Solomon’s Knowledge of God, Part 2

Today on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. When we walk into the presence of God, we stand on ground that is literally soaked through in the blood of Jesus. And that is really good news for us because like Solomon said, there's nobody who doesn't sin. At some point you're going to come to your senses and Solomon said, when you do there's God standing in a place filled to overflowing with the blood of Jesus ready to forgive and to restore. Welcome to Summit Life with Pastor J.D.

Greer. As always, I'm your host, Molly Vitovich. We're in the middle of a teaching series here on the program called The Man Who Had It All, where we're learning from the successes and failures of one of the wisest men to ever live, King Solomon. And boy, did he have some high highs and some low lows. If you've missed any of the previous messages, you can find them all free of charge at jdgreer.com. But right now we're looking at King Solomon's speech at the dedication of the temple. There's a lot we can learn about God from this passage.

So here's Pastor J.D. with teaching he called Solomon's Knowledge of God. In 1 Kings chapter 8, Solomon essentially gives the people of Israel a commencement address.

Solomon delivers this address in the form of a prayer that he offers at the dedication of the temple that he has just completed. 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. 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. 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 a thousand years away.

And so for now, what the people have is this beautiful structure that symbolizes Jesus. 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. 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. Number two, God is a narrowly accessible God. He's 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. 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.

Write this down. 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. 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 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 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'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'm 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. Here's the third promise I've built my life on. Psalm 84-11, no good thing will he withhold from those whose walk is right with him. He will not withhold any good thing if I am walking with him.

Can I ask you a question? What would your life actually look like if you believe that? What would your life look like if you believe that no good thing would God withhold when you were walking with him? Here's what it's done for me. This may be incredibly bold when I pray because I'll say to God things like, God, I need this good thing in my parenting. I need this good thing in my marriage and you promised you would not withhold good things for me and I need it right now so I'm asking you for it.

I'm asking boldly. Here's the other thing it does for me. When something doesn't turn out the way that I think it should, which happens a lot in my life and yours too, then what it does is it gives me an incredible sense of peace and calm because I know that whatever is happening in my life, it's not because God has started to withhold good things for me because no good thing will he withhold from those who walk with him. It means that whatever I'm going through is better than what I asked to happen and I can just rest in his promise and it gives me an incredible sense of peace.

All right, what would your life look like if you actually believed that promise and built your life around it? Matthew 24 14. This gospel Jesus said of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations and then the end will come. That's a promise of what God is doing in the world and what he's going to finish doing before the end comes. I have ordered my life and done my best to order the affairs of this church around that verse right there. Y'all we pursue world missions like we're crazy, not because we love world travel, not because we got some silly idea about global domination. We pursue world missions because I believe that promise right there is true. And I believe that if you want to be where Jesus is working in the world, you'll be in the kingdoms of the world seeing the gospel of the kingdom come into there because they're going to know Jesus before time is up. When you order your life around God's promises it makes you wise, when you don't it makes you a fool.

Which are you doing? Are you living as if his promises are true or are not true? Number four, Solomon knew that God was a grace extending God.

A grace extending God. You'll see the biggest chunk of this prayer verses 33 through 53 are all about God's willingness to forgive and to restore after we sin. Verse 46, for example, when they sin against you, when they sin against you, for there's nobody who does not sin and you're angry with them and hand them over to the enemy and their captors deport them. By the way, when you sin so bad that God like deports you, we're not talking about, you know, JV level sins. We're not talking about little white lies and I forgot to recycle and that kind of stuff.

I mean we're talking barshan and we're talking major stuff. When they come to their senses and they repent and petition you from their captors land, you will hear in heaven and uphold their cause, forgive their rebellions against you, and you will grant them compassion. This is probably the big difference y'all between Solomon's commencement address and all the commencement speeches you hear in our day, which are honestly a bunch of flattery and meaningless nonsense. Oh, you're all above average. You know, you're unique, special, a snowflake, a skittle, or whatever they, you know, we say.

