1 Kings 5

Discussion Questions

1. Just as Solomon did business with Hiram, Pastor Jim suggests that we should collaborate with the world when it is wise to do so, as it can lead to evangelism. Do you agree? Do you tend to withdraw into a Christian enclave or do you look for opportunities to collaborate with non-believers?
2. Hiram gets a taste of worship of Yahweh in verse 7. Who are the Hirams in your life? Have you ever considered the evangelistic impact you might have on those you work with?
3. All work is God’s work for a believer. All work can be an act of worship. How can this shift in perspective change how you work in your day to day job?

Transcript

We study through books of the Bible here at The Village Chapel. We have some extra copies. If you didn’t bring one with you and you would like one to follow along, just raise your hand up real high. Somebody will drop a paper copy off your aisle. There is one over here, on the far back corner over there if somebody doesn’t mind getting that and all along. Also, the QR code I believe is up there on the screen for you. If you would like the sermon notes and quotes, you can have all of that.

Our study, is today going to be called “Preparation, Collaboration and Exaltation”, and this is the beginning of the planning, the building, and the dedication of the temple. The Solomon Narrative runs from chapters 1 through 11. About 40% of it will be about the temple and the historical time period that we are in is the early Iron Age. Some of you would be familiar with that. The temple project will be completed around 957 B.C.

Bible nerds like me, and some of us as well, as architects and interior designers may relish reading through the planning and building of this impressive ancient edifice, while the rest of you may come to the conclusion that the reading of the Holy Spirit’s inspiration here will require a bit of perspiration on your part. Either way, there is an important part of the Solomon story here. As we read it, I believe it will lead us to a couple of important questions we need to ask ourselves and to some riches, some timeless truths that we can draw from this passage.

So, before we read chapter five, let me pray for us.

*Father, as we open our hearts and minds to your word this morning, may your promises become our inexhaustible hope and proper confidence. May your purposes become our meaning and mission. May your presence become our delight and joy. Through today’s study, I pray Father that you will give us a clearer vision of your truth, a greater faith in your power, and a more confident assurance of your love for us. This is our heart’s desire this morning and this we pray in Jesus’ name for His sake and for His glory. *

So, chapter five, then if you are with me in your Bibles, this is 1 Kings Chapter 5. It is filled with international relations, some international banking efforts, some negotiations, some of you like that kind of stuff, and we open by meeting a near neighbor to the north of Israel.

It says, “Now Hiram, King of Tyre sent his servants to Solomon when he heard that they had anointed him King in place of his father, for Hiram had always been a friend of David. Then Solomon sent word to Hiram saying, ‘You know that David, my father, was unable to build a house for the name of the Lord, his God because of the wars which surrounded him until the Lord put them under the soles of his feet.’”

It is interesting to me here that Solomon highlights that the house that he wants to build is for the name of the Lord as opposed to for the Lord. The understanding as I kept reading this and thinking about it is that he understands, he knows, (and we will read a portion of 2 Chronicles chapter 2, a parallel account in a bit.) but he understands there is no building that can contain God. If you build a building, the best you are going to be able to do is to honor the name of that God.

The pagan worshipers on the other hand would build statues. Statues that sometimes had eyes or hands or feet. Eyes that could not see, feet that could not move, hands that could not do anything and their statues like the statue to their God. The Philistine statue to the god, Dagon, for instance, fell over and broke and his head fell off. And if your God can fall down and break and its head can fall off, you have got the wrong god. Okay, so that is really important I think for us to know.

But here Solomon communicates to Hiram, and I think in a way he is witnessing. I think in a way he is exploring the question of “who is God” with Hiram and I think that is important for us to note. We will see that again as we look at the other account, the parallel account in 2 Chronicles chapter 2.

But for now, let me keep going in verse four. “But now the Lord my God has given me rest on every side. There is neither adversary nor misfortune.” [Everything is really going well, and for Solomon right now, things are really going smoothly, so he wants to get to this project.] “Behold, I intend to build a house for the name of the Lord, my God, as the Lord spoke to David, my father, saying, ‘Your son whom I will set on your throne in your place, he will build the house for my name.’” And that is Solomon understanding and knowing that his father David had been told by Yahweh, “David, you will not build the house for my name. Your son will do that.” That is back in 2 Samuel chapter 7 if you care to explore further and read that.

