Did you know that the White House was never dedicated? I didn't know that. I had it in my head that there was a whole dedication when John Adams was president. He's the second president of our country, for those of you who are outsiders to all of this. And I had it in my head that there was a whole big event and that Adams issued this prayer at this event that I, I guess, completely imagined, where he talked about honest people ruling in this building in the future. But that didn't happen. There was no dedication at all. John Adams moved in apparently. I just learned this, just look this up. On November 1st, 1800, the building was not finished. They'd been working on it for eight years. George Washington himself had picked the location and set the cornerstone. And now, eight years later, it was time for the presidency to move in there, even though I guess it was a little bit behind the schedule. So it was a pretty uneventful thing. Adams just moved into the parts of the house that were done. And then the next day, November 2nd, 1800, this is the quote that I guess I was picturing. Adams wrote a letter to his wife Abigail, and he said the following uh it's a prayer. I pray heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this house and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof. Now we could, of course, have a debate about the degree to which God has answered that prayer. But what is interesting for the purposes of our conversation is that that was a pretty uneventful dedication, if you can even call it that, and there's no indication of a supernatural answer to Adam's prayer. There's no indication that the fire and cloud of the presence of the Lord filled the White House as he finished writing that letter, and that it is still there to this day, and that if one enters the White House unworthily, the sheer glory of the presence of God in the White House would strike them down. There's nothing like that. I had the good fortune, the blessing, the honor of being invited to the Obama White House. I was not the primary invitee, but I got to go and do a little presentation, and I got to see the behind the scenes stuff, and it was really cool to be there. I still have a little foam cup that the Obama folks gave me that I could drink a beverage out of. It sits over there on my bookshelf as a reminder of the day that I got to do that. And here's something I remember from that day. It wasn't that impressive. It was a pretty modest house. There was wires sticking out and stuff was scuffed up. This is not some sort of elaborate mansion. It really looked like normal people could access this place. It did not look like something that is the seat of power for the world for the last hundred years. And I certainly did not see when I was in there the cloud of the presence of the Lord, nor the fire of the presence of the Lord by night. None of that was present. But in the Old Testament, at the dedication of the temple, the situation was quite different. The physical manifestation of the presence of the Lord is recorded as having shown up in very obvious, very dramatic ways that everybody saw and wrote down. In 1 Kings 8, we get one of two accounts of the dedication of the temple built by Solomon. And this is not like the White House. This is not a subtle dedication where it's like, oh, well, okay, you know, all right, here's some hand gestures or something. There's a couple people here with me. We're calling this dedicated. Oh, that's beautiful. No, no, it was a whole thing. Solomon spent a gajillion dollars dedicating this. There's all kinds of sacrifices and music. It took a very long time. The Ark of the Covenant was there. It was carried into the most holy place. And at that time, during this dedication process, as uh this is 1 Kings 8. Uh the priests then brought the Ark of the Covenant to its place in the inner sanctuary of the temple, the most holy place, and put it beneath the wings of the cherubim. The cherubim spread their wings over the place of the ark and overshadowed the ark and its carrying poles. So it sounds like they're describing miraculous confirmation. I mean, that's how I read that text. The poles were so long that their ends could be seen from the holy place in front of the inner sanctuary, but not from outside the holy place, and they are still there today. I like that little just in the moment detail. There was nothing in the ark except the two stone tablets that Moses had placed in it at Horeb, where the Lord made a covenant with the Israelites after they came out of Egypt. When the priests withdrew from the holy place, the cloud filled the temple of the Lord, and the priests could not perform their service because of the cloud, for the glory of the Lord filled the temple. Then Solomon said, The Lord has said that he would dwell in a dark cloud. I have indeed built a magnificent temple for you, a place for you to dwell forever. Then in both 1 Kings and 2 Chronicles, which paint a picture of the same scene, Solomon gives this dramatic prayer. And then it repeats what is said earlier in 2 Chronicles and back in 1 Kings. The priests could not enter the temple of the Lord because the glory of the Lord filled it. When all the Israelites saw the fire coming down and the glory of the Lord above the temple, they knelt on the pavement with their faces to the ground, and they worshipped and gave thanks to the Lord, saying, He is good, his love endures forever. Again, I cannot stress enough, that is such a different dedication account than the one we get of our White House, which is John Adams moved in with his weird Knickerbocker pants and his real high socks and the little frills around there, and he went in with his little spectacles and he was like, All right, I am in here now. Put my things over there, lads. Here, hand me the inky quill pin. I am going to write a letter to Dear Abigail. Dear Abigail, I pray to heaven that the Lord may bless the