Nothing can stop you from achieving your dreams except for disease and maybe an untimely death, getting hit by a bus on the way to the parking lot, or bad luck, or maybe the fact that 50 percent of you studies show are going to have a marriage that ends up in divorce and so you're going to fail there. And so let's not talk about any of that right now though. Let's just fill you up with meaningless platitudes that make you feel invincible in the moment. That's a modern day commencement address. Solomon's whole prayer by contrast is built on the understanding that we are desperate sinners who are going to mess things up and the one thing you can count on us for is that we mess stuff up. And so the whole verse, the whole passage, verse 35, when the heavens are shut up and there's no rain because of your sin, when famine or plague comes into the land because of sin, when an enemy besieges you in any of your cities because of sin, when disaster disease come, then when a prayer plea is made by anyone among your people Israel, then hear from heaven and forgive, forgive and then act, forgive and then act.

In fact, there's a very disturbing reality about this prayer that you might overlook. This whole ceremony, this whole commencement, this whole speech was bathed in blood. Verse 5 tells us that before the prayer Solomon and the whole congregation of Israel sacrificed, look at this, sheep and goats and cattle that could not be numbered because there was so many of them. And then the moment Solomon gets done with the prayer, verse 63, Solomon offered a sacrifice of 22,000 cattle and 120,000 sheep and 142,000 more animals.

Do you know how bloody and how messy this whole scene was? The ground that Solomon was standing on when he was making this prayer was literally soaked in blood. That may be gross to you, but it shows you that the entire basis of our relationship with God, the very ground that we stand on with him, is the blood of sacrifices for sin. All this blood pointed to the blood of the ultimate sacrifice, Jesus, who would one day be slain for the forgiveness of our sin.

When we walk into the presence of God, we stand on ground that is literally soaked through in the blood of Jesus. And that is really good news for us because like Solomon said, there's nobody who doesn't sin. There's nobody who doesn't mess up relationships. There's none of us that doesn't suffer the effects of poor decisions or go through a time when they lose their mind and start playing the fool. There's not a one of us that can't look at that and say, why did I do that? Why did I say that? Why did I make those series of decisions?

And at some point you're going to come to your senses. Solomon said, when you do, there's God standing in a place filled to overflowing with the blood of Jesus ready to forgive and to restore. Thanks for joining us today on Summit Life with Pastor J.D.

Greer. We'll get back to our teaching on King Solomon in a moment, but first I want to shine a spotlight on the people who keep these daily broadcasts on the airwaves. It's our incredible gospel partners. Without their generosity, it's not an exaggeration to say that we would not be able to spread the gospel as effectively as we're able to now. And as our way to say thank you to our gospel partners, we are always excited to send them an exclusive premium resource. This month we are sending them an eight-part study through Psalm 23 called Goodness in the Middle. It's an expansion of the teaching from this series that we recently heard on Psalm 23, and it will help you take an even deeper look at just how good God is to us in the middle of life's circumstances. Thinking about joining our team of gospel partners? We'll welcome you with open arms and send you a copy of Goodness in the Middle just to say thanks.

Give us a call at 866-335-5220 or swing by jdgreer.com to sign up today. And so Solomon says, when you pray toward this place, when you pray toward this place, you can rebound from defeat. You can rebound from defeat. You can regain lost blessings.

There we go. Verse 35 and 36, you can request personal healing, verses 37 through to 39. We can regroup for spiritual victory, verses 44 and 45, and we can repent and be restored.

We can come boldly to the throne of grace, the writer of Hebrews says, and we can find help in time of need because we come on the basis of the blood of Jesus which has put our sin behind us. C.S. Lewis was once asked, it was a group of professors from Oxford where Lewis worked, a group of philosophy professors who were in a classroom and they were talking about all the world religions and they were having commonalities between them and they were trying to make the case that they all taught and said the same thing. And so they saw C.S. Lewis walking down the hall and they said, hey you're a Christian, come in here and explain to us what is the distinctive thing? What separates Christianity from these religions?

