Solomon’s Knowledge of God

Today on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. The most determining fact about any man is not what he at any given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives of God to be like. Well, see, that's basically the same thing that Solomon was saying. Our knowledge of God is the shaping, most determining influence on our lives. Welcome back to Summit Life with pastor, author, and apologist J.D. Greer.

As always, I'm your host, Molly Bidevich. You know, popular thought says that there are lots of ways to know and be close to God. And in modern society, claiming to have exclusive access makes you sound prejudiced and narrow-minded. But is knowing God really just like climbing a mountain where all roads lead to the top?

Do we all just have different pieces of the same puzzle? Pastor J.D. answers those questions today as he continues our series called The Man Who Had It All, and our teaching today is called Solomon's Knowledge of God. Let's join pastor J.D.

in 1 Kings chapter 8. I went through a streak a few months ago where I got into listening to famous commencement addresses, graduation addresses from around the country. There's some really great ones out there on YouTube and other things like that. One was from Admiral William McRaven, the U.S. admiral and former Navy Seal, who shared with graduates from the University of Texas 10 different life lessons that he learned as a Navy Seal. The first he said was to make your bed the first thing when you get up every morning. If you do, he said, you will have accomplished the first task of the day, and that will, he said, give you a small sense of pride and it will encourage you to do another task and then another and then another.

And by the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed. I know that some of you mothers feel 100% justified right now in how you're raising your kids, but I thought it was a great speech. Of course, the famous speech given by Steve Jobs at Stanford in 2005 who told graduates there that a simple slogan had shaped his life. He took it from a 1970s magazine called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was like a travel journal in the days before Google. The magazine, he said, ran for a few years and then discontinued.

He loved it. He said, sorry to see it discontinued, but in their final edition, the back cover featured a picture of a beckoning country road early in the morning that was headed off into the mountains and underneath it were the words, stay hungry and stay foolish. This was, he said, their farewell message as they signed off and it became the theme of my life.

Stay hungry, stay foolish. Finally, there was my favorite, Will Ferrells at the University of Southern California in 2017 who said, I would like to say thank you for your warm welcome. I would also like to apologize to all the parents sitting there thinking, Will Ferrell? Why Will Ferrell? I hate him. I hate his movies. He's gross, although he's much better looking in person.

Has he lost weight? I graduated from this college years ago with a degree in sports information, a degree that was so arduous, so prestigious that they discontinued it a few years later. Today, I am also receiving from USC my honorary doctorate. I have been informed that I can now perform minimally invasive surgery at any time and in any place, even if people don't want it. In fact, I'm legally obligated to perform a surgery at the end of today's address or my degree will be revoked. So if you have a sore tooth you want removed, please meet me at the surgery center.

And by surgery center, I mean that windowless van in that parking lot over there. How many of you who graduated from college or high school cannot remember your commencement address or the person who gave it? Just raise your hand, okay? That's really discouraging for a guy who actually makes a fair number of commencement addresses.

I do all that work and all that nerve-wracking thing and you don't even remember it. But anyway, a commencement address is supposed to sum up a philosophy of life. It's supposed to lay out what you believe to be the most important or most essential principles for living. Well, see, in 1 Kings 8, Solomon essentially gives the people of Israel a commencement address, though his has some pretty drastic differences from most commencement addresses that you're going to hear today. Solomon delivers this address in the form of a prayer that he offers at the dedication of the temple that he has just completed. We saw that Solomon, whom God had made to be the wisest man who had ever lived, said this about wisdom. Proverbs 9 verse 10, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and the knowledge of the holy one is the foundation of understanding. The knowledge of God, how I understand God, is ultimately the basis for my understanding. Well, this prayer that you and I are going to look at today is the embodiment of Solomon's knowledge of God. And like he says, that knowledge of God is going to form the foundation of his wisdom because we tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God and we become like that.

The most determining fact about any man is not what he at any given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives of God to be like. Well, see, that's basically the same thing that Solomon was saying. Our knowledge of God is the core.

