Building Temples Series

He walked across the dusty stony ground, kicked a rock and bent and drew in the dirt. He looked around at the desolate land scape and down at the city below and wondered if his dream would ever be a reality. Would it really happen, someday would the people of God worship on this ground? Would songs of praise fill the air? Would the word of God be read aloud? Would prayers be uttered and heard?

He had a dream, a dream of a building called a house of God, a dream of a building where his people could worship. A dream of a permanent home for their services. And now as he stood on the empty lot he wondered just how long it would be until the doodling he made in the dirt would actually become a building.

It was later, the dream had taken on a substance and as he stood and watched the men and women exercise their talents and gifts his dream was becoming a reality in front of his very eyes. There were those who had doubted and those who had scoffed but now they could see what before only he could see and the doubters had been silenced. So much had been done, but so much more still had to be finished. He hadn’t realized that the transition from dream to reality would take so much time, sacrifice and so much talent. There were times that he knew that whatever it cost it was worth it, while other times he wondered if it would be worth what it cost.

His days were consumed with building and during the night he tossed and turned with a thousand questions racing through his head. His life revolved around the construction and he began to bore his friends with his obsessive talking of the progress. He stepped through the rubble of construction and listened to the saws and hammers and his minded drifted back to how much simpler this had been as simply a dream.

It was later, much later it seemed like a thousand years later but it couldn’t have been that long and he stood and looked at what had once been a dream. He could hardly take it all in, the size, the splendour of it. Just like he had dreamed, it had come true and was now a reality, he wished his father could be with him to see this accomplishment.

No more would his people worship without a permanent spiritual home, no more would they feel like nomads. God had given him a vision for what could be done and had given him the strength to do it and it was finished. As a matter of fact we are told in 2 Chronicles 7:11 So Solomon finished building the Temple of the Lord, as well as the royal palace. He completed everything he had planned to do.

The story of the building of Solomon’s temple is told in the book of 2 Chronicles which is the 14th book of the bible. Jewish tradition holds that the book was written by the Prophet Ezra and although there is no evidence to prove this there is no evidence to disprove it either. The book was written around 450 BC and the two books of 1 & 2 Chronicles were originally one book, the book of Chronicles. And although much of the information in these books was already provided in 2 Samuel and 2 Kings it is here for a different purpose. Chronicles was written after the Kingdom had been torn apart and the Jews were living in captivity and so the Author was assuring them that God was still in control and still had a plan for the people of Israel. When you begin to read 2 Chronicles it seems a little dry, the history of a people that you feel you have no connection with that happened a long time ago. However one author wrote this “2 Chronicles is to history what the space shuttle is to a hang glider. The “extras” you’ll find featured in its pages offer a higher vantage point”

This morning we are going to look at some thoughts on temple building. Now we are Twenty Five Hundred years apart and several hundred million dollars different in cost. After all Solomon’s temple made Bob Schuler’s crystal cathedral look like a shack. And yet even with all the differences between the temple of Solomon and the building we are proposing for Bedford Community church there must be some common ground. A common thread or two which weaves it’s way through the twin tapestry of God’s house.

1 Chronicles 22:7 “I wanted to build a Temple to honour the name of the Lord my God,” David told him.

1) They both began with a dream David started off with a dream, he could see the temple in his minds eye. He wanted to build a building to be called God’s house. It probably started off innocently enough, a word, or a thought, maybe it wasn’t even David’s original idea or thought, maybe somebody said something in conversation that stuck in David’s mind.