Verse 6. “’Now therefore’, [Solomon speaking through servants to Hiram, ‘Therefore command that they cut for me cedars from Lebanon and my servants will be with your servants and I will give you wages for your servants according to all that you say.’ [Name your price, basically.] ‘For you know that there is no one among us who knows how to cut timber like the Sidonians.’” So, the Sidonians, well-known for their skill at cutting timbers. I have no skills when it comes to home repair or home building. I call the guy. Raise your hand if you call the guy. Okay, there is a bunch of us here, we call the guy because the guy knows what he is doing and I just don’t know what I am doing and it is better if the guy does it in my book or the gal, whomever it may be.

Verse 7. “It came about that when Hiram heard the words of Solomon, he rejoiced greatly and he said, [and this blew my mind when I first read it], ‘Blessed be the Lord today who has given to David a wise son over this great people.’” And what is really amazing to me is that this pagan king north of Israel uses the personal name of the Israeli God. He isn’t just saying Elohim, he is saying, “Blessed be Yahweh.” That is fascinating to me. That is really amazing. What does that tell us about what is … Is this worship or just mere neighborly respect? And commentaries are divided on the issue. I am curiously optimistic that when we get to Heaven, there might be having some coffee on a cloud somewhere up there, there might be a guy named Hiram and I am going to get to talk to him and ask him about this whole deal.

But that is curious to me that he would recognize Yahweh when he and his people are completely dedicated to worshiping pagan deities of various names. Usually, deities that were sort of identified by the task they have in nature. Nature gods, the god of the rain, the god of the moon, the god of the sun, god of the harvest and quite fickle, sometimes not getting along with one another. And oftentimes in legends and fantasies, they were sort of slapping around the humans and sort of abusing them in lots of different ways, but not so the God of the Bible. Hiram is getting the idea that Solomon, who worships now the same Yahweh of David, Hiram’s good friend from before, David who’s now gone, he is showing some respect at the very least, if not worshiping Yahweh.

“So, Hiram sent word to Solomon saying, ‘I have heard the message which you have sent me. I will do what you desire concerning the cedar and cypress timber. My servants will bring them down from Lebanon to the sea and I will make them into rafts to go by sea to the place where you direct me.’” Tell me which port you want them to drop into. Probably ended up being somewhere near Joppa. Some of us who have been to Israel before, we come in, we usually end up staying in Tel Aviv or nearby and it is not far from Joppa at all. Joffa as it is also known. And so, he says, ” You, tell me where you want them to be floated down along the Mediterranean Sea too, and then they will break them up and then you will carry them away. Then you will accomplish my desire by giving food to my household.”

So, there is the trade, there is the negotiation that goes on. You get building supplies, and you will give to me food, essential needs. Mountainous up there where he is from and probably not as fertile soil. And so here we see that each country is going to give a little bit of what they have or maybe what the other person needs in the negotiation. That is interesting to me.

“Hiram gave Solomon as much as he desired,” verse 10 says, “Of the cedar and cypress timber.” Verse 11, “Solomon then gave Hiram 20,000 kors of wheat as food for his household and 20 kors of beaten oil. Thus, Solomon would give Hiram year by year.” This was an ongoing contract. A “kor”, (K-O-R), some of your English translations will have a little number there and it will point you to a note in the margin and some of the different English translations will say it is somewhere between 6 and 10 bushels of wheat each kor, but 20,000 of them is a lot of wheat. That is pretty awesome.

Verse 12 is one of those summary statements we find often in First Kings. “The Lord gave wisdom to Solomon just as he promised him.” Great is thy faithfulness Lord unto me in very practical ways like this. The book of James tells us if you are lacking wisdom, ask, and God is generous. He gives liberally, He gives wisdom to us. We seek Him, we seek His ways, His will, His purposes, His plans. We want to see things the way He sees things, and that is what wisdom really is; seeing things the way God sees things, valuing the things that God values, treasuring, prizing, protecting, weeping over the things that God weeps over. That is the way of wisdom. “And there was peace between Hiram and Solomon and the two of them made a covenant.” So, they make this promise, this commitment to one another.

