1 Kings 8:27

1 Kings 8:27

I. Every one will recall the scene of Solomon, the mastermind stored with all the learning of the day, dedicating the Temple to God. He was speaking to a nation naturally given to idolatry and to the localisation of worship, to a nation exclusive in their religion and almost incurable in their low, semi-materialistic ideas of God, speaking, too, at the moment of dedicating their most magnificent temple to their national God; and yet he rises far above nay, he cuts clean across all their national prejudices, and in these sublime words reveals that God is infinite, not to be comprehended in temple or shrine. It was a stage in the revelation of God given to the world through Solomon, the great student of His works, a further revelation of the immensity, the inconceivability, of God. And yet Solomon dedicated the Temple to become the centre of the passionate religious fervour of the nation, to be deemed for a thousand years the most sacred spot in all the earth. How shall we regard this? Was it in Solomon a hypocritical condescension to popular superstition, and in the people an unconscious or forced inconsistency, or was it not rather in both a flash of anticipation of the great truth that every form of worship is inadequate and even misleading until we see its inadequacy?

II. We also have to learn this lesson, that all opinions about God, all systems of theology, are provisional, temporary, educational, like the Temple. They are not the essence of truth. It is the deepest conviction, not of philosophers only, but of the pious congregations of our land also, that the harmony, and co-operation, and brotherhood of Christians is the will of God concerning us, and that it is not to be sought for in unity of opinion, and can never be obtained as long as opinion is held to be of primary importance in religion. It is to be sought for in some far deeper unity of faith in Christ and service to Him. In the ideal Christianity which Christ taught opinion is nothing, and purity of life, charity, and the love of God are everything. Let us, each in our own little circles, try to assist in this glorious transformation of Christianity by the steady subordination of opinion to the practical service of Jesus Christ.

J. M. Wilson, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxv., p. 161.

References: 1 Kings 8:27 , 1 Kings 8:28 . A. Watson, Christ's Authority, and Other Sermons, p. 187. 1 Kings 8:29 . E. Paxton Hood, Sermons, p. 1. 1 Kings 8:38 . H. Hayman, Sermons Preached in Rugby School Chapel, p. 193. 1 Kings 8:38-40 . Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxv., No. 1489.