And please remain standing turning with me in your Bibles to First Kings, Chapter Five.
So continue making our way through this wonderful portion of God's Word. So we consider the wisdom and the following of Solomon, the great First Kings, chapter five. We'll read it in its entirety.
But before we read, please join me in a word of prayer and gracious God and Heavenly Father, how grateful we are for Your Word, which has been given to your people infallibly, without error. We pray that your spirit would be at work in our hearts to take the words of Scripture it's been breathed out by your Holy Spirit, and so imply them to our hearts. We pray that you would enlighten our eyes and our minds, that we might understand what's being heard, but that you would so empower us to believe all that your word calls us to believe and to do, all that your word calls us to do. And so we ask that You would bless the reading, but especially the preaching of the word To this end, that Christ might be magnified in our own lives as a people redeemed by His blood. We ask in Christ's name, Amen, First Kings, chapter five. 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 always loved David.
And Solomon sent word to Hiram, saying, you know that David, my father, cannot build a house for the name of the Lord his God because of the warfare with which his enemy surrounded him, until the Lord put them under the soles of his feet.
But now the Lord my God has given me rest on every side.
There is neither adversary nor misfortune. And so I intend to build a house for the name of the Lord my God, as the Lord said to David, my father, your son, whom I will set on your throne in your place, shall build the house for my name.
Now, therefore, command that the cedars of Lebanon be cut for me.
My servants will join your servants, and I will pay you for your servants, such wages as you set for you. Know that there is no one among us who knows how to cut timber like the Sidonians.
As soon as Hiram heard the words of Solomon, he rejoiced greatly, and he said, Blessed be the Lord this day who has given to David A wise son to be over this great people.
And Hiram sent to Solomon saying, I have heard the message that you have sent to me. I am ready to do all you desire in the matter of cedar and cypress timber. My servant shall bring it down to the sea from Lebanon, and I will make it into rafts to go by sea to the place you direct. And I will have them broken up there, and you shall receive it, and you shall meet my wishes by providing food for my household. So Hiram supplied Solomon with all the timber of cedar and cypress that he desired, while Solomon gave Hiram 20,000 cores of wheat as food for his household and 20,000 cores of beaten oil.
Solomon gave this to Hiram year by year. And the Lord gave Solomon wisdom as he had promised him. And there was peace between Hiram and Solomon, and the two of them made a treaty.
King Solomon drafted labor out of all Israel, and the draft numbered 30,000 men, and he sent them to Lebanon, 10,000 a month in ships. There would be a month in Lebanon and two months at home. Adoniram was in charge of the draft. Solomon also had 70,000 burden bearers and 80,000 stone cutters in the hill country. Besides Solomon, Solomon's 3300 chief officers who were over the work with charge of the people who carried on the work and the king's command they court, they carried out great costly stones in order to lay the foundation of the house with dressed stones, so Solomon's Builders and hirams builders and the men of gabal Did the cutting and prepared the timber and the stone to build the house. This ends the reading of God's word. Please be seated.
Question for you to consider this morning, very simple one, what makes a king or a kingdom truly great? What is it that makes a nation great?
During the week, I teach high school ancient history and other types of history courses, and as we consider the various ancient civilizations that have risen and fallen so often, the accent falls in the history textbooks on art and architecture, you think about the Egyptians.
What's the first thing that comes to mind? It's the pyramids. If we were to turn our attention to.
The Mughal dynasty, you would consider that of the Taj Mahal.
If you're to consider the great Roman Empire, or the later Roman Empire under that of Byzantium, you might consider that of the Hagia Sophia. You look even further in to history, and you consider the Spanish conquest of the New World. You consider the desire and the pursuit of Fortune and glory. You consider of all the gold and the adventures that the conquistadors played, even making it here, down to the Florida coasts, even if we were to consider that of England, probably be thinking of something along the lines of Shakespeare himself. So often when we think of the greatness of civilizations that the accent falls on art and culture, architecture and all the tremendous buildings that perhaps still stand to this day, they are monuments and testaments to human ingenuity.
Well, what we find in our passage here is we're invited, invited to consider this very question here, Solomon's greatness is brought in to purview, something that is highlighted for the opening chapters of First Kings.
