Hope From the Word

Guest (Male): God has given us so much and has been so gracious to us. Today we're giving thanks to him for that. Pastor Bill Luebkemann has us consider our motivation as we give back to the Lord.

Bill Luebkemann: When we give him ourselves, we shouldn't be, "Okay, one dollar for you, God, nine for me. One for you, ten for me. One for you, eleven for me." But it seems like we're always adding up what did we give God or are we going to get back? It's popular today in some circles to talk about giving to God a seed. We're going to plant this seed by giving an offering to God in the hopes that we'll get something back. And that's the wrong reason to give to God.

We get a clear picture of Christ in the New Testament. That's probably not news to you. But did you realize there are amazing pictures of Christ in the Old Testament? 2 Chronicles 4 contains one such portrait, and it is incredible to put it mildly. Today we're taking notice of the beauty of the temple and considering the description of the furnishings inside the temple as well. All of this is a picture of Jesus and Heaven. When you see it, you'll be blown away. Here's Pastor Bill Luebkemann with hope from the word.

We are in 2nd Chronicles tonight, picking up in Chapter 4. We were looking at Chapter 2 and 3 last week, looking at Solomon building the temple. We saw the foundation. We saw how the inside was paneled with pine and covered with fine gold. We saw the most holy place, the Holy of Holies as it's called, overlaid on the inside with 600 talents of fine gold with gold nails that weighed 50 shekels each.

We saw the cherubim in the most holy place, very large creatures with a wingspan where two of them side by side, the outside of the wings touched the walls and the inside touched each other. So the wingspan was half the width of the building for each of them, about 15 feet each. These were very imposing statues of angels. We saw the pillars out in front. Now Chapter 4 gets into a little bit about the inside of the temple.

Chapter 4, verse 1: He made a bronze altar 20 cubits long, 20 cubits wide, and 10 cubits high. He made the sea of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring 10 cubits from rim to rim and 5 cubits high. It took a line of 30 cubits to measure around it. Below the rim, figures of bulls encircled it, 10 to a cubit. The bulls were cast in two rows in one piece with the sea.

So the first thing we see here is that this altar was the most imposing thing in the temple. It was 20 by 20 by 10 high. A cubit's about 18 inches. Just add on half again and that's how many feet it was. So when it says it was 20 by 20 by 10 high, that means the altar was roughly 30 feet square and 15 feet high, as high as the ceiling in this room, maybe. We're talking about an altar that most likely had to have steps going up to the top of it.

This was a very imposing, great altar for the worship of a great God. By the way, the word altar goes back into the word related to killing. I think it means a killing place or something along those lines because it was on the altar that the sacrifices were made. Our altar really is the cross of Jesus Christ. I hate it when people refer to the front of the church as an altar because we're not killing anything there.

We're not offering any sacrifice there. The sacrifice was offered on the altar, and the final sacrifice to end all sacrifices was on the cross that Christ was crucified on. You could almost call the cross an altar. I like stage, platform, high spot in the floor, front of the room, or anything along those lines for the front of a church, but really, altar is just not a proper word when you read the Bible and see what an altar was used for.

He made the sea of cast metal. Now the sea was a big giant bathtub that the priests could wash in. I'm not sure if they got in it or if they stood around it and washed themselves off, but I wouldn't be surprised if they got in it. It was that big. It was 10 cubits from rim to rim, so it had a diameter of 15 feet across, roughly from where I'm sitting to the wall on one side of the building.

It was 10 cubits from rim to rim, 5 cubits high, so 7.5 feet high. This also would have had to have steps going up to it. So if you were going to get in it to get washed off, you'd have to climb up those steps somehow to get into it. It took a line of 30 cubits to measure around it. We can see a little bit of geometry in there because the radius of a circle is 2 pi r, and r is half the diameter. It's got a 10 cubit diameter. Half of that is five.

So 2 times pi times that, well, it's pi times the diameter. So it's 10 times pi. Pi is 3.14159. So if you work that math out, the perimeter should be 31 point something cubits. So we're right in line here with what geometry says the circumference of a circle should be. Now to me, that's close enough. It doesn't have decimal places on this number. It doesn't say 30.000 cubits. I'm happy to believe that these numbers here are approximations.

