Daily Bible Reading: 1 Kings 8:22-66 and Ephesians 6

1 Kings 8:22-66 – In the presence of all the people, Solomon stands before the altar and prays. He raises his arms to God and asks that God will keep the covenant He has made. He says this: “But can you, O God, really live on earth? Not even all of heaven is large enough to hold you, so how can this Temple that I have built be large enough?” (8:27-30).

There is in this passage much of the same tension that must have come upon the Jewish followers of Christ when they considered the possibility that God had actually entered into human form.  The early and fundamental understanding that the God we worship is completely above the created world, that “He” is spirit and uncontainable in anything human hands can make—this is challenged by the desire David has to build a house for him, a location for him to dwell in on earth.  It is likewise challenged by the incarnation—but God knows our weakness as human beings; he is not slave to any idea we form of him, no matter how exalted that idea is; he comes to us and is present to us as we require.

           

Solomon asks God to judge “your servants, condemning the guilty by bringing their conduct on their own head, and vindicating the righteous by rewarding them according the their righteousness” (8:32). When your people are defeated by enemies and “turn again to you, confess your name, pray and plead with you in this house, then hear in heaven, forgive the sin of your people Israel, and bring them again to the land that you gave to their ancestors” (8:34). When there is drought, and they turn to you, hear them and forgive, “teach them the good way in which they should walk; and grant rain on your land. . .” (8:36). If there is famine, “whatever plea there is from any individual or from all your people Israel, all knowing the afflictions of their own hearts so that they stretch out their hands toward this house; then hear in heaven your dwelling place, forgive, act, and render to all whose hearts you know—acceding to all their ways, for only you know what is in every human heart—so that they may fear you all the days that they live in the land that you gave to our ancestors” (8:38-40). And when a foreigner comes and prays toward the house, then hear them too “so that all the people of the earth may know your name and hear you. . .” (8:43).

           

“Let your eyes be open to the plea of your servant, and to the plea of your people Israel, listening to them whenever they call to you.  For you have separated them from among all the people of the earth, to be your heritage. . .” (8:52-53).

           

Solomon finishes and turns to bless his people.  He says also, “Blessed be the Lord, who has given rest to his people Israel according to all that he promised; not one word has failed of all his good promises, which he spoke through his servant Moses” (8:56). Therefore, “devote yourselves completely to the Lord our God, walking in his statutes and keeping his commandments, . . .” (8:61). It says 22,000 oxen and 120,000 sheep were offered as sacrifices that day, to dedicate the Temple—they even used an altar in the middle of the court since the bronze altar was too small.  For seven days they hold a celebration. 

Ephesians 6 - Paul continues with words of advice to govern the interrelationships of people in families and extended households.  The tacit approval of slavery here has certainly caused at least as much discomfort among modern Christians as the passages about husbands and wives.  But with slavery everywhere illegal and in total disrepute, we can relegate the issue as Paul’s handling of a situation we no longer have to worry about.  But men and women are still marrying, still wrangling over issues of authority and dignity, so Paul’s words here persist in presenting difficulties. Some who would like to see the words of Paul on wifely submission rejected as of the same cultural and historical vintage as those on slavery.  But I am not so sure.

I think the question of God’s handling of the slavery question continues to be very interesting and challenging.  In this chapter Paul urges slaves to be obedient to their masters and serve them in all sincerity.  He also urges the masters to stop bullying and acting as if they were masters because the underlying reality for masters and slaves as for husbands and wives is that when we are speaking about our behavior as Christians, questions of our worldly status should become irrelevant. The fact is, Paul had to find some way to blend the social realities of his day—the existence of slavery and male dominance in family relations—with the spiritual truths he was trying to make available to people. How was one to be a Christian and a wife or husband or slave?  The solution Paul found was to urge that every social relationship be seen in the light of the new reality of being part of the body of Christ.  How would Christ be a wife?  How would Christ be a husband?  How would Christ be a child or a slave?  He would be these things in precisely the same way that he would be God or Messiah or King—by submitting, by serving, by loving unto death.  The main reality is the fact that Christ has poured himself out for all of us, male and female, slave and free.  Whatever kind of society or culture we have, God does not disdain to bring us his salvation.  Throughout scripture, God makes it known that not all social contrivances are good.  He warns the Israelites against adoption of a monarchical form of government, yet he grants it when it is desired. There are indications in both old and new testaments that God was sensitive to the justice issues involved with cruelty in slavery, yet He nowhere makes culture a matter of relevance to the issue of salvation.  One can be redeemed and be a slave.  One can be redeemed and be a slave-holder.  One can be patriarchal or not be.  These are not salvation issues.  This is not to say that they are matters of no importance to God, but God it would seem allows a great latitude in the social structures we set up for ourselves.  What is important is how love can be made to prevail in any given outward situation.  This is not to say that God is completely indifferent.  I think there are structures which are not “in his will” and these structures are inherently destructive, degenerative of moral development or simply not God’s intention for us, but these things play out in history over the long haul.  The major struggle, as Paul says, is not with human powers, not “with flesh and blood” but “with the principalities, with the powers.”  Directing our attention to the real issues will help us loosen our willful hold on the false enemies and allow God to establish his peace in our lives.