And yet Solomon, with all of his ingenuity, with all of his wisdom that he has, for all of his strength and might and all of his glory, we find in this passage. Passage hence, not only of his wisdom, but also the great folly that will lead to the downfall of a nation.
In one sense, this chapter is rather simple. It regards the preparations for the great architectural achievement of the kingdom of Israel, that of the temple the Lord. It's a great feat, and in many ways the central feature of the Scriptures, the dwelling place of God. Here we are given a visible replica on earth of what it looks like, spiritually speaking, for God to inhabit the praises of His people. And here we are also given a foretaste of the very picture that the prophets have. And give that, as the temple is built, the Lord draws in all men and nations to himself.
And yet we see here in the midst of it, a dark cloud, as this passage also anticipates Solomon's treachery when he will thrust the kingdom into darkness.
There's three things I would like us to consider, three movements in this chapter that are told in terms of a downward spiral. First, we'll consider the matter of rest. We'll see that here in verses one to six, and secondly, we'll consider the matter of labor in verses seven to 12, and then finally, the matter of servitude in verses 13 to 18. So notice that downward spiral of rest to labor to slavery itself. The passage here begins with that of eight pagan King Hiram of Tyre the great king of the old Phoenician sea kingdom, a nation that was, as it were, kissing cousins with the ancient Carthaginians, a kingdom that was renowned for their wisdom, their beauty and their trade, especially in matters of wood. And this is not the first time we've seen Hiram of Tyre in the pages of Scripture. If you were to turn your attention back to second Samuel chapter five, for instance, you'll find out that Hiram was one of David's friends, even as David had been crowned king and spent the first seven to 10 years of his life trying to secure the kingdom against his enemies and against his foes. Hiram was one of the few Gentile kings who came to David's aid. I think it reminds us of the great Abrahamic promise. Remember in Genesis where the Lord said to Abraham, I will bless those who bless you. And so we should expect that in the Old Testament, some nations will look favorably upon the kingdom of God, and the people of God, and Hiram is one of those people. Notice this. This is not an instance where Solomon has come to conquer a pagan king and kingdom. Here's an instance of a Gentile King coming freely to bow before the wisdom of Solomon, as we'll see in First Kings. This is not the only kingdom to do so. The Queen of Sheba likewise will come to bow before Solomon's greatness, and now, as this pagan king comes and pays homage to, as it were, the King of kings, Solomon says, now has come the time to build a house for the Lord.
Important question we have.
Ask, of course, is why now you think about in the ancient Near East, how there's always this pattern that we see replicated over and over again, not simply in the Bible, but in the world around them, that they're all there was always this expectation that before a temple could be built for a nation's deity, that nation's enemies must first be destroyed. We see this pattern replicated, for instance, in the book of Exodus.
How many of us at the beginning of a new year start our read through the Bible in a year plan? You're doing pretty good making it through the book of Genesis. You do pretty great making it through Exodus as if you're like me. Images of Charlton Heston are kind of booming in your mind from watching the 10 Commandments every Thanksgiving as a kid with your folks, whether or not you should or shouldn't. I'll let you talk to your pastor about that, but that's certainly what I had done as a kid.
First half Exodus is really great, all the stories of of the plagues and and the locusts and the frogs and the blood, all this violence, as the Kingdom of Egypt is brought to its knees, and the people of God are delivered through flood and flame, that pillar and the cloud. Then you make it Exodus.
Chapter 26 from chapters 26 four, you're left scratching your head. Thing is this how Exodus should end, whereas the first half is all these kind of miraculous stories of great deliverance. Chapters 26 through 40 reads something like an ancient, Near Eastern honey dew Home Depot list, as there are the various instructions for the construction of the tabernacle.
And yet it fits that particular pattern. Particular pattern right. The Gods of Egypt have been destroyed. Now the temple on the go can be erected, and God could come to dwell in the midst of his people. And isn't that how Exodus ends? And yet exodus from Exodus, through Deuteronomy, forwards this idea that even though God dwells in his people, it they are a people on the go. They have no resting place, and God has promised to his people that he would lead them to an everlasting inheritance where they would dwell forever. And as they make it into the land of Canaan, the Lord says, I'm going to establish my tabernacle in a particular place. And now we come, and of course, as we make it to David, for instance, David has to spend his entire life fighting all of Israel's foes, both from without and from within.