Verse 13 is a little bit of a change. Our narrator, whomever that may be, is going to tell us a little bit about the project as it begins if you will. “Now, King Solomon levied [or conscripted] forced laborers from all Israel, and the forced laborers numbered 30,000 men and he sent them to Lebanon 10,000 a month in relays. They were in Lebanon a month and two months at home. Adoniram was over the forced laborers.” You may remember from chapter four verse six that Adoniram was essentially the Secretary of Labor, and so here he is in play in this particular project, which by the way is going to be massive. You can see that at least just from the 30,000 people that have begun to be a part of it. But watch this, you think 30,000 is a lot.

Verse 15. “Solomon had 70,000 transporters.” I mean think trucks, trains, think transportation industry, that’s what this is. 70,000 transporters. By the way, the cedars of Lebanon were not just your average neighborhood tree that we might have in here. These are like sequoias. I mean these are massive trees and that is why they wanted those trees instead of trees that they might have more readily at hand themselves. “70,000 transporters, 80,000 hurlers of stone in the mountains besides Solomon’s 3,300 chief deputies.” These would be middle managers or managers of teams. “And they were over the project, and they ruled over the people who were doing the work. Then the King commanded, and they quarried great stones, costly stones to lay the foundation of the house with cut stones.”

“So, Solomon’s builders and Hiram’s builders and the Gebalites cut them and prepared the timbers and the stones to build valves.” Who are the men of Gebalites? Not 100% certain. There was a little town up in that area that some of these folk may have had a very special skill and it either related to transporting the cedars to the ocean or perhaps binding them together and designing the rafts that they would make out of them to float them down south to Joppa or to wherever they were going to go.

So, this is brilliant. Some of these stones, by the way, weighed up to 160,000 pounds. That would be 80 tons, 1 stone. Can you imagine just moving that from here across the parking lot? Much less the miles and miles and miles to get them to where they would go up to Jerusalem. Some of those same stones, believe it or not, those of you have been to Israel, you have marveled when you have gone to the old city and you have gone to the Western Wall and you look at the ancient stones that are there. Some from the second temple period to be sure, some from the period when King Herod remodeled and expanded the temple to be sure, so later. But I am told that today on the southwest and the southeast corner of the Temple Mount and 100 feet above the bottom of those corners will be some of these same stones from the first temple. That is really powerful. That is really amazing to me.

Well, some of you may be curious about where this might be and so I have got the map up on the screen and if you are listening online, you should be able to see this map as well. Look at the yellow section on the map with me and you will see that that is all it says of course is Phoenic, but it actually, if you had all of it, it would say Phoenicia and so Tyre and Sidon are there as well. And Byblos would be north of that. That is probably going to be the second most important city in Phoenicia. You might hear a little bit about that a little bit later, but you can kind of see it is not that far. All of Israel, by the way, Israel and Judah there on the map in the color that I guess for some of our eyes would be called purple. That is no bigger than the state of New Jersey. So, remember Israel is not a massive country. It’s actually quite small and Tyre and Sidon all the way up there, but moving those cedars, moving those stones all that way is quite a bit.

You may have heard these popular sayings that some people use. Things like “Success Favors the Prepared”, or “Proper Preparation Prevents Poor Performance”. I love that one of course because of all of the alliteration, but I think wise King Solomon had some version of this going and in chapter 5 it is all about preparation, collaboration, and its end goal is exaltation. That is the worship of God. I want to drive that home and remind us of that over and over again. They were wanting to build a gathering place for the worship, the corporate worship of God. As chapter 5 opens, we meet this new friend, he congratulates Solomon on his ascending to the throne, upon the death of his father David, and Hiram just seems to me to be quite an interesting kind of fella. You can see again; it is about 12 miles into the southern area of what we now today call Lebanon from the northern border of Israel.

As far as Hiram is concerned in terms of his history, some of your English Bibles may call him Huram, (H-U-R-A-M), and it is spelled that way actually in Chronicles when we go to that, I will just put that up on the screen in a minute. Some of your English Bibles might call them Ahiram, which is it? Well, they are all variant spellings of the same particular name. We have that kind of thing in our own day and time as well. Your name might even have more than one spelling depending on what your name might be. My name is kind of boring, Jim. I could go with G-Y-M, but I am pretty much limited to J-I-M. Hiram according to Pastor David Guzik, pretty good website, enduringword.com if you’ve not visited it before, Hiram is an abbreviation of Ahiram, which means “brother of ram” or “my brother exalted” or “brother of the lofty one”. That is what his name meant.