Daily Bible Reading: 1 Kings 8:1-21 and Ephesians 5

1 Kings 8:1-21 – Solomon assembles the elders and heads of tribes for the bringing up of the ark from the city of David (Zion). Countless sheep and oxen were sacrificed to mark the occasion.  The ark was brought into the inner sanctuary under the wings of the cherubim.  In the ark were only the two tablets of stone Moses had placed there at Horeb.  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” (8:11). He recounts the establishment of David’s “house.” The Lord’s response to David’s desire to build this Temple is couched here in more positive terms than in Samuel.  Solomon prays that the Lord may keep the promise to bless the house of David through the generations. 

Ephesians 5 - Paul continues his encouragement to his readers to actually be imitators of God (5:1).   Obscene, silly and vulgar talk is out of place, fornication, impurity, idolatry—all of these things have no place in the lives of believers. “Live as children of light—for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true.” (5: 9) In everything we do it is our Christian duty to “try to understand what is the will of the Lord” (5:10).

“Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ” (5:21). Paul’s advice to wives, husbands, children and slaves.  All of these people owe service to others in the world, according to the world’s dictates.  Paul’s advice goes to the way one’s worldly service (when it exists) should be lived out for believers. Every relationship we have in the world is to be seen in the light of the deep paradigm that is now at the core of our being—Christ’s relationship with God and His Church—the reality to which we are now joined through our faith. Paul urges husbands and wives both to “be subject” to each other in marriage.  For the wife that means respecting her husband and submitting to the authority that people in those days believed was proper for him to have over her. Husbands are to love their wives with the same self-sacrificing love that Christ showed the Church. Such mutual submission should be a source of peace and unity, not a source of contention, pride and rebellion.

Daily Bible Reading: 1 Kings 7 and Ephesians 4

1 Kings 7 – It takes 13 years for Solomon’s palace to be completed. In it there was a Hall of Pillars, a Hall of the Throne and a Hall of Justice.  The daughter of the Pharaoh, one of his wives, has her own house the size of one of these halls.

                 

Huram, the craftsman who helps Solomon with this palace, is son of a widow from the tribe of Naphtali, who married a man of Tyre.  He knew how to work in bronze and was “full of skill, intelligence, and knowledge in working bronze” (7:14) He did the bronze work on Solomon’s house.  Among the things made was a “molten sea” that stood on twelve oxen, 3 facing in each direction and holding 2000 baths (a measure of volume). The text describes in some detail all the bronze-work Huram did for Solomon—stands with lions, oxen, basins, pots, decorative work, etc.

Ephesians 4 - Paul begs us “to lead a life worthy of the calling to which [we] have been called” (4:1). We should bear with each other with humility and gentleness, making an effort to be in unity with each other in the Spirit.  We all have different measures and different gifts—some for prophecy, some for pastoring and teaching. 

If we are rooted and grounded in love, this is what our lives will then look like.  And this is what the Church will look like. We will not just talk about gentleness and love and then excuse ourselves by pleading the prevalence of sin in us and in the world.  We can no longer “plead up sin” and excuse ourselves from the necessity of living transformed lives.  We must bear the fruits of faith in our lives. The old self must be put away and the new, restored man, put on.

The Old Testament quote Paul uses in verse 8 (Psalm 68:18) is confusing because the translation Paul had is not what we now use. The reading refers to a conqueror going up to the heights and receiving men as booty of war. Paul says the one who ascended,  “made captivity itself a captive; he gave gifts to his people.” Like Paul we all have a gift, a service to offer the world as members of His Body. And we must “strive” for unity among believers so that we are true to the calling we have to be of “one Lord, one faith, one baptism.  Within that unity though there will be different strengths and ministries reflected in the body of believers.  Some will be given leadership, some prophesy, some pastoral abilities, some the ability to teach.  But like the different members that make up a body, we all in our different ministries must try to be connected with the head, Christ, who will bring unity and coordination to the body.