It's just the same as all the others, isn't it? And the story goes, C.S. Lewis didn't say anything, just walked up to the chalkboard where they'd written all their stuff down, took a piece of chalk and he just wrote over the whole thing, the word grace, G-R-A-C-E, put the chalk down and he walked out. Because the one thing that is different in what Christianity says in every other religion is every other religion says, if you do these things then you will earn God's blessing. And what the gospel says is you didn't earn God's blessing, you forfeited God's blessing and God in his grace gave it back to you through the blood of Jesus Christ. And that means you can come boldly to the throne of grace now and you will find help in time of need and the church, the place of God's name, ought to be characterized by that kind of grace. Y'all one of the things that fires me up most is seeing God do this in the lives of people here. I've told you before that two of our worship services are in prisons and I get pretty regularly letters, some of the sweetest letters I've ever gotten from these C.S.

men and women. One of them recently told me that, he said when I went to prison, he said when I went to prison I knew I'd mess my life up and I knew some things needed to change. So he said I tried Buddhist meditations for a while because I'd always been really angry. He said and for a while they worked to give me a serene feeling when I was doing them but I knew it wasn't really repairing the things in my heart that caused me to be angry. He said everything changed for me when a volunteer team from the summit church came to wait correctional and started to tell me about Jesus.

I was moved by their love toward me and their their excitement just to be around me. He said and I quote, doing things my way had led me to a prison and put me in a deep dark hole of sin and depression but God met me there and redeemed me and set me free. Although I am still in prison I'm free even though I'm surrounded by chaos and guards and barbed wire I have peace and joy. God's house. God's house is a place to rebound from defeat, a place to regain lost blessings verse 35 and 6, to request personal healing, to regroup for spiritual victory, to repent and be restored.

It is can be all of those things because of the blood of Jesus that is the ground on which we stand on which means that when you come to this place I know that you come with a life full of dysfunction and things that are messed up but in this place you should not hear the voice of condemnation because the voice of condemnation was put on Jesus in your place so that all that remains for you is God's promises to heal and to restore and to do in your life the blessing that he has always wanted to do. Number five, Solomon knew. Solomon knew that God is a justice conscious God. He's a justice conscious God. Y'all listen I almost skipped this one but when I walked through the message I walked through the message each Wednesday with our campus pastors and one of them told me he said no you have to keep it in because this is essential for developing a wise perspective on life.

So I'm going to do it but I'm gonna do it real fast. Okay verse 32 Solomon says may you judge your servants condemning the wicked man by bringing what he has done on his own head and providing justice for the righteous by rewarding him according to his righteousness. Here's what that campus pastor I was talking to said he said Solomon seems to recognize that there will be times when you feel like you are deprived of justice and you tried confrontation and you tried to get other people to help you and you went to the person but you just at the end of the day you ended up wronged or maybe you tried the court system and even after going through the court system you still ended up without justice. Solomon said that's going to happen and when that happens you can lay it at God's feet knowing that one day he will restore justice and you can get up with a sense of peace in your heart because when you believe that you could escape the bitterness and the desire for vengeance that will spoil your life.

Miroslav Volf who was a survivor of the oppression and the genocides in Croatia. He said you know when you watch your family your brothers and sisters have their throats slit in front of you he said and you watch that the people that did that are not punished he said the only way to keep from going insane is to know that there is a God who is angry at what is happening and who will one day he promises to restore justice if you don't believe that he says you will sieve with an insatiable desire for vengeance only when you believe that God has the sword in his hand will you be able to lay it down from your own only then he says can you be free from the hatred and the bitterness that arises from the inconsolable desire to avenge your wrong. Solomon knew that God was a justice conscious God and that gave him a wise perspective on life.

Number six last one God is an outward focus God he's an outward focus God look at verse 41 as for the foreigner who doesn't belong to your people Israel he's come from a distant land because of your name he heard about you they will hear of your great name in your mighty hand like the queen of sheba they're going to hear they're going to hear about your outstretched arm and how you move and how you do miracles in the midst of your people and when they come and they pray toward this temple then hear from heaven do whatever the