But somebody could argue with this and say, "Oh, there's a case where the Bible's wrong. It should have been 31.4 cubits and it's not. So therefore the Bible's wrong." Well, some have suggested that this is really the inside, that the thickness of it made the inside circumference a little less than the outside circumference. And that certainly could have been the case also. To me, it just doesn't matter.

Below the rim, there's a rim around this sea, and below this rim, there were figures of bulls encircling it, 10 to a cubit. That's 10 bulls every 18 inches. So these are like 2 inches big, very small bulls, kind of like a design of bulls cast with one piece. So they're all made out of bronze, the same piece of bronze that the sea is made out of. These bulls are made out of it. It's all one and the same casting.

But now there's other bulls here in verse 4. The sea stood on 12 bulls. These are different bulls. There's only 12 of them. Three facing north, three facing west, three facing south, and three facing east. All kinds of ideas there, pointing to the different directions, the different directions where the various tribes of Israel were camped out around the tabernacle. Some thought here 12 bulls for the 12 tribes, or 12 bulls for the 12 apostles.

You can get whatever you want out of this, I guess. But there were 12 of them, three facing in each of the three major directions. And they were like the feet of this thing. So this big tub sitting on these feet, which were made in the shape of bulls. The sea rested on top of them and their hindquarters were toward the center. So they were facing outward. It was a handbreadth in thickness and its rim was like the rim of a cup, like a lily blossom.

It held 3,000 baths. So a handbreadth, several inches there, the sea in thickness. The difference of the circumference on the inside or the outside would have been measurable. And it held 3,000 baths. Now I don't know the unit of measure there, but over in Kings, it says 2,000 baths. So there's another source of conflict in the Bible. People like to say, "Oh, it doesn't even agree with itself. It says 2,000 in one place, 3,000 in another place."

All kinds of theories on that also, but Chronicles was written after the Babylonian captivity. And some people feel that the writer of Chronicles was using the Babylonian system of measurement where the bath may have been smaller than the Hebrew system. The book of Kings was written several hundred years earlier. So there's no guarantee here that these are the same unit of measure. And by the way, it says here it held 3,000 baths.

The other figure of 2,000 may have referred to how much water was in it. It may not have been filled up all the way. So a lot of possible explanations there. You don't have to write off God's word as being wholly inaccurate just because we don't understand all the nuances at times. He then made 10 basins for washing and placed five on the south side and five on the north. In them, the things to be used for the burnt offerings were rinsed, but the sea was to be used by the priests for washing.

So these smaller basins, sinks if you will, I guess they didn't have running water, but there were basins along both sides, five on the south side, five on the north side that they used to wash the implements of the temple. The sea was where the priests washed. But when they made an offering, things had to be cleaned. The priests had to be clean. The offering, the utensils that they used had to be clean. And they would wash the utensils in these basins. They would wash themselves in the sea.

He made 10 gold lampstands according to the specifications for them and placed them in the temple, five on the south side and five on the north side. The tabernacle that they had made out in the desert just had one lampstand if I'm not mistaken, but here now there are 10 in the temple here that Solomon is building. He made 10 tables and placed them in the temple, five on the south side and five on the north. He also made 100 gold sprinkling bowls.

Don't know where they were at, but they were placed in various places, I assume. There were 10 tables spread out in the south and north side just like the 10 basins for washing. So it was almost like they had everything they needed there to do the job that they had to do. Verse 9: He made the courtyard of the priests and the large court and the doors for the court and overlaid the doors with bronze. He placed the sea on the south side at the southeast corner.

Now, there was the inner temple and then there was a courtyard around it where the priests could be, but the people were not allowed to be. And then there was the outer courtyard where everybody could be. And that was open to any member of the Jewish community. But the Gentiles, well, I don't think they could even be in the outer court. So we're talking about a large building here. There's a courtyard, an inner court where the priests are, then there's the larger courtyard.

So the doors that it's referring to here may have been doors in the walls that faced to the outside and they were overlaid with bronze. And the sea was on the south side of all that at the southeast corner. He also made the pots and shovels and sprinkling bowls. Those, by the way, I believe some of them were recovered in the time when they returned from captivity. So the chronicler who's writing this, these pots and shovels and sprinkling bowls may have been the only thing left of all this stuff that they were able to recover and use.