No other two specific callings -- the call to be reborn into the Spirit, which Christ has given us, and the call to maintain unity among those who belong to Christ -- have been more neglected by us in the modern world.  We have whole philosophies and systems to defend our disobedience to these callings.  For the first, we “plead up sin” as Fox said shamefully.  We refuse to accept the redemption offered by our Lord and instead build theories of why we cannot do what we are plainly told we should and could do with Christ’s help.  This is a “fallen world” we argue.  We cannot be truly renewed in this life because of original sin.  And I think we allow ourselves to fall into this kind of thinking because of a mistake in our understanding of what the fall was all about. 

When we read the story so as to make ourselves believe that mortality came into the world because of our original parents’ sin, and we see that mortality is still part of the equation, we naturally assume that since the resurrection will only occur at the end of time, we have no present expectation of redemption from the effects of the fall.  But if we accept that mortality was simply part of the design of nature in God’s creation and part of the limitation we have as creation, we are freer to see that the important consequence of the fall was not the coming of mortality per se but the entry into a condition of “spiritual death” that deprived us of our true selves. 

God created us to “be,” to “live” in His image, to be close to Him and intimate with His voice.  Our harmony together and our deepest happiness lies in coming into our true natures, and we have fallen terribly and tragically away from that.  

Christ’s redemption brings us the power to begin again, to be rooted and grounded in love, to be secure in the presence and lordship of God.  Now it is perhaps true that laziness, over-confidence or outright disobedience can remove us from that salvation even after it is experienced by us.  But we are dealing with the dimension of eternity and our nature strives against its own redemption to a certain degree, so we are always moving in and out, some more than others, some less.  But this is different from pleading as a matter of doctrine or principle that we must accept our place outside the garden, outside the Promised Land, outside the Kingdom of Heaven.  Our true place is “in” that place of God’s presence, and it is the whole point of Christ’s coming and redemptive work that we should come in and sup with him in that eternal dimension.

Daily Bible Reading: 1 Kings 6 and Ephesians 3

1 Kings 6 – 480 years after leaving Egypt, 4 years into Solomon’s reign, they start on the Temple. It was 60 by 20 cubits, 30 cubits high [or 90’ by 30’ and 45’ high]. It’s interesting how exact the biblical account is on the dimensions. It is similarly precise when it describes the Ark Noah was told to build [450’ by 75’ by 45’] and the Ark or Covenant Box that was built to contain the “words” or “commandments” of God [45” by 27” by 27”]. The stone used was finished with precision at the quarry, some distance from the site of the Temple.  No hammer or tool of any kind was used on stone at the Temple because of the noise it would create.  There were three stories to it, each one wider than the one beneath.

                 

Then it says, “Now the word of the Lord came to Solomon, ‘Concerning this house that you are building, if you will walk in my statutes, obey my ordinances, and keep all my commandments by walking in them, then I will establish my promise with you, which I made to your father David.  I will dwell among the children of Israel, and will not forsake my people Israel” (6:11-13).

The inner sanctuary is for the Ark of the Covenant to be kept in.  The interior of the inner sanctuary was 30’ by 30’ by 30’, overlaid with gold, “in order that the whole house might be perfect; even the whole altar that belonged to the inner sanctuary he overlaid with gold” (6:21-22).

                 

Inside the sanctuary the cherubim were made of olivewood, each 15’ high and each wing was 7 and ½ feet long.  The wings touched the walls.  The cherubim were also overlaid with gold (6:28). The walls were carved with cherubim, palm trees and open flowers.  In the fourth year, the foundation was done. In the eleventh year, it was all done. 

Ephesians 3 - Paul introduces this and the following chapters of his letter with the phrase, “I, Paul, a prisoner of Christ.”   He describes himself as one claimed by the Lord for a purpose, and the purpose is to bring God’s message of redemption to the Gentiles, a message which eliminates the wall of separation between Jews and Gentiles and which at the same time reconciles both to God.  It is Paul’s task to bring to light the plan of God’s salvation which has been hidden from ages past, “so that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the church to the principalities and authorities in the heavens” (3:10).  Somehow, the church proclaims a plan or a reality, which must be made known to all creation, including the spiritual hierarchies the Jews pictured as populating the heavens.

Paul is preaching about the “inscrutable riches of Christ” (3:8), which is being offered in his teaching as an apostle.  Paul prays here my favorite prayer in the whole New Testament:

“Out of his infinite glory, may he give you the power through his Spirit for your hidden self to grow strong, so that Christ may live in your hearts through faith, and then, planted in love and built on love, you will with all the saints have strength to grasp the breadth and the length, the height and the depth; until, knowing the love of Christ, which is beyond all knowledge, you are filled with the utter fullness of God” (3:16-18, Jerusalem Bible translation – the best, I think). 