It is the shaping, most determining influence on our lives. So that's why we're going to take apart what Solomon understood about God. Now, before I get into that, let's talk first for just a couple minutes about the temple that Solomon was dedicating through his prayer. Solomon considered the building of this temple to be his life's greatest achievement. It was a magnificent structure.

It took 150,000 laborers more than eight years to complete it. Most of it, large portions of it, were layered in gold. The book of 1 Kings tells us that Solomon used more than 4,000 tons of gold and 40,000 tons of silver in its construction.

The price of what he used in today's value would be more than $160 trillion. One scholar said that the amount of gold that Solomon used in the temple was about 4% to 5% of all the gold that had ever been mined on earth. And then there were all the precious stones lining the walls, marble, and onyx, and rubies, and emeralds that coated the pillars and the walls.

This thing had some serious bling power. But the most significant aspect of the temple was how it prefigured the Messiah that was to come. You see, God had promised Solomon's father, David, that one of his sons would build a place where the people could connect with God. That was fulfilled first by Solomon through this temple, but it would ultimately be fulfilled by David's later son, his great-great-great-great-grandson, Jesus, who would be the ultimate place that we met with God. There are so many things in this temple that prefigure Jesus.

I do not have time to go through them all. For example, the center of the temple was an altar right outside of the holy place where God dwelt, where sacrifices for sin were made. Well, in order for a sacrifice to be effective, the book of Leviticus explains, you had to have four things present. First, you had to have a sinner who was offering the sacrifice. Then you had to have, number two, the sacrifice. Then you had to have a priest who was mediating the sacrifice.

And then you had to have the presence of God to receive the sacrifice. Well, in Jesus, you've got all four of those things in one. You've got Jesus who became sin for us. He was the sinner.

You've got him as the sacrifice. He is the priest standing between us and God, and he's also God himself. So this whole structure points to Jesus, but in Solomon's day, in 1 Kings 8, Jesus is still about 1,000 years away. And so for now, what the people have is this beautiful structure that symbolizes Jesus. In 1 Kings 8, they bring the Ark of the Covenant into the temple, 1 Kings 8, verse 10, and the cloud filled the temple of the Lord. And the priest could not perform their service because of the cloud, for the glory of the Lord filled his temple.

Now, watch this. Then Solomon said, the Lord said that he would dwell in total darkness. Total darkness means that God is undiscoverable. He is unknowable. He is unfindable. He's just in total darkness.

We can't get to him, but watch this. I have indeed built an exalted temple for you, a place for your dwelling forever. Notice the contrast. This brings up the first component of Solomon's knowledge of God. You've got the fact that God dwells in darkness, which means he's inaccessible. Yet, Solomon says, here's a temple that God has made himself knowable to us. Number one, Solomon knew. Solomon knew about God. This is your first thing that comprised his knowledge of God. Solomon knew that God was a mysterious, yet accessible God. He was a mysterious, yet accessible God. God was incomprehensible in one sense, dwelling in total darkness, but approachable in another through the temple that he had built. Because he is incomprehensible, we should give up any hopes of just figuring out God with our minds.

That's what that means. If we are going to know God, we have to do it through the way and in the place that he has revealed himself. The reason that God dwells in darkness for us, by the way, is because, first of all, because of the limited capacities of our minds, but second of all, because of the twistedness left in our minds due to our sinfulness. If there is one chronic shortfall of the human race, one core sin behind all the other sins, it is that we constantly minimize God and downplay his glory and maximize our capacities. God is not just a slightly bigger, slightly smarter version of you. I know that's kind of what we think about. He's not. We think, well, if God would just explain his ways to me, then I would understand it.

No, you would not. How big must God really be? I mean, he literally exists without beginning or end.