Archeologists have discovered a royal sarcophagus in Byblos, which I mentioned earlier, which is a little bit north of Tyre and Sidon and that sarcophagus is dated to 1200 BC. It is inscribed with the king’s name, Ahiram, reminding us once again that our Bible is set in space-time history. When you start finding caskets with a dude’s name on it, it is at least a clue that somebody isn’t just making this up out of thin air and it corroborates a little bit of the storyline as regards Solomon’s letter to Hiram mentioned here in verse 2. According to Josephus Flavius who was a well-known first century Jewish historian, copies of just such a letter along with Hiram’s reply were preserved in both Hebrew and Tyrian dialects. They were in the archives, and they were extant in his, Josephus’ time, first century AD. This cedar and cypress lumber and all these stones would become building supplies for the construction of the first Jewish temple as we said earlier, and that temple would be completed around 957 BC. Solomon dies around 931 BC at the age of 68. I just never thought about that. For some reason I had him going to be like 120 or something. And I am 68 and I am thinking, man, he is just like me, only smart. It is just awesome.

The temple would after he builds it later be destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BC when Nebuchadnezzar leads his armies to ransack Jerusalem and destroyed the temple and all that sort of thing. Then it would be rebuilt again around 516 BC with some later remodeling by Herod the Great around 20 BC, closer to the time of Jesus. It was destroyed once again and has not been rebuilt back in AD 70, after Jesus on the ground, probably somewhere in and around 31 or 32 right there, AD says, “This temple will be destroyed and in three days I’ll rebuild it.” He says that in Matthew 12, I believe it is, and what He is talking about there is not the physical temple, but He is actually using the temple as a model, or as an illustration of His own body where He would die.

Now some of you might be curious about this. Here is your MELT, Ministries and Executive Leadership Team from the Village Chapel and here we are in Israel, overlooking the old city. You can see part of that. I just really wanted to make sure you got to see all of us together because when we disappeared for that amount of time, I wanted you to know we actually went there, and we were actually working. I mean it was really important. Here is a little view of the Western Wall from a distance. This is all that remains of the ancient Jewish temple itself. The gold dome up top is the Muslim Mosque. There are two of those up there on the Temple Mount and Jews aren’t actually allowed to go up on the Temple Mountain. If you as a non-Jewish person go up there, you as a Christian person, you can’t wear a cross when you go up. You have got to make sure to kind of respect their rules and their regulations, but that Western Wall is the Wailing Wall, some people call it.

Jews will come from all over the place to go up to that wall and pray. Indeed, we did as well. There is a men’s side and a women’s side. And interestingly the men are to wear the little hat thing right here on the back of their heads and the women go up and you take a little prayer request if you want to on a piece of paper and you can stick it right in that wall and it is just an amazing thing to be there if you have never gone there. It is just really, really powerful. And here, a few of us up close, my cousin Skip there, he is the second one from the left myself there, a bunch of our other guys. And down below on just on two or three of our trips we have been allowed to go underneath the Western Wall and this is what is really fascinating to me because some of these stones date all the way back, and it is just fascinating to see these stones, to touch these stones and to think that they are a part of the biblical narrative.

So, let’s not overlook that what we really have going on here is the first church capital campaign. I know some of you are excited about those kinds of things. Raise your hand if you have ever been a part of a capital campaign. Okay, and did you leave that church because of that? Is that what happened, and you came here? Well, but notice that we are kind of timid and shy about such things. I mean we are building a little pavilion, but it is going to have a playground for the kids, and it is for the children, so you can’t be against that. I know that. Some of you had wanted to contribute to that. I understand that. You can talk to Chris Parker who was up here earlier. He will help you find a way to become involved in some of those kinds of things that are going on here at The Village Chapel.

But just like us, Solomon had to keep all the regular business commitments of Israel going at the same time that he sends all of these workers from his workforce up there into Lebanon to help with the cedars and to go out into Israel and up into Lebanon to get those gigantic stones. And to go through this building project and as well all of the resources that it took financially to do all of the management that it took to do all of it is really when you start to think about it, it is huge. It is massive, this project of building the temple.