We who are delivered from our bondage like the Israelites must go through a desert time, a time of transition and drama, during which we may often be tempted to give up or go back to what seemed comfortable and familiar, even though it was slavery to us.  We must derive power from the presence of God and for us Christians that presence is experienced by allowing Christ to “dwell in our hearts through faith”; this trust in Christ and reliance upon him is a real power in us, not a power to aggrandize us in any human way, but a power to help us become rooted in God’s love. 

Rooted there we will have strength beyond anything we might imagine to comprehend the infinite love of God, which is made known to us and made palpable to us in Christ’s life and continued presence in us.  This power is often neglected by those who try to instruct us in the gospel life.  It is a transforming power that can give us a much greater degree of freedom from the spirit of the age in which we live.  We need not despair over the weakness of our nature and bemoan the fact that we sometimes yearn for the security provided by remaining trapped in the realm of our appetites.  Christians should be continually encouraged to understand the very real power Christ offers them to overcome these temptations and really experience a degree of freedom from the bondage of sin. This is the testimony of Friends and the faith in which ALL of their “testimonies” are rooted. 

Daily Bible Reading: 1 Kings 5 and Ephesians 2

1 Kings 5 – Hiram of Tyre (a great friend of David’s) sent his servants to help Solomon build the temple David had planned for but not built.  Solomon explains to Hiram that David never had the peace he needed to build the Temple; there were endless threats on his borders. But Solomon now has the peace needed to devote himself to the task. They get their timber from Lebanon – cedar and cypress. The king had it made into rafts and sent by sea.  In return, Solomon will provide food to Hiram’s household – wheat and olive oil in large quantities.

Solomon conscripts 30,000 forced laborers in Israel and sent 10,000 to Lebanon in three-month shifts – one months of labor in Lebanon, then two months back at home (5:14).  He also had 75,000 stonecutters in the hill country, and 3,300 supervisors. 

Ephesians 2 - Paul refers to the death that we were in before we “saw” or “knew” Christ, a “spiritual death”  - living according to the dictates of the world, following the desires of our flesh and our impulses.  It is God who raised us, like Christ, from this death and raised us up with him.  This regeneration comes from grace, not from any right we have.

Before Jesus came, the Gentiles “were aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.  “But now, in Christ Jesus, you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ” (2:13).  He is “our peace”; in his flesh, he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, the hostility between us (2:14).  

He has abolished the Law with its commandments and ordinances, in order to create “in himself” one people. “By his death on the cross Christ destroyed their enmity; by means of the cross he united both races into one body and brought them back to God” (2:16). Through Christ we have become co-heirs with the Jews, adopted sons, and the wall of enmity between the chosen and those outside has been torn down.  He is our peace, the one in whom we are reconciled.

This very important passage explains what we often forget, that Christ’s coming did not terminate the relationship the Jews had with God, but simply offered the rest of us a way into the redemption he had been pursuing with them.  In Christ whose life and very being recapitulate and subsumes the redemptive “means” worked out in the history of God’s first people, we are brought into the “household” of redemption.  We are adopted into the household, and what we must do is adopt it as well.  For every adoption to be successful involves not only a “bringing in,” but the adoptee’s reciprocal adoption of the family he is being joined to.

But what does Paul mean when he says the law with its commandments and ordinances is abolished?  This is the problem.  Does he mean that we are no longer bound by the commandment to “serve the Lord alone,” or to “honor our father and mother”?  Surely he does not mean this. 

Does he mean that the Jewish covenant is now superceded? Maybe he meant this.  It is this supercessionism that has gotten us into trouble over the years.  The very idea that the faithful, steady God whose promises are realities more enduring than anything simple “nature” will ever be able to provide, could suddenly change the grounds on which the redemption of Jews is founded has got to be wrong.  What has happened in Christ is that all that the Jews worked out with God, all they came to know about Him and about what it is He wants us human beings to do and be is gathered and embodied in Jesus.  He is the door through with we come into the light and life of God.  But the earlier promises are not abolished.  They are just not our door. Jesus too does not cancel out the law.  He brings it to us with the deeper wisdom that the prophets gave the Jews concerning it—especially Jeremiah who saw that it would go out to the world in a new dispensation, a dispensation that looked to the law Christ would write on our hearts.

The Church is built on the foundation of the prophets and the apostles.  Jesus is the capstone and we are all part of the structure, a “temple sacred in the Lord” (2:21). The Church is described as a structure held together “through him,” which grows “into a temple sacred to the Lord; in him you also are being built together into a dwelling place of God in the Spirit” (2:22).