Just thinking about that one thing makes my mind want to explode. He stands outside of a universe at least 12 trillion light years across, having spoken all of that into existence with just a word. The book of Isaiah says that of the 3,000 billion trillion stars that he created, he calls them all by name. I can't remember all the names of the kids or the people in my small group. I go to them like, hey, how's your boy doing? You know, a little junior, how's things going in his life? God looks at each of the 3,000 billion trillion stars and says, oh, yes, that's Alpha Centauri. Oh, and Betelgeuse, Bob.

I don't know what he calls them, but he calls them all by name. And he is so in touch with every aspect of his creation that not a single hair falls from our heads without his knowledge. Just compare that to the capacities of our minds. I am clueless, as are most of you, as to how the majority of the things in my life that I most depend on actually work. My car starts making a noise and I take it to the shop. And I swear, every time they look back at me and say, oh, it's the dingle arm or something like that that I've never heard of, it'll be $1,200. I have no idea if they're telling me the truth or not.

I just pay my money and I leave because I don't know how it works. Is it wise for somebody with capacities as limited as ours to expect to comprehend everything about God or to subject him to the bar of our understanding that we'll just be able to grasp how he exists eternally or how he is a trinity or how all things are working for his good purposes? It just always baffles me when I hear people saying, oh, well, you know, this doesn't make sense about God, therefore God couldn't exist.

I'm like, who do you think you are and who do you think God is? Solomon says very clearly in Ecclesiastes, this is coming from the wisest man who has ever lived. He says in Ecclesiastes, chapter 8, verse 17, nobody can comprehend.

By the way, nobody includes you, okay? Nobody can comprehend God's work under the sun. Despite all their efforts to search it out, nobody, no one can discover its meaning. Even if the wise claim they know it, they're lying because they cannot really comprehend it. There is so much of what God does because of who he is that just remains a mystery to us. It's like John Piper always says, you know, he says at any given moment, God is doing about 10,000 different things in your life and you understand about three of them. You're listening to Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. We hope you're enjoying today's teaching and that it's been an encouragement in your walk with God. And before we continue, I wanted to remind you about a resource that can also help you stay connected to God's word throughout the week. Our daily email devotionals, written by Pastor J.D., offer insightful reflections on the Bible and practical applications for your life.

Each day's devotional corresponds to our current teaching series here on the program so you can stay plugged into the themes and ideas that we explore here even if you miss a day. And best of all, it's completely free. To sign up, simply visit J.D. Greer dot com slash resources, enter your email address, and we'll take care of the rest. Thank you for your financial support that makes this resource and the rest of Summit Life possible. It's because of friends like you that we are able to proclaim the gospel each day to a dying world. Now let's get back to today's teaching with Pastor J.D.

Greer here on Summit Life. He dwells in darkness. He is mysterious. But on the other hand, Solomon said, God has given us a temple where we can meet with him, which leads me to number two. God is a narrowly accessible God.

He is a narrowly accessible God. Look at verse 27. Will God indeed, this God who dwells in darkness, will he live on earth? Even heaven, the highest heaven, could not contain you, God, much less this little temple I have built. But your eyes will watch over this temple night and day toward the place where you said, my name will be there. And you will hear the prayer that your servant prays toward this place.

Follow me here. If God really does dwell in darkness, but he really has revealed himself in a specific place and specific way, then it follows that the only way to really know him is to seek him at the place and in the way that he is designated. Now, contemporary wisdom will tell you the exact opposite. It'll tell you that the more sophisticated you become, the more globally, worldly wise you become, the more you will understand that God is really like a mountain and that whatever way you choose to get to the top is up to you because all the religious roads are headed toward the same place.

That's epitomized. I've told you in a parable I heard from one of my professors in college, you said the way you need to see world religions is basically like three blind men that fall into a pit with an elephant. They fall into a pit. They stand up. One of them grabs a hold of the tusk of the elephant and says, it's a spear. The other one grabs a hold of one of the legs and says, it's a big tree.