And so it's of great significance that Solomon says the time has now come that the temple can be built. Why?
Because he is the man of rest.
He is the man who has achieved rest on every side. He is the man who has defeated his foes.
He is a man who has subjugated the peoples.
The Lord has triumphed over the gods of Cain, and now the time has come for the Lord to enter into His temple. Now is the time for the preparation for the temple to begin. And yet, in the surprising turn of events, notice who is being included in the building of God's house. It is not something that is the unique prerogative of the Israelites. Now, under the leadership of Israel's King, the Gentiles are being welcomed in to the building of the temple the Gentiles, who acknowledge Solomon as the true king, that anointed king, the Messiah, is conscripted to join in these efforts. It's a repeated theme that we see throughout the book of Kings, that God goes to the nations. In fact, it becomes such an embedded picture that Jesus Himself will draw the attention of his hearers to this very future of kings in his very first sermon. You remember when Jesus goes out into the wilderness and he defeats the serpent in the wilderness, and he returns to his hometown and preaches his very first sermon in the power of the Spirit, and He preaches a sermon and and everyone says, oh, that's that's a really great sermon, Jesus, isn't that? Isn't that the carpenter's son, it's really nice. Kind of give him a nice little pat on the back.
How does Jesus respond?
He says, Well, there are many widows in Israel during Elijah's lifetime, but when famine hit, the Lord did not send Elijah to Israel, but to a Gentile sidonian widow, there were a host of lepers in Elijah's day, but the Lord healed not a Jew, but a Syrian.
A central feature we see in the book of the Kings is the inclusion of the Gentiles in the construction of the temple, but also in the Lord going and showing mercy on the Gentiles around them.
It's a central feature to this book. Not only that, it becomes the paradigm for the prophets themselves. I think this is what's so critical about this particular chapter, and for the next four chapters, with all the emphasis on the minutia of the construction of the temple, it becomes the material by which.
Uh, the prophets articulate the consummation of all things.
It's It's articulated through the prism, through the prescription lens of the the temple here itself. Think of what Isaiah himself says in Isaiah chapter two, it will come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains and shall be lifted up above all the hills and all the nations shall flow to it.
And here we see the first fruits of the nations coming to that mountain to see that the temple be constructed, willingly bending the knee to the King of kings to see and offer their tribute and what they can do and service to this great project. Solomon is depicted as the king of the nations here, Hiram of Tyre pays tribute. He offers labor freely, and He blesses the Lord for Solomon's wisdom, He bestows great honor upon Solomon. And yet, we see that not only does Solomon receive honor, Solomon has already amassed a great amount of wealth. Notice what Solomon offers in return for hirams labors.
What does he offer him a blank check. That's what Solomon says, right? So name your price for your labors. Whatever you want, it's yours.
You gotta have a lot of money in the bank to be able to do that and to say it with confidence and bravado. In other words, I think what we have before us is an idyllic Golden Age. The land is at rest. Israel is at peace under Solomon's leadership, the nations are flowing to him, and he's beginning to make preparations, under this golden age, to build a permanent dwelling place for the Lord his God.
And leads us to our second consideration here in verses seven to 12, that of the matter of labor under Solomon's leadership, Solomon commands and Hiram joyfully obeys. This is not to be seen as a cooperation of equals. This is rather a senior partner giving orders to a junior associate. And yet it's not a matter of slavery. NOTICE This that Solomon pays handsomely for hirams laborers, again, he offers that blank check. He is doing. He is treating those men well. He is treating them justly. Think of the language that we had in Jeremiah earlier for the reading of the law for the man who wants to build the Great House, the man who does justice is the man who pays the laborer for his wages. Isn't that what we see in the New Testament? Paul himself says the same thing, citing Jesus in Luke chapter 10, we see it throughout the Old Testament. Leviticus, chapter 19, for instance, you shall not oppress your neighbor, nor shall he rob him. The wages of a hired man are not to remain with you all night until morning.