occupants of this home and that only wise and just and honorable people may rule here. The end. No fire, no cloud, no nothing. And yet, we get pretty excited about that building and what goes on in there. We tend to think it is very consequential and very important. How much more so would the people who saw the miraculous arrival of God at the dedication of the temple be really excited about the temple and the God who resides among them therein? At this point in the Old Testament, I guess it would no longer be appropriate to say that God was tabernacling among his people. At this point, he's really templing among his people, but in kind of a weird roundabout way. Doesn't it sort of feel like God was a little bit closer and a little bit more accessible when he was tabernacling among them? I'm not criticizing God. I think God's right about everything. I'm very pro-God. I think God laid out the story exactly the way he needed to lay out the story, and the order of events makes infinite sense when you read through the whole Old Testament, but just from an impression point of view, other than in the Garden of Eden, at what point does it feel like God is in closest proximity to his people? Well, I think the tabernacle feels closer than the giant, dramatic, elaborate, beautiful, megalithic temple of Solomon. Well, God's presence in the temple is status quo for centuries after this. When the priests go in to perform their duties, they gotta tie a rope around them. They you can't, because if somebody dies while they're in there doing their duties, you can't go into the Holy of Holies if you're not the one who's supposed to be in there on the very rare occasions where you're supposed to be in there. So you'd have to drag somebody's body out of that place because them's just the rules. The glory of God, the presence of God is so powerful. I've likened it before to a tiger. Everybody likes the tiger, it's so powerful, it's so majestic, but you can't have the tiger without the teeth and the claws and the muscles and the athleticism and the power and the risk that goes along with the tiger. You take those things away, it's not really the tiger anymore. Well, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, is what it says over in Proverbs. And indeed, God, throughout the Old Testament, is very present. He's around, but he's not to be trifled with, in the same way that the tiger, who is beautiful and majestic and glorious, is still to be taken seriously and not to be trifled with. These are the ground rules for centuries, as we followed the story of the kingdom of Israel splitting into two parts. The northern kingdom lasts for a couple hundred more years. They're a mess, so they don't put up a single good king and eventually they get conquered by Assyria in 722 BC. Meanwhile, the little southern kingdom with just two tribes, Judah and Benjamin, just keeps chugging along, chugging along in the south. They have bad kings, but they have a few good kings as well. They get stuff wrong, but every now and then they have a religious revival. Ultimately, though, it's all too little, too late. And in 586 BC, Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians come to town, and calamity of calamities, a calamity that still shapes the world to this day, in the headlines, Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the temple, stone by stone, wrecked the whole thing. So for the attentive reader, that raises a question where did the presence of God go? And the answer to that is recorded between chapters eight and eleven of the book of Ezekiel. Ezekiel was a promising young man who was taken as a hostage by Nebuchadnezzar a few years prior to the time when he destroyed the temple. And Ezekiel should have been a priest, but instead he gets deported and he becomes a prophet. And maybe the most sobering of all Ezekiel's visions is one that he has in chapters 8 through 11, where God shows him his own, the glory of God, leaving the temple in Jerusalem and moving east. Ezekiel 10, verse 18. Then the glory of the Lord departed from over the threshold of the temple and stopped above the cherubim. And then in the ensuing verses, we get the account of how that presence of God goes away. So now in 586 BC, you've got a huge problem for the whole redemptive story, the story of God being present with humankind, because the temple is in ruins, God's presence is not there, God's chosen people are in exile, they're scattered. How is this going to work out? Humanity and the human condition, indeed, all of creation, cries out for the presence of our Maker. It begs for reunification with God. And we've seen these little flashes of it. And it's awesome when we get that. It's awesome and glorious and awe-inspiring and terrifying when we see the presence of our Maker in these little glimpses throughout history, throughout the Old Testament. But now there's a giant question mark in the biblical narrative as we come out of the book of Ezekiel, because we don't know where God is anymore. We have reason to believe his physical presence will be back. But coming out of these visions early on in Ezekiel, we don't know when that's going to happen or what it's going to look like. But what we do know is that in John 1, in this prologue we've been working through, God is present with humankind again. The word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We've seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. Tomorrow we will conclude our weeklong Bible-long run where we've followed the story of the physical presence of God among humankind in the world. And I suspect that once we have this saga of God's presence in the world, when it's there, when it's not, what it looks like, once we have that saga in our hip pocket, John 1 and the stuff about God taking on flesh is gonna hit a whole lot harder. We'll round out that story tomorrow. I'm Matt, this is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.