Hope From the Word

Bill Luebkemann: With encouragement to remember what we ought to remember and to forget what we ought to forget, here's Pastor Bill Luebkemann.

We don't remember the things that God tells us to remember. We also do the opposite. We do remember the things that God tells us to forget.

Somebody wronged you and they asked for your forgiveness and you forgive. You know, then you shouldn't be walking around holding that grudge. Yet, that's human nature. It's human nature to hold grudges, and when we don't like somebody or don't like something they did, we just remember that.

On the other hand, the things that we should remember, the goodness of God, the fact that He kept His promises, look, we should remember those things that God promised us. We should write them down even maybe in a journal so we don't forget them. It's so easy to forget those things.

Bill Luebkemann: The Bible records what God has done and what He will do. It's written so we can take part in God's program and lay claim to His promises. That's why Bible study is so important. It's what we're all about here at Hope From The Word, the daily radio outreach of Calvary Chapel of Marlton.

In the Old Testament book of Second Chronicles, Solomon prayed that the temple would be a place where God's people could pray and receive from the Lord. A place to remember the greatness of God. From Second Chronicles chapter six, here's Pastor Bill.

So we're in Second Chronicles chapter six. We've seen in the last couple weeks the building of Solomon's Temple. And at this point it's complete, and you're going to notice that Chronicles doesn't really say too much about building his palace.

You have to look back in Kings for that information. The person who wrote the Chronicles, we call him the Chronicler, for lack of a better name, but he seemed to want to focus on the Temple. And that's what all the focus is on here.

At this point, in the middle of chapter six, Solomon is beginning this prayer of dedication, as it's called in the NIV. We'll call it that for lack of anything better.

The beginning of chapter six, well, going back to chapter five, we saw the ark being brought up to the Temple from the place where it had been stored temporarily in a tent for some 40 years. How would you like being displaced from your place of residence for just temporarily, for just 40 years? That's a long time to be living out in a tent.

We saw at the beginning of chapter six, Solomon giving praise to the Lord, basically making a speech to the assembly of Israel, blessing them, praising the Lord in front of them, telling them about how his father wanted to build this Temple, but the Lord allowed Solomon to do it and explaining to them that the Lord has kept the promise that he made, and now he has succeeded his father.

So, beginning of six, he's talking to the people. Now, for the rest of chapter six, he's talking to God. And this is his prayer of dedication, which begins in 14. We're going to start in verse 12.

Then Solomon stood before the altar of the Lord, in front of the whole assembly of Israel, and spread out his hands. Now, he had made a bronze platform, five cubits long, five cubits wide, and three cubits high, and had placed it in the center of the outer court. He stood on the platform and then knelt down before the whole assembly of Israel and spread out his hands toward Heaven.

I've seen this platform referred to as a throne. I'm not sure if that's really a good way to describe it or not, but it's about seven and a half feet square and about four and a half feet high. Just high enough so that he could get over the people and so that they could see him. And it's made out of bronze.

It has been said that the top of this platform didn't have a chair on it. Of course, it doesn't say that in the Bible. It's been speculated that the only two positions, you know, he could be in if he was up there would be standing or kneeling.

If he was standing, he may have been standing to speak to the people. So, when it says here, he stood before the altar of the Lord in front of the whole assembly of Israel and spread out his hands, he may very well have been standing on top of the platform at that point. And perhaps he was standing up there as he spoke to them in the earlier part of chapter six.

But now he changes his position. He had been standing, and now he changes to one of kneeling before the whole assembly because he's going to pray to God. And he spreads out his hands not towards the people, but towards Heaven. So, he assumes an attitude of prayer here.

I think this says a lot that the people there would know that their leader is praying to God. What an idea that we could use today, instead of our leaders saying there is no God, or whatever God is to you is good enough, or we refuse to use the name of God in public for fear of offending somebody or anything like that.

You don't see Solomon here worried about offending anybody, or worried about which God he's praying to. We're going to see in the minute here that there is only one God. He knows that. And he kneels down in front of God, but also in front of the whole assembly of Israel, and I think there's a good bit of a role model in here.

I think if you read between the lines, you can see Solomon is kind of saying to them, "You all ought to be doing this too," you know. Maybe not just here on this particular day, but every day throughout the year. And we see here that he was sincere in doing it.

He could have stood up there and said, "Look at this great temple that I built. Aren't I the greatest thing?" That's what happened to Herod. When Herod spoke, they said, "It's the voice of a god," you know, not of a man, and Herod died right then before God because he didn't give the glory or the credit to God.

So here we see a guy who does give the glory and the credit to God. He knows where it comes from. He's not taking credit. He does say the temple that I built. So he takes maybe a little bit of credit that he built it, but he's giving all the glory to God. He's really doing the job right, I think, and acting as a good role model and example to his people.