So Huram, remember, he's the guy that was sent down by the king of Syria to help Solomon. We saw that last week back in chapter 2, verse 13, when the King Hiram, King of Tyre, said, "I am sending you Huram-Abi, a man of great skill. His mother was from Dan and his father was from Tyre." So his mother was a Jew, his father was a Gentile. He was a guy that was skilled greatly at the making of all kinds of things. He could work with gold and silver, bronze and iron, stone and wood, and with purple, blue, and crimson yarn and fine linen.

He was experienced in all kinds of engraving and could make any design given to him. So he was a master craftsman, if you will. And that's who's been making all this stuff that we've been reading about here. But now he was finished. So Huram finished the work he had undertaken for King Solomon in the temple of God. The two pillars, we read about them last week, the two bowl-shaped capitals on top of the pillars, the two sets of network decorating the two bowl-shaped capitals on top of the pillars.

The 400 pomegranates for the two sets of network, two rows of pomegranates for each network decorating the bowl-shaped capitals on top of the pillars. It almost sounds like the 12 Days of Christmas every time you go forth. It gets a little bit more complicated here. The stands with their basins. So here we have a little clue what these basins were like. They were not on tables. They had their own stands. The sea and the 12 bulls under it, the pots, shovels, meat forks, and all related articles.

All the objects that Huram-Abi made for King Solomon for the temple of the Lord were of polished bronze. Now archaeologists have discovered, they believe, the area where this stuff was made outside of Jerusalem. I think we're going to see some mention to that here in a few minutes. The king had them cast in clay molds in the plain of the Jordan between Succoth and Zarethan. All these things that Solomon made amounted to so much that the weight of the bronze was not determined.

And so for the great God of the universe, the God who created all things, the only God who really is a God, the only wise and true and living God, well, he's going to have the biggest and the greatest and the best of everything and so much of it that it cannot be measured. And as I said before, archaeologists have fairly recently discovered the area where they believe this stuff was cast and made. It's just amazing to me when it says the king had them cast in clay molds.

To make a clay mold and then to be able to pour the hot metal into it so that it would form, just amazing to think how they would do that with the technology of the time. This was like in 960 something B.C., 962 or thereabouts maybe. So we're talking roughly 3,000 years ago. How did they do that? You can wonder, but you can also know why it took so many years to build this. It would go a lot quicker right now.

Watching a construction project now building a building, you see them come in with the bulldozers and zoom, zoom, zoom, they're all before you know it they have the ground all changed around and they're putting the foundation in and it seems like buildings go up awful fast today. But in this time here, to me, it's just amazing to think about how they would have made these clay molds, how they would have made them that big, how they would have got them in different sections somehow hooked together so they didn't leak, so they could then fill them with the hot bronze.

How they would have heated it up and you wonder how many people got burned or scalded in the process of doing these things. Although, as I said last week, there's a Jewish belief, myth, but it might be true, there's a belief that nobody ever got sick or injured or died or anything during the building of this temple project. So who knows? It wouldn't at all be surprising if that was the case. It doesn't clearly say that in here, but it wouldn't be surprising.

And there was so much bronze here that the weight of it was not determined. It doesn't say could not be determined. They just didn't bother. There's so much of it. And you see sometimes today we can be awful proud of what we did for God or what we gave to God. Not that we go around, Jesus said don't let your right hand know what your left hand is doing, not that we go around telling everybody I did this for God or I gave this much to God or that, but we can just be proud ourselves.

And here's, I think, a spirit of real giving where the left hand really truly didn't know what the right hand was doing. Like it was just undetermined. Nobody bothered to add it up. So much was given here that it wasn't possible to be bothered with it. And I just see a picture in there of what our giving to God should be. When we give him ourselves, we shouldn't be, "Okay, one dollar for you, God, nine for me. One for you, ten for me. One for you, eleven for me."

I heard the guy said he gives all his money to God. He throws it all in the air. Whatever God wants he can keep, whatever comes back down he gets to keep for himself. One of these days he's going to throw it all in the air and a wind's going to blow it all away and there's not going to be anything left. So there. But it seems like we're always adding up what did we give God or are we going to get back?

It's popular today in some circles to talk about giving to God a seed. We're going to plant this seed by giving an offering to God in the hopes that we'll get something back. And that's the wrong reason to give to God. I was in a church once, I'm sure I've mentioned this many years ago in a different state far away from here. And they were trying to get the people to give more money. And the preacher said, "Suppose you have, suppose you need a car." And this is, I'm not joking now, I'm not exaggerating. This is what he said.