It is possible, indeed it is the testimony of Paul that even the prophets and the covenant of God to the Jews is established on Christ, as He is understood by Paul and John and all who see in Him the fullness of God’s Light and Word. 

Daily Bible Reading: 1 Kings 3-4 and Ephesians 1

1 Kings 3 – Solomon takes one of the Pharaoh’s daughters in marriage.  Asimov says the 21^st Dynasty in Egypt was in a state of decline. They “ruled only the Nile Delta, while upper Egypt was under the domination of the priests of Ammon, who ruled as virtual monarchs from Thebes” (323). 

People in Israel are still sacrificing “at the high places . . .because no house had yet been built for the name of the Lord” (3:2). The king sacrifices in Gibeon, “the principal high place” (3:4). But one night when he is there, the Lord comes to him in a dream and asks Solomon what he should give him.  He says, “Give your servant. . .an understanding mind to govern your people, able to discern between good and evil; for who can govern this your great people?” (3:9) This pleases the Lord, and because he asked for something worthy, he also gives Solomon what he did not ask for—“riches and honor all [his] life; no other king shall compare with you” (3:13). When he wakes, he goes to Jerusalem before the ark of the lord and offers sacrifice there.

Two prostitutes come before the king to have him decide a case they have: they both recently gave birth to children, but one child died, and now they both claim that the surviving child is hers.  No one else was there—only they know the truth.  Exercising the wisdom he has just been promised, Solomon orders the baby cut in two so that each woman can have half.  When one of the women protests, she is awarded the child because her love for the child gives away her true identity.

1 Kings 4 – Officials of Solomon’s administration: Azariah (son of Zadok) – priest; Elihoreph and Ahijah – secretaries; Jehoshaphat – recorder; Benaiah – commander; Zadok and Abiathar – priests; Azariah (son of Nathan) – over officials; Zabud (son of Nathan) – priest and king’s friend; Ahishar  - in charge of the palace; Adoniram – in charge of forced labor.  Each of 12 officials was responsible for getting food for the king and his household for one month of the year (12 food districts). “Judah and Israel were as numerous as the sand by the sea; they ate and drank and were happy” (4:20). Solomon’s kingdom extends from the Euphrates to the land of the Philistines, to Egypt even.

                 

The requirements of Solomon’s household – food and other provisions. “God gave Solomon very great wisdom, discernment, a breadth of understanding as vast as the sand of the seashore” (4:29). He composed 3000 proverbs, and his songs numbered a thousand and five.  He wrote of trees and animals. He sounds like a lover of nature. And people came from everywhere to hear him. 



Introductory Information to Ephesians: The theme of this letter, written between 61 and 63 AD, is the nature, origin and purpose of the church in its most universal sense.  Having touched in Colossians on the ascendancy of Christ over not only the church on earth but over all the principalities, dominions and powers that co-exist with God in the cosmos, he returns to the theme of how this “pleroma” concept transforms the deepest notion of the church.  It is in the increasingly “mysterious” sense of Christ’s place in the universe that Paul sees the inexhaustibility of God’s love and the glory of His redemptive work in Christ.

Ephesians 1 - The letter introduces its theme more quickly than in most of Paul’s letters – it is the eternal nature of God’s plan.  We believers were chosen in Christ from the beginning, before the foundation of the world. The “we” to whom Paul refers are called blessed because we were chosen “in Christ” to be holy and unblemished, chosen to be adopted “to Himself” and redeemed by his blood. In Christ, God has “made known to us the mystery of his will . . . a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (1:9-10).

What does it mean to be “chosen in him”? That the people who were to find their salvation were somehow joined in Christ’s body even from the beginning of time? The God of this letter is a God whose purposes cannot be thwarted.  What his intentions are, nothing can change or deflect, even all the sin and misunderstanding and darkness that man’s will can throw out at God.  He says too that the gift of the Holy Spirit is but the first installment of our redemption inheritance.  The word “redemption” implies being returned to God as his possession. Paul focuses his mind on the importance of “knowing” or just seeing into the mystery he describes, more than on conforming one’s behavior to a certain set of rules.  The behavior is important—that is amply clear from his words in Colossians 3:5-9 and here again in chapters 4 and 5 of Ephesians—but the root of this transformation in behavior and character is to be found in “the spirit of wisdom” here in 1:17 and 18.

The Church is Christ’s Body (1:23).  Paul asks that we who are part of the body may be given wisdom and knowledge of him through “the eyes of our hearts” (Jerusalem Bible translation) - that knowing him we may have a hope for all the riches of his inheritance.  It is the mighty power of God that raised Christ from the dead and set him at God’s right hand, giving him authority over all things spiritual in heaven and on earth.