Solomon’s contract with Hiram reminds us in our day and time that Christians should not attempt to isolate on everything in this world. We are to be in the world but not of it. We won’t be able to live in this world and still bear witness to Christ by withdrawing from everything in this world. In other words, besides the word Christian being a noun and some people have started to use it as an adjectival modifier. And so, as they withdraw, they try to only listen to Christian music or only drive a Christian car, which I don’t even know what that is, folks. I mean, and only dry their hair with Christian blow dryers and brush their teeth with Christian toothpaste and now you have really lost me. I am bright white. It is righteous. That said, we can, and I would argue that we should collaborate when it is wise to do, and we learned that from Solomon right here.

Notice here in 1 Kings 5, the wisdom of collaboration, how it can sometimes lead to evangelism. And I think it did right here. Notice the huge plurality of workers involved in the building of a temple. The sheer number of participants is mind-blowing. Over 150,000 people are working on this thing, man. That is an amazing workforce. There had to be architects to lay out Solomon’s plans, HR recruitment to go village to village and say, “I need you, you, you, and you.” There had to be managers who managed the everyday work on Monday, on Tuesday, on Wednesday, on Thursday, scheduling experts. “Oh, you? This is your month to go. Then you come back, you get two months off.” That actually sounds like a pretty good deal there, doesn’t it? Yeah, so it is fascinating the number of scheduling people, the lumberjacks, the excavators, the movers, the haulers, the sea and ground transportation professionals, the cooks, and the catering. Who drove that falafel business? That was amazing. Just think of that contract man. Carpenter, stonemasons, precision assembly experts. Just reminds me, think about this even now today, think about this. All kinds of work can become an opportunity that leads to the worship of God in some way. I read this chapter, I just kind of came away going, wow, what is the meaning of this? Why is this even in the Bible? And I started thinking about this, this is amazing because here we are, a room filled with people. I am looking out, I mean part of our diversity in this church is the socioeconomic, vocational, and educational diversity that we have. I love the generational diversity that we have as well here. But I can look out sometimes and one of my favorites is to say I see somebody right now; I spy somebody who is a money manager sitting right next to an out-of-work drummer. Or I might see an out of work money manager sitting next to a very successful guitar player. It is just fascinating to me the diversity that we have.

And I want you to know, I’ll take from chapter 5 here, it takes a lot of different kinds of skills, talents, and people to be about the business of God and to build something that can be seen as worship of God. It reminds us that whatever you do, the Apostle Paul would say in Colossians 3, “Whatever you do, do it heartily as unto the Lord and not unto men.” And so, whatever you do that he says there, man, that broadens it. That is a huge highway. That is really wide. Whether you ride on the back of a trash truck or you are a master gardener or you are a banker, whatever you do, do it heartily as unto the Lord. And that is why we will say around here all the time too: Don’t live to work, you work to live. But also work to worship. See that as part of the equation as well. What kind of work really brings honor to God? Some people think, “Oh pastor, you really … What do you do up there teaching the Bible?” And I am going to suggest to you that what I do is no more holy than what anyone else in this room or watching online does. You can bring glory to God in what you do and so can I. And we need to be about that.

For Christian believers, work is us having the opportunity to simply rearrange some of God’s raw materials. See, none of us are creating ex nihilo. God created ex nihilo out of nothing. God said for you musicians, God said, “I’ll tell you what, let’s make something called A4-40 and that will be … Now I’m going to make C sharp.” And all of a sudden you think, oh man, let me create this big song or whatever. You are using borrowed stuff buddy. God made that and you get to rearrange it and sort of come up with a song, same with language, the same with the crops that people grow, the same with even commerce and the ability to communicate. All of that stuff can be used for the glory of God, the good of our neighbors, and even for the delight that we might find in being creative. Even for the delight that we might find in being productive. And some of you know what it is like to be in a season where you are not productive or you are not creative, and you know that sometimes that kind of drift can lead to despair. Do you recognize that? Why? Because you are created to be like God and God is creative and God is productive.

Well, I want to be a rock star and he doesn’t seem to make me a rock star. Well then be something else. You are not shut down completely because you didn’t get to pick and choose what you get to do. And most of the time, we are looking at somebody else and we are coveting what they got going on. We are thinking, I want to be like that guy, president of that corporation. I want to be driving that car. I want to be playing that kind … Whatever. And it is just because we got it wrong. We are worshiping the thing instead of God himself. And we need to be careful about anything we do. I’ll make the point again, anything we do can be used in the manner that it can be worship.