Deuteronomy, chapter four, you shall give him his wages on his day before the sun sets, for he is a poor man, and sets his heart on it so that he will not cry against you to the Lord and become sin against you. Here, Solomon treats the Gentiles with justice. They come freely, they offer freely, and they are rewarded handsomely. Here they give the best timber in the world. This timber, the cedar that comes from Lebanon. If you read the prophet Ezekiel, the Lord Himself, says that the the cedar of Lebanon is greater than the than the trees of Eden itself. It's how magnificent the timber is in this particular region. It is an idyllic picture.
Almost leads us to our final consideration, that of servitude. I don't know how many of you have ever gone house hunting and gone looking at model homes. Remember when I was pastoring out in Oregon, I'd go and look at these model homes. And for those you, I think everybody here should know what a model home is. You go and you have this kind of walk through of the actual type of Pro, the prototype of the type of home you want built on your own property. You walk in, everything looks pristine, everything looks nice.
Everything is designed to impress that. You could say this is the home that I want, this is the house that I want built here. But let's say you walk into a model home and everything looks right, almost. But you look on the walls and and the paintings are just kind of slightly crooked. There's a little bit of mold in the back corner. There's this kind of stale, stagnant stench that just doesn't sit right. I think that's something of what we see here for all the imagery that's given here in the construction of the temple, even down to the preparations for it.
That gives us the, again, the prescription lens for our understanding of the end of.
Things. Something here just doesn't seem right. There's a foul stench in the air.
Something's rotten in the state of Denmark.
Consider, for instance, in First Kings chapter three, that the king himself has married Pharaoh's daughter, the very enemy of the people of God, something that Israel's King, according to the law of the king in Deuteronomy 17, was not allowed to do make it first Kings. Chapter Four, you have all these horse stables, all these 1000s upon 1000s of horses. And it's a Kingdom that's so rich, so serene, so idyllic, that there are over 40,000 horse stables, even the horses have homes.
And yet again, the law of the king says king should not be acquiring horses from Egypt, which is the very place that Solomon was acquiring those horses from.
And now here in verses 12 and following, we see the matter of a treaty and forced labor. Things that remind us that not all is well in the nation of Israel, two key problems. The first is the matter of the forced labor. You see that here verses 13 to 18, that language there are forced labor here in the ESV is the same language that is used of the Egyptian slave masters and how they treated the Hebrews under 400 years of servitude.
It's a certain incongruity here, isn't there? Whereas Solomon is paying the Gentiles handsomely for their labors in verses seven to 12, he has now conscripted forced labor within Israel to mine the quarries. He was actually treating the Gentiles better than the people under his own reign, conscripted Israelites. Solomon sounds a lot like Pharaoh. In fact, when we make it to chapter 12 or 13 under Rehoboam Solomon's son will find that the nation of Israel felt like this under the bulk of Solomon's reign. As they as they come to Solomon's son saying, your father kept us under his thumb.
We were treated like slaves.
Please release us from such a heavy burden. And again, remember the words of Jeremiah himself, as we heard in the reading of the law earlier, Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness, who makes his neighbor serve him for nothing and does not give him his wages. And yet this is the very thing that Solomon is doing with those within the bounds of the kingdom.
He has conscripted them to forced labor. Well, we could say there's a possible solution to this conundrum. In First Kings chapter nine, we find that it's not the Israelites who were enslaved, but the remaining Canaanites in the land. And think great Solomon is off the hook. And yet it only compounds the problem, doesn't it?
Because Israel was commanded not to enslave the Canaanites who remain in the land, but rather to execute them as a sign of God's judgment against a godless nation. Remember, this is the very reason why the kingdom was stripped from Saul's hands.
Remember the story of Samuel with Agag and the Amalekites, where Samuel had commanded Saul to put all of them to the sword, and Saul had not done that. And Samuel says, For this reason, the kingdom is stripped from your very hands now, Solomon is doing the exact same thing that Saul had done. Yeah, that's not the only problem that we see in Solomon's actions. Perhaps this is a greater problem here in the ISV, it says that Solomon made a treaty with Hiram, the king of Tyre, quite literally the word there is covenant.