"Suppose you need a car and this car costs ten grand." I thought, "That's a pretty cheap car." And he said, "Now suppose you only have two grand. What do you have?" And everybody shouts out, "A seed!" And the preacher says, "What do you do with a seed? You plant it!" And he wanted them of course to give the two grand to the church. That was planting their seed so then they could get the ten grand they need for the car.

And I thought, "If he needs two grand for his church, why don't he give me ten grand for the car and he can plant the seed? Why is it always the people preaching this want others to give them the money? That's the planting of the seed so they can get it back. Why don't it work the other way around?" And I think a correct way to give ourselves to God wholly and completely is not to be a miser and not to keep track of it and not to add it up.

"Well, that's my limit. I served my quota there. I read the number of verses I want to read today. I prayed for 16 minutes, that was longer than the 14 minutes I prayed yesterday. I gave God 10.085 percent of my income or something." We should be giving it all to him such that it cannot be measured, such that we are not even going to bother measuring it. And I kind of see that picture in here so that the weight of the bronze was not determined. There was so much of it.

Solomon also made all the furnishings that were in God's temple. The golden altar, the tables on which was the bread of the presence, the lampstands of pure gold with their lamps to burn in front of the inner sanctuary as prescribed, the gold floral work and lamps and tongs. They were solid gold. The pure gold wick trimmers, sprinkling bowls, dishes and censers and the gold doors of the temple. The inner doors to the most holy place and the doors of the main hall.

So Solomon made all these things. I don't think it means he made them personally. I think he was supervising the project and I'm assuming the various workers there made all these things. And I think it's important to see what was made out of pure gold: the lampstands, the lamps, the tongs and the other things here that were made out of pure gold. And we're going to see in a little while that they still had supplies left over.

You remember that David contributed a large amount of gold and bronze and other stuff to the temple of God to be used for the building of these things. And we're going to see here even as much as David gave and then towards the end of David's life he gave even more. And he gave a lot of his personal fortune to the building of the temple as well. And they had so much they not only didn't bother to measure it but they had stuff left over as well, which they put into the treasury to be used in the future.

When all the work Solomon had done for the temple of the Lord was finished, he brought in the things his father David had dedicated: the silver and gold and all the furnishings, and he placed them in the treasuries of God's temple. So there you have it. When it was all finished, he brought in the things his father had, so all the extra stuff was put in the various rooms of the temple, the extra gold, the extra silver, plus as well as all the things that they made for the temple: all the furnishings, all the tools and all the implements.

When the work was done, when the building was done, they brought everything in and set it all up. And how much fun that is to set up a new building. And this is a temple for God. One of my clients is moving into a new building and I've been helping them a lot. It's going to be a real mess moving all the computers and stuff over there because it's a large company, couple hundred people, desks and chairs and whatever.

But they can lay everything out the way they want it. It's brand new, built to their specifications, smells all nice and new and everything, and they can move in and set it up. And that's what they did here. Solomon got to this point where, and we know from over in Kings, this was like a seven year project to build this temple. And what a joy it must have been as it came to a completion here as they could begin to put their stuff in it. Kind of neat, build a new house or if you get married and you get a house and you start to put your stuff in it. Well, here it was the temple of God, the temple of the Lord, and how exciting it was for them to bring in the things that God had told them to make for it as well as all the large amount of extra items that they had, all the extra silver and gold and everything else that they had which could be used in the future.

Guest (Male): You've been listening to Hope From the Word. We're currently in Pastor Bill Luebkemann's study of 2nd Chronicles. If you'd like to hear this message again, you have several options. Visit our website at ccmarlton.org, download the Hope FM app to your smartphone or tablet, or look for us wherever you find podcasts. If you've been thinking about visiting Calvary Chapel of Marlton where Bill serves as pastor, we'd love to have you.

Our service times are on Sunday mornings at 10:00. We also meet midweek on Wednesdays at 7:00 PM. You can also livestream from home when you visit our YouTube channel at Calvary Chapel of Marlton. For more information, go to ccmarlton.org. We hope to see you soon. Before the day is done, we'd like to connect with you. Share a praise report, prayer request, or what you're learning from this series. You can easily email us from our website ccmarlton.org or just call us at 856-983-1662. There's more to come from Bill's study of 2nd Chronicles and we'll have that for you next time on Hope From the Word with Pastor Bill Luebkemann. This program is brought to you by Calvary Chapel of Marlton.