Good friend, Steve Brown, good friend of the family in “What Was I Thinking?” He says,

“One of the great dangers for Christians and for the world is that we are far, far too religious. We go to religious movies, we read religious books, we associate with religious people, we eat religious cookies, we wear religious underwear that is far too tight. Don’t get me wrong, I am religious too. The problem is the Holy Spirit isn’t.”

Such little … He always likes to shake things up a little bit, doesn’t he? Steve is good that way, but I think he has got a good point here. We can’t just isolate; we can’t just try to do everything and brand it somehow with the adjectival modifier Christian. Christian is a noun. That is the best way to use it. I am a Christian. Why? Because I have taken all that God has given me and given it right back to Him, offered it back to Him in worship, offered it back to Him to honor Him. It is one of the reasons we include prayers for different categories of vocation each week here at The Village Chapel, whether you are a multimillion-dollar businessman or person or you run a small business online, whether you deliver the mail or you deliver babies at a hospital, every good endeavor can become a means of worship. And we pray that every one of us might be able to bring the gifts, talents, and resources entrusted to us by God to prayerfully use those abilities and resources for God’s plans and purposes.

All right, I just have two points. This is the first of them.

• Let’s become more eager to allow whatever we are building to stir within us, a passion to worship God and an increasing compassion to serve our neighbors.

Simple. We can draw that from chapter 5 here. Could we start thinking about whatever you do as Paul says, “Whatever you do, do it heartily” as until when I was in my teenage … I was about 17 maybe, I think I might have been about 18. I was working at Safeway, and I remember I was a cashier. Back then, they had manual, not digital, but manual cash registers. You punch a button, and you like that. And so, I was checking people out and then one of my other duties was sweeping and they gave me a big wide broom and told me to go around through each aisle of the store and sweep. And when I first heard somebody teach on that Colossians Three passage about, “Whatever you do, do it heartily onto the Lord.” I was working there, and it just dawned on me. I could be sweeping to the glory of God. And as a young guy, it just all opened up for me and I didn’t let one single cigarette butt slide off the end of my broom. I started going for all of them for the glory of God. And people thought I was nuts; I think as I was going through the store. “Excuse me, ma’am. Excuse me, ma’am.” And trying to make sure I got them all and didn’t miss one, and if one did happen to slide off underneath, I got down on my knees and got it. But you know what? It made me a better worker. I was much more delighted in my job because I wasn’t just doing it for a paycheck. I was doing it for some glory, and nobody can take that away from you. Do it for the glory of God. Whatever you do, do it for the glory of God. Let’s become more eager to do that. Watch it change our lives.

You need to know,

“The whole of our life belongs to God. It’s part of His calling, [Stott says] both before conversion and outside religion. We must not imagine that God first became interested in us when we were converted or that now He’s interested only in the religious bit of our lives.”

He is interested in all of your life, every category. Did you know that? That could change the way you do what you are doing. Really fascinating.

A.W. Tozer. I love this quote.

“A right conception of God is basic not only to systematic theology, but to practical Christian living as well. It is to worship what the foundation is to the Temple; where it is inadequate, [that is where we don’t have a right conception of God] Or out of plumb, the whole structure will sooner or later collapse.”

And I think that is true for me. That has been my experience. I need to stay focused on God.

The second theme I want to drive home about this before we come to the table is this.

• I think that the work that Solomon, that he wanted to do and this project that he wanted to do this had a major evangelistic impact on Hiram.

Did you notice that? I mean, you could go right past this and not even think about Hiram, but he is a real person. And he is sort of at the pinnacle of all that goes on up there in Tyre in that region in history anyway. His invitation to collaboration results in leading Hiram to taste of worship of Yahweh. Verse 7, look at verse 7 again. “It came about that when Hiram heard the words of Solomon that he rejoiced greatly and said, “Blessed, be Yahweh today.” Wonder what that felt like inside of him. After all of his loyalty and fealty to all of those pagan deities, now to be actually worshiping the living God, the one who is really there, the one that wasn’t made with human hands, that had eyes but couldn’t see, feet but couldn’t walk, but the real living God. What did that feel like to Hiram? I don’t know. I don’t know, but I am stirred to think about it. And today, you and I, we are ambassadors for Jesus Christ. Everything in our life should stir curiosity in others and serve as an implicit invitation for them to join us in the worship of Jesus. And so, I think that is why this is a good second point. Let’s become more eager to extend the invitation of the gospel to the Hirams in our life.