The other one grabs a hold of the tail and says, it's a broom. And the moral of the story, my professor explained, is that no one blind man had the full scope of all the elephant, that each of them had to humbly listen to each other one. And then they would get a bigger picture of what the elephant was actually like. And that's what the world religions are is each one sees an aspect. And when we put our minds together, then we'll see more fully who God is. I've got three major problems with that approach to God.

Number one is just a pure logical problem. The one person who sees the whole elephant in that story is the narrator. He understands what the whole elephant looks like, which is how he knows that all the blind men are only seeing a part. In other words, he is claiming for himself the very thing he denies to everybody else. And that's not fair. Number two problem I have is all the world religions are not saying complimentary things about God. For example, some of them will say that when you die, you either go to heaven or hell. Others will say that when you die, you are reincarnated. Some of them will say that when you die, you just dissolve into nothing at all. Even a child can see that you cannot possibly do all those things at once, even if you put a bumper sticker on the back of your car that says coexist. That's not bigotry. It's just simple logic.

The main reason that I got a problem with the God like a mountain approach is who else would you approach that way if you were in trouble? I mean, if you're having a heart attack and you head down to Walmart because you say, I love Walmart. I love their low prices. I love the fact that nobody bothers me when I'm in Walmart.

There's no pesky helpers in the aisles actually trying to help me find whatever I'm looking for. I just love Walmart, right? You might be genuinely sincere in your preferences, but you're going to die because Walmart doesn't carry heart specialists on aisle 13. At least last time I went to Walmart, they didn't carry out, you know, hearts, but you can get a lot of Walmart, right?

Big Mac, an eye exam, a haircut, a tire rotation, a bathing suit you will immediately regret, right? But heart surgery, probably not your best bet. The cardiologist says, I can help you. I can help you, but you get my help if you come to my place where it's got my name on the door and my healing instruments on the inside. God says, I put my name and my power at that place.

If you want my help, you got to seek it there. I was talking to a girl one time in a plane about these very things. She was from Harvard and I just graduated from Campbell. So I could tell she was a little intimidated. So I was trying to make it real simple for her.

But she pulled this out. She's like, well, you know, God's like a mountain and spiritual mountain whatever way you choose to get to the top is up to you, just whatever way you prefer. And I asked her, you know, I said, well, what if the pilot of this airplane approached the runway the same way you do God? She said, what do you mean? I said, well, say he says, I'm an open-minded pilot. So I choose to land this plane whenever and wherever and however I prefer.

And right now I prefer Cameron village in downtown Raleigh. She said, I don't think that analogy is the same. I said it is. And your inability to perceive that is why you couldn't get into Campbell and you had to settle for Harvard.

Now I'm kidding, of course, about the last thing. I didn't say that to her, but if God is real, listen, if God is real, if he's a real person and he's not just a projection of our imaginations, and he's really chosen to place his power and healing in one place, then it follows that if we want to know him, we got to seek him in the place that he has appointed. When the apostles made the claim that salvation was found only in Jesus, they tied it to first of all, Jesus's ability to make the lame walk. And secondly, to his ability to rise from the dead.

And they said, a lame person needs actual healing power to walk, not just sincere feelings. And a dead person needs actual life, not just a sincere desire to be alive, just as Jesus had the power for both of those things. So he alone has the power of salvation. So there is salvation found in nobody else. They said, acts four 12, there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved. If you want to come to God, you got to come through Jesus.

If you want access to God, you got to seek it in the place and the manner and the way that he is designated. And Jesus said, that's through me. Solomon said, you put your name here, so I'll seek you here.

And that made him wise. Now I realized that will make you a fool to the world, but it makes you wise toward God. If you are wise, you'll seek God in the place and the way he's designated.

Let me give one application for you who are already Christians here. The place that God has put his name and his power of his spirit is his church. That means if you're going to experience the blessing of God, you've got to be committed to the church.