Verse 14, he said, "O Lord, God of Israel, there is no God like you in Heaven or on Earth. You who keep your covenant of love with your servants who continue wholeheartedly in your way. You have kept your promise to your servant David, my father. With your mouth, you have promised, and with your hand, you have fulfilled it as it is today."

So he starts out the prayer by acknowledging who God is. Almost like if you follow the pattern of the Lord's Prayer, "Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name." Here he is in the very beginning, worshiping God and giving God credit for who he is and acknowledging him and putting him first, et cetera, et cetera.

"O Lord," he says, "God of Israel. So, now, there is no God like you in Heaven or on Earth." This is still, I think, an amazing statement for somebody at this time period when so much of the world back then believed in multiple gods, as many, there was a God in every different place.

"If we beat you, then our God is stronger than your God. If we go to fight you in your land and we lose, maybe your God over there is stronger than our God." They believed gods were distributed geographically in different places and they had different functions and served different purposes and different areas of responsibility. Most people in the world, but not the Jews and certainly not Solomon.

He says, "O Lord, God of Israel, there is no God like you in Heaven or on Earth." And I just think this is a profound statement to be written here some 900 years before Christ.

Then he goes on to acknowledge who this God is, just in case anybody's confused about who this God is. I was watching a video last week, and they were interviewing people in the street asking them who is God? And they really funny. There was a couple Christians who knew who God was, but the answers were just hilarious. Sad. Really sad.

They would just, you know, they had different people, different walks of life, expounding on who they thought God was. And one woman was a Unitarian Universalist minister. And she was going on and on and on about God. Then they showed different snippets of different other people. Then they came back, and she was still talking. You know, "And God's around us and in us and through us and everything is God, and we are God, and God is us." You know, then they went on to, then they came back, and she was still talking. It was fabulous the way they did it. So confused.

Here almost 3,000 years ago is a guy who's not confused. See, the good news that Jesus Christ came, well, that was God's plan from the beginning of time. And who God is, well, he hasn't changed. He's been the same God all along.

All she'd have to do is open this up and look at it. There is no God like you in Heaven or on Earth. You who keep your covenant of love with your servants who continue wholeheartedly in your way. God keeps his covenant. He keeps his word. He keeps his promise.

You have kept your promise to your servant David, my father, with your mouth, you have promised, and with your hand, you have fulfilled it as it is today. So here he's acknowledging God as the one who makes the promise and the one who fulfills it.

Therefore, he's also saying, if you read between the lines, that God is able to do what He says He's going to do and that He keeps His word. And that He's good for it, and that we don't have to, it's good for us to pray in accordance with God's word. And he keeps his word. If we pray in accordance with His word and He keeps His word, then we know that our prayers are going to be answered.

If our desire is the same as His desire, then we don't have to worry about our prayer being answered or wonder if it's going to be answered. And he's praying to God and acknowledging this in front of all the people. So he's also reminding them as well, that God is a God whose only, there's only one of Him, and He keeps His word, and He did it already.

I think it's good to remember. I, in the same video, or maybe it was a different video, I saw that the same meeting last week, this guy was saying that how central it is in the Bible that God tells us to remember. And over and over again, remember these things that I've done for you. Teach them to your children.

You know, build a monument here. Lord, why are we building this monument? Well, because in the future, your kids can ask you what this is about, and you can tell them, "Well, this is where we crossed the river." Or this is where we did that. This is where God parted the Red Sea.

All throughout the Old Testament, we are exhorted, and the Jews were exhorted to continue to remind themselves and each other and their kids to remember what God did for them. This guy was saying in this video that I watched last week, too many times today we don't do that. We don't remember the things that God tells us to remember.

He went on to say, and I thought, "Well, that's true." He went on to say something that I thought was really profound. He said, "You know, we also do the opposite. We do remember the things that God tells us to forget."

So, if somebody, you know, somebody wronged you and they asked for your forgiveness and you forgive, you know, then you shouldn't be walking around holding that grudge. "I can't believe what he did to me. I'll never forget him." Yet, that's human nature. It's human nature to hold grudges, and when we don't like somebody or don't like something they did, we just remember that for longer than we should. Maybe we harbor it inside of us and maybe it festers and whatever.

On the other hand, the things that we should remember, the goodness of God, the fact that He kept His promises. Look, if you've been walking with the Lord for more than a day, you should be able to think of some things that He promised to you that He did. And the longer you've been walking with Him, the more you can. We should be able to look back in our own life.

And say, "Look, God, you promised this, and you did it." We believe you for it, and we should remember those things that God promised us. We should write them down, even maybe in a journal, so we don't forget them. It's so easy to forget those things.

I think we see here a model here of how he could be doing it and a reminder that we should be doing it. We should be remembering that God is the one who promises with His mouth and carries out with His hand. And he's done that here, and Solomon's acknowledging that, "You promised you would do this, and here, David's son is on the throne, the temple's been built. We're going to worship you in it."

Now, verse 16. "Now, Lord, God of Israel, keep for your servant David, my father, the promises you made to him when you said, 'You shall never fail to have a man to sit before me on the throne of Israel, if only your sons are careful in all they do to walk before me according to my law, as you have done.' And now, O Lord, God of Israel, let your word that you promised your servant David come true."

Here he now shifts from the past to the future. And on the one hand, he's saying, "Thank you for keeping your promise, for fulfilling your promise, for doing the things that you said you would do. Thank you for doing that." And now, turning around looking towards the future, he's praying that God would continue to do that.

Now, we call that praying in accordance with God's word. When God promises something and you pray for the thing that God promised, well, you just can't go wrong there because you're praying in accordance with what God had said. And he said, "Keep for your servant David, my father, the promises you made to him when you said, 'You shall never fail.'" Look, so he acknowledges the fact that David is alive still, even though he's not on the Earth. That he's alive somewhere. Because otherwise, you can't really keep promises for somebody who's dead.

He said, "Keep for your servant David, my father, these promises, you'll never fail to have someone sit before me. Keep the promise." Now, unfortunately, later in his life, Solomon got away from the Lord and started worshipping idols. And God also kept his promise, the other side of his promise, when he said, "If you don't follow my ways, then these other things are going to happen." So God keeps his promise either way. "If you do this, this is going to happen. If you do that, that's going to happen."

So either way, God's promise has been kept. It's all according to, you know, what you did in walking in His ways. And he's praying and asking God that he would continue to keep the promises true. "And now, O Lord, God of Israel, let your word that you promised your servant David come true. Let it continue to come true."

Thanking God for the things that happened in the past, praying and asking God to continue to work in your life in the future in accordance with the things that you know that he's promised for you. Maybe you're here tonight and you're wondering, well, you know, what does God want me to do? And, you know, none of us had God appear to us in a dream and give us wisdom like Solomon had.

We haven't built a temple, and none of us are king of the land or anything like that, but God is still working in our life in accordance with the promises that he's given us, of which the whole Bible is filled with them. We couldn't, we couldn't cover them all in a day or a week or a month. But we can look forward to knowing that he will keep all of those promises for us as we continue to walk with him.

Verse 18. "But will God really dwell on Earth with men? The heavens, even the highest heavens, cannot contain you. How much less this temple I have built." Look, here again is something else that's amazing because all the heathens were building temples and they built their gods and then they put their gods in their temples, and the temple could contain the god.

But this guy knows that God can't fit in this temple. He can't fit on the Earth. He can't even fit in the whole universe. God created the universe, and He is bigger than it is. He says, "The heavens, even the highest heavens, cannot contain you." Now, look, Solomon may not have known how many light years wide and deep and tall the universe is, and maybe we don't either.

Solomon may not have known the exact dimensions. He may have looked up at the sky and thought the stars were not that far away. They were really General Electric light bulbs screwed into some kind of thing that was going around the Earth. I don't know what he thought about it, but what he said here is true.

As we look at modern science today and we realize how big the universe really is, how far and wide it is, we still know today that God is outside of that. Even unsaved scientists look at the universe and acknowledge it had to have a beginning, and therefore it had to have a beginner. It's hard to find an unsaved scientist that doesn't acknowledge that something created the universe.

Most of them are smart enough to see that now that it's been created. It had, it was created from nothing. And at the time it was created, time itself was created. They may not all admit that, but an amazing number of scientists are on board with the idea. Therefore, God has to be bigger than all of it, and it's amazing what Solomon says.

Look, "Will you really live on Earth? You can't fit on Earth. You can't even fit in the universe. And if you can't fit on Earth or in the universe, how are you going to fit in the temple that I built?" Hardly bigger than this church we're in now. Maybe even a little smaller than this church.

"Yet, give attention to your servant's prayer and his plea for mercy, O Lord, my God. Hear the cry and the prayer that your servant is praying in your presence. May your eyes be open toward this temple day and night, this place of which you said you would put your name there. May you hear the prayer your servant prays toward this place. Hear the supplications of your servant and of your people Israel, when they pray toward this place. Hear from Heaven, your dwelling place, and when you hear, forgive."

Now, this is, this just continues to give more and more amazing to me. So we know God won't fit in the temple, and we know He won't fit on the Earth or even in the whole universe. Yet, Solomon here is bold enough to ask the Lord, "Pay attention to my prayer and to my plea for mercy."

