, some of the depth in the Gospel narrative
and to enlarge your Christology beyond Jesus died for our sins.
To help us to see what the offices of Jesus were.
We have here the fulfillment of all these things in him.
And so on this basis I would say that you have the whole notion of prayer coming through into the New Testament.
That it is through turning to this place where God's name dwells and praying to the God who is in heaven
that you find the New Testament emphasis on prayer is always on prayer to the Father through the Son
with the enabling of the Holy Spirit.
The confusion that you meet when people don't know which person is a Trinity to pray to.
And so as I have said before because of the interrelationship of the three persons of the Trinity
but where one person is present and doing something, I am hearing our prayers there
or three are present and hearing our prayers.
I don't get my shirt in or not if somebody prays a prayer to Jesus.
But if I had an elder who got up to pray Sunday by Sunday and only prayed dear Jesus
I would take them aside and say listen here where did you learn that?
You didn't learn it in the New Testament.
As far as I can see in the New Testament there are only three prayers addressed to Jesus.
One is when Paul is converted and the voice says I am Jesus.
So he has been talking to Jesus.
The second is when Stephen is about to die and he sees a vision of Jesus and prays to him.
And the third one is at the very end of Revelation, come Lord Jesus.
Every other prayer is a prayer to the Father through the Son by the Spirit.
If that is what the New Testament does then it seems to me that is what we ought to do.
Okay, so I suppose a parting shot.
The Solomon narrative really expounds the significance of the resurrection of Christ.
See, I think it is fair game, you might differ from me on this.
I think it is fair game.
What we are saying is that the Old Testament does testify to Christ.
But when we winkle out the texture that is here in the Old Testament narrative
and see where it leads in the person of Christ then I think we can understand better
what it means for Jesus for instance to fulfill all the promises of God through his resurrection.
In other words it helps us to understand what is going on in the resurrection of Jesus.
And that surely is an immensely important thing.
I think a lot of Christians have the idea that what the resurrection is for is just to prove to you that Jesus is God.
Now for a start I am not even sure that it does that.
I don't see how a body, a human body raising shows that somebody is God.
As I said to you yesterday, what happens when we are all raised from the dead at the last day?
It is not going to show us to be God.
What it does show is that we have a man who is acceptable to God.
Forever.
Death cannot hold him and therefore death cannot separate us from God if we are in Christ.
And then there are all these other things which are added to the texture of the resurrection.
So when Paul says that we bring you the good news that what God promised to the fathers
that he has fulfilled to us the children by raising Jesus.
This is the building up of the temple in three days after it has been destroyed.
Okay, questions, discussion.
Greg.
I would like to add that the temple is almost a symbol of assurance.
So the thing is that a lot of the prayers are when things are contacted.
Yep.
Yep.
I certainly agree with that.
Anything else?
Can we relate the same passage to what John was saying about the compliment that we have
given that we are saying that God is able to give us whatever we ask and so that we have
the principles that we have asked us in.
Yep.
Yeah.
I think that is a good point because all those passages in the New Testament which
gives the idea that if you have enough faith God will answer your prayers willy nilly sort
of thing.
I think they do get things out of perspective if they fail to recognize that it has been
spoken in a particular context in the framework of asking in my name and according to my will
and this sort of thing.
I often wonder at people who go on with that sort of stuff that such and such didn't happen
because she didn't have enough faith.
The implication if they did it properly you know if they did have enough faith things
would happen.
Why did such people who go on with that, why did they not have the courage of their own
convictions?
Because if I had that kind of faith I would just get down on my knees and say Lord convert
the whole world.
Nobody ever does it.
Why not?
Okay.
Yes David.
I've got two questions.
Would you actually use, if you were ever given a theory of prayer, would you actually preach
one of your journals on Solomon's prayer?
I don't know whether I would but I'm not averse to it.
Put it that way.
I have preached a series on prayer but it came from a different angle but if I, I would
not be averse to preaching that particular passage.
The thing that I think would work against it is I think that preaching from that passage
would be far more powerful if it's preached in a series that deals with the whole one
kings pericope which is more than just dealing with prayer.
But I would certainly be inclined to refer to it.
Yeah.
I don't know what I'd do.
I mean, you know.
I'd say it depends on a number of things.
If you just left it on its own like that, yeah it would be I suppose but I certainly
wouldn't leave it like that because to me the starting place, if I wanted to start on
any sort of topic, if I was doing it topically rather than exegeting a pericope or something
of Old Testament narrative then I would probably start with the Gospel.
Just that is where I tend to want to start because essentially that is the proper starting
point for most beings anyway.
And so I would ask the question of about the significance of Jesus Christ not as he sets
an example, not that Jesus got up a great while before day and went out to pray therefore
how much should we do, but what is the significance of Jesus the prayer on our behalf?
In other words prayer is something that also must come under the umbrella of justification.
See, your lousy praying and my lousy praying are justified by the perfect praying of Jesus.
That's the encouragement of the Gospel.
But if you just turn it into, you know, Jesus prayed a lot and if he prayed a lot how much
more should we pray, then it just becomes a burden.
And I think that's the effect of so much literature and talk about prayer.
It's a beat up and it leaves you with a great burden because none of us, I think, would
put our hands up and say oh yeah we pray as we ought.
Would you?
Anybody like to try it?
That's unfair but I certainly couldn't.
As I said in the preface to my little book that the last thing I want to do is to give
the impression that I was a great prayer.
I said probably the fact that I'm not is the thing which qualifies me above all to
write a book on prayer because I know how bad a prayer I am and how much in need I am
of the perfect prayer of the man for me who is my intercessor.