You cannot have a casual relationship to the church and rich access to the blessing of God. You got to seek him in the place that he's designated. Number three, Solomon knew about God, that God was a promise keeping God. God was a promise keeping God. Solomon is going to utter a phrase first in verse 15 that he's going to repeat all throughout this prayer. And that phrase is, God has fulfilled his promise by his power. He's going to repeat that same phrase again in verse 20, verse 24, verse 25, verse 26. And then he's going to end his prayer by saying in verse 56, blessed be the Lord.

He's given rest to his people according to all that he has said. Not one, not one of the good promises that God made through his servant, Moses, not one of them has failed. A couple of weeks ago, if you were here, I gave you a hard time because some of you repeat the name of God over and over and over again in your prayer. Thank you, God, for this. And God just want your help, God, and just God, just God, you know, like, stop it.

Right? Well, Solomon actually did that kind of repetition, but with the promises of God in this prayer. You just go read this prayer and you find like every third phrase, he's like, like you said, like you said, like you said, like you said, like you said, like you said. He could not pray anything without tying it back to a promise that God had made and Solomon ordered his life around the assumption that the promises of God were true and that God would fulfill every one of them.

Write this down. Wisdom means aligning your life around the promises of God. Wisdom means aligning your life around the promises of God. It means you live in a way that if the promises of God aren't true, you would be a fool. It's not that when you become a Christian that you just become more moral and a nicer person.

To really follow Jesus means that you begin to live in various areas that if the promise of God is not true, then you are wasting your life. Can you point to areas of your life, not where you're moral and nice, but the areas where you say, if the promise of God is not true, then I'm a fool for living this way. I started thinking this week about a number of promises that I've been trying now for about two decades to build my life around.

Here's one, Hebrews 9, 27. It is appointed unto man once to die and after that the judgment. I often tell you guys, I do not do everything right in the Christian life. I get a lot of things wrong, but I will tell you that just about every single day, I think I could say every single day, I have the thought that I am going to give an account to God and at that point, the only thing that matters in my life is what God thinks about what I've done and how I've lived. That promise shapes my life.

You may not be very smart in life, but simply thinking that way will make you wise. Psalm 90 verse 12, Lord teach me to number my days because then I'll apply my heart to learn wisdom. That's one promise.

Here's the second one that I've built my life on for the last 20 years. Honor the Lord with your wealth, with the first fruits of all your crops. In other words, of everything God gives to you, in your treasures, your money, your talent, your time, everything, give the first and the best of it back to God. Put him first, then your barns will be filled to overflowing and your vats will brim over with new wine.

I've been telling you for 20 years, I've banked my life on that being true. God, you're going to get the first and the best, whether I can afford it or not, because I believe if I honor you, then you'll take care of me. Do you believe in God's goodness? No good thing will he withhold from those who ask. You're listening to a series on the wisdom of Solomon called The Man Who Had It All with Pastor JD Greer and Summit Life.

If you missed any of the previous messages, or if you'd like a copy of the transcripts, you can find them free of charge at jdgreer.com. Today, I want to once again send a special thank you to our gospel partners, our group of generous monthly financial supporters. Gospel partners really are the foundation of this ministry, and without their support, none of the gospel work we do around the world would be possible. To thank them and all of our other supporters each month, we send an exclusive resource that we've created or curated specifically to help them mature in their walk with God, but also to help them grow as disciple-making disciples.

This month, we are excited to offer Goodness in the Middle, an eight-part study through Psalm 23 that expands on the teaching that Pastor JD did a couple of weeks ago. You can get a hold of your copy of this study with your gift of $35 or more. Or better yet, if you've been blessed by these broadcasts, why not consider joining our team of gospel partners who give regularly each month to make this ministry possible? Call us now at 866-335-5220. That's 866-335-5220. Or give online at jdgreer.com. You also don't want to forget to follow Pastor JD on Facebook and Instagram for more updates and encouraging content. I'm Molly Vitovich. Be sure to come back Wednesday as we continue this teaching titled Solomon's Knowledge of God, where we learn what Solomon had to say about the nature of God himself right here on Summit Life with JD Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by JD Greer Ministries.