Solomon has made a covenant with a pagan king, anything. Okay, so what's the big deal? Well, listen to what Moses says in Exodus. CHAPTER 34 says, Watch yourself that you make no covenant, no treaty, with the inhabitants of the land in which you are going, or it will become a snare in your midst. Otherwise, you might make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, and they would play the harlot with their gods and sacrifice to their gods.
When you read Joshua 13, you find that both Sidon and Lebanon were part of Israel's promised inheritance. Here, Solomon is violating the law of Moses, as he has come to make a covenant with a Gentile King, one which he is told that if he does, it will ensnare him as it binds him to the gods of the other nations and will lead his.
Heart astray.
Solomon compromises. There are cracks in the model home, cracks in the foundation, cracks in the kingdom. And so we see the downward spiral begins, that pattern of rest to labor to servitude and slavery.
Solomon's treaty will find in chapter nine, his treaty with Hiram goes south as Solomon begin to give away cities in the Promised Land to tire as part of their covenant, something that the king of Israel is forbidden from doing, something that is not within his power or prerogative to do. Not only that, Solomon will begin to worship foreign gods, the downward descent begins, and leads us to consider this one particular question that we began with, what is it that makes a king truly great?
Is it found in the great cultural achievements that plaster every great museum, such as the art or architecture of Babylon, of Assyria, of Tyre Sidon, of Britain, France, Rome, the United States. Is that truly what makes a nation great?
Or is it something else again?
Listen to the words of Jeremiah we already heard earlier. Do you think that you were a king because you compete in cedar? Is that what makes a king truly great? In other words, did not your father eat and drink do justice and righteousness? Then it was well with him. He judged the cause of the poor and the needy, and then it was well, it's not this to know me, declares the Lord. Here we find that simple Solomon's kingdom and was great in many ways, but not according to the standards and rigors of God's righteousness. It's not because of its architectural splendor, though Solomon's Temple itself does prove to be a great wonder.
Solomon's Temple was great because it was the place where God dwelt. But what but what makes a nation truly great are the matters of piety and justice.
It reminds us of the church's task.
We need to remember that Solomon's Temple was just the model home. It's just the blueprint, the schematic for something greater that the Lord had in mind in the purposes of redemption. In other words, our task as the people of God is not to try to rebuild a temple in Jerusalem. There's misguided zeal to that, but that is not the trajectory that the Bible has for us, nor is the church's task found in making its own ornate buildings, though there is nothing wrong with that.
I'm not here to say that any church whose building is beautiful is somehow missing the mark. My point is that is not the main point or focus of the task in mission of the church.
Rather, what we see here in the Old Testament is that the temple is a road sign that points us to the final destination. How cruel it would be if you tell your kids that you're taking them to their favorite theme park. Take your pick, whether it be Six Flags, Disney World, universal, whatever it is. And you hop on I 75 you go up the road, and you see one of those road signs that says, you know, Universal Studios, 52 miles away. And you pull next to the road sign and go, here we are.
We've arrived.
Every kid right away would know that that is not the intention of the road sign. We ought not to confuse the road sign for the final destination. The same is true here. The Temple of the Old Testament is a road sign that points to something far greater, and we would do a great injustice to the Scriptures if we were to confuse the two, because the temple that Solomon built is a picture of the church.
It's a picture of Christ, who is, in fact, the word and flesh as the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us, and yet Christ, having died and been raised on high, now constitutes the people of God as His Church, as his body, a temple that is made not of brick and stone, but of flesh and blown flesh and bone. It's the holy habitation of the spirit, that includes the Gentiles, the very thing that the model home in First Kings five and four began to depict a temple that is constructed under the auspices of a king who rules.
In justice and wisdom, who calls us to the beauty of holiness, who calls us to taste and see that he is good, that he is redeemed for himself, a people from every nation, that we too might be invited to partake in the building up of that holy place where God Himself will come to dwell in the midst of his people. Let's pray Our gracious God, Heavenly Father, we are grateful for Your Word. We're grateful for what is given to us this morning, we pray that you would cause us to consider the great beauty of your church, that you've come to dwell in our midst, that you've come to inhabit not simply a building, but a people. And we pray that we would worship you in spirit and in truth. We ask these things in Christ's name. Amen.