Who are the Hirams in your life? Surely there are some. Surely you haven’t withdrawn into a Christian enclave and the only people you ever talk to are Christians. Surely you have friends or acquaintances or neighbors and they are in your life for a reason. It is fascinating to me to look at the parallel account in 2 Chronicles. I’ll just read it for you. This is Solomon talking to Hiram. Look at how much more theology is recorded here from Solomon to Hiram.

“I’m about to build a house for the name of the Lord, my God, dedicating it to Him, to burn fragrant incense before Him and to set out the showbread continually, to offer burnt offerings morning and evening on Sabbaths, and on new moons and on the appointed feast of the Lord, our God, this being required forever in Israel.”

So, he is really connecting what he is about to do with the God who is there, the God of his fathers, Yahweh. He is even explaining the sort of methods of their worship. “The house which I am about to build will be great for greater is our God than all the gods.” Do you see how bold that is of him to say that to a guy who’s worshiping pagan gods? He is really laying it out. It is courageous faith, but I think it is contagious faith too. “Who is able to build a house for Him for the heavens and the highest heavens can’t contain Him? So, who am I that I should build a house for Him except to just burn a little bit of incense to Him?” There is humility there in his witness, in his testimony. He is not bragging about what he is doing. He is saying, “God is great. God is amazing, awesome, and no house can contain Him. I understand that, Hiram. But we want to build something that will at least honor his name.” That is beautiful.

1,000 years later, Jesus would make this claim. “I say unto you that this place in this place is one greater than the temple.” And He is talking about himself. So, none of this nonsense about Jesus just being one of many, just another religious leader. No, He is actually saying He is greater than the temple. He will also say He is greater than Solomon. He will also say He is greater than Jonah.

I mean the claims that Jesus made are mind-blowing. And what He meant by that is the kind of thing Spurgeon talks about. Temple was a symbol. Jesus is the substance. It was but the shadow, this temple of which He is the reality. The redeemer is greater than the temple because He is a more abiding evidence of divine favor. God forever dwells in Jesus Christ, and this is the eternal sign of His favor to His people. Oh, I wonder, do you know him? Buildings come and go. That temple will be destroyed in 586 BC. It will be rebuilt at 516. Okay, then it will be destroyed again in 70 AD. And right now, the only thing you have got is a little chunk of rock over there that you can walk up against to, it is one of the remaining foundations. There is no great and glorious temple there. That is just a building.

And I think Solomon kind of had that perspective. But again, as we have made the comment, unfortunately, he is going to drift a little from his view of God and from his relationship with God. But understand this, Jesus much greater than the temple. Jesus, (as Tommy said last week, the Prophet, Priest, and King, all three), the ultimate version of all three of us. Jesus, our home, the place where God has come to dwell among us is Jesus.

Your life and my life before others should make non-believers question their unbelief in God. So, we should be having that kind of impact when they see us, when they know who are those crazy people that meet up there in that building up there that has the high glass windows, and it used to be like a convent, and now it doesn’t seem like it is Catholics coming in and out of there. Who are those people? What is that all about? Oh, I hope our faith is both courageous and contagious and it makes other people curious about Jesus. That is what I hope. It is my prayer.

Do you want to know a truth that in the momentous challenges of our modern day will be at once a quest to inspire you, an anchor to hold you fast, a rich fare to nourish you and a relationship you will prize above all others. Listen to Jesus of Nazareth, answer His call.

Amen. Let me pray for us before we get ready to come to the table.

*Lord, thank you that you delight when your children delight in you. And heavenly Father, we honor you. We honor your name, which is all that you stand for, all of who you are. We honor your name. Jesus, we thank you for coming to die on the cross for us, for rising again from the dead to defeat our last and greatest enemy: death itself. Holy Spirit, we bless you, exalt you, praise you for living within us, for baptizing us into the body of Christ, for conforming us into the image of Christ as we walk with you. Pray that you be moving in this room and online, our dear friends and brothers and sisters from around the world that are joining us for worship today. Be with all of us Lord and draw us close to yourself that we might worship you. We realize the purpose of missions is not merely conversions, but it is worship. That you would receive more worship, that people who were designed to worship would worship the right thing. You, our living God, our Lord, and Savior Jesus. In your name we pray, amen. *