Today’s Reading: 1 Kings 9; 2 Chronicles 8; Psalm 136; Romans 5
Scripture: 2 Chronicles 8:11
11 Solomon brought Pharaoh's daughter up from the City of David to the palace he had built for her, for he said, "My wife must not live in the palace of David king of Israel, because the places the ark of the LORD has entered are holy."
Observation: Solomon has taken Pharaoh's daughter as his wife. (This is apparently more of a political alliance than a romantic one.) But the reason he gives for building a separate palace for her grabbed my attention. She is a gentile, not a Jew, and as a result, she is unclean. And Solomon doesn't want her around David's palace in Jerusalem because the ark has been in an about it. Solomon regards not only the ark as holy but also asserts, "the places the ark of the Lord has entered are holy." So he is unwilling to let Pharaoh's daughter be in those places. But what about Solomon himself? Isn't he holy? He is the anointed king of Israel. Why would he be willing to compromise himself, in this most sacred of relationships, and his body, in the most intimate of acts, in being married to this person that he considers unclean and unworthy? Strange that he thinks the ark is holy but he is not. Holy confusion here.
Application: Many people compartmentalize God in their lives. God gets the following: Sunday morning, a moment before each meal, and a few seconds before going to bed. That time is holy. "The rest of the time is mine," they think. So God stays in his compartment. As long as he stays there, everything is fine. But God cannot be confined in a box. (If we have successfully confined our god to a box, what is in that box is not really God at all.) God is bigger than our boxes, no matter how big we may make them. I assert that God cannot be a part of our lives. We can be a part of God's life. The word that comes to mind in this regard is consecration. It is a word that describes the full and total giving of myself to God. I give my entire life and being to God and I live in him. Had Solomon understood this correctly, seeing himself as holy and consecrated to God, he would not have married Pharaoh's daughter, would not have worshipped idols and other gods, and would have left a legacy of faithfulness that would be a blessing to his descendants, instead of a curse.
Prayer: Lord, I belong to you. All of me. I am consecrated to you. Keep me from anything that violates that.
This I pray in Jesus’ name, Amen.
1 comment:
The word that comes to mind is "compromising." Salomon, for the sake of peace, compromised his beliefs. I am sure that his other pagan wives insisted that he accompanied them in their rituals to their gods, and he eventually ended up following the rituals himself. He might have adopted the mentality of "we all worship the same god anyway," and that caused him to fall. I think we tend to think that if we give God a little of our time, like giving a Dollar to a beggar, that is good enough to compromise with the world the rest of the day.
CM
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