I want to suggest to you, the reason he's bold enough to say that is he knows that God will answer that prayer. Because he knows God in some way. "Hear the cry and the prayer that your servant is praying in your presence. Listen to my prayer," he says. "And may you be open to all the prayers that come from this place."

"This place where you said you would put your name there. May you hear, hear the prayers of your servant prays toward this place, and hear the supplications of your servant and of your people Israel, when they pray toward this place." Now, you know, hundreds of years later, in the book of Daniel, we see Daniel prayed three times a day. What did he do? He faced towards the temple.

He wasn't in Jerusalem or even in Israel, right? But he was in Babylon, but he was facing towards the temple when he prayed. And not that that's some magic formula that they had to do it that way. Not that if they looked, prayed a different way, or their compass wasn't working, or their GPS was down. Solomon had a great GPS, but the problem was he couldn't find a place to buy the AA batteries.

And so, look, if they were looking the wrong way, it wasn't like God was going to not answer them. But by facing the temple, in some way they acknowledged who they were praying to, and in some way they're, they're putting their faith and trust in God. And he's saying here, "Hear the, hear the prayers of all of Israel when people pray toward this place. Hear from Heaven." So he knows where God is again. He doesn't live in some temple made with human hands.

"Your dwelling place." "I know you live in Heaven. It's bigger than the universe. It's outside of our sphere of understanding. But here, and when you hear, forgive." Notice he doesn't pray, you know, "Give us everything our little hearts would lust after." Everything we read about in that magazine, lust for electronics. He's praying that God would forgive.

This is, you know, so many people today are praying for the wrong thing. Especially unsaved folks. You see unsaved folks praying for this, that, or the other thing. And if they don't get it, they figure, "Well, there's no God," because their prayer didn't get answered. Well, the first thing you need to be praying for is forgiveness.

I remember a few years ago, we had a seminar here on a Saturday night, I think. Maybe it was all day Saturday, I forget. It was a thing for families. We had a guest speaker come in talking about families and parenting. It was a thing on parenting, raising your kids and whatever. And he asked, "How many people had never sinned?" Like seven people raised their hands.

It was an outreach to the community, of course. We were like, "Well, those people don't know anything. They never sinned." But there are folks that are confused about that. They don't realize that everybody has sinned. "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God."

The penalty for sin is death, but Christ paid the penalty so that we can live because of what He did. And I think it's interesting here what Solomon is praying for. He's praying for forgiveness. He's not praying for, "Give me a bigger kingdom, you know. It's nice to have all of Israel, but I want to rule a few other kingdoms also. And I need a bigger house, and a nicer car and more food or anything." He's praying first and foremost for forgiveness.

Bill Luebkemann: Forgiveness first, that is our greatest need. And God is able to meet that need because of Jesus. What about the wrong that was done? How is that dealt with? Pastor Bill Luebkemann returns momentarily to address that issue, so stay with us for more Hope From The Word.

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Bill Luebkemann: With more on Solomon's prayer, here's Pastor Bill. "When a man wrongs his neighbor and is required to take an oath, and he comes and swears the oath before your altar in this temple. Then hear from Heaven and act. Judge between your servants, repaying the guilty by bringing down on his own head what he has done. Declare the innocent not guilty and so establish his innocence."

Look, sometimes something happened between two people and it couldn't be proved who did it. Maybe there's an accusation, and you only had two people, the accuser and the accused. And there's no witnesses. So nobody could testify, you know, "He hurt me, beat me up, kicked me, stole my donkey," or whatever. My iPod, cell phone, whatever. And so there's a dispute between two people, and neither one has a witness.

Well, it became practice for them to go to the temple, and in front of the temple, the accused would swear an oath that he was innocent. And there was, you know, and if he would swear this oath that, you know, "If I'm innocent, and because I'm innocent, you know, I want these good things to happen to me. But if I'm not, if I'm not innocent, then," you know, he would call down curses on himself, so to speak.

And then the idea was, well, you'd watch the guy or the gal the rest of their life, the next few weeks or years or whatever. If they got sick and died or something or, you know, all their animals got the flu or something, then you'd know that they were really guilty. And if they were, if they were successful in what they did, then you'd know that, well, they really were innocent.

And he's asking God here, "When a man wrongs his neighbor and has to take this oath and swears it out before you, then hear it and act accordingly."

Bill Luebkemann: What a blessing to have the Lord, the righteous Judge to determine the case between us and those that do us wrong. You can look forward to hearing the rest of this message next time on Hope From The Word as Bill Luebkemann continues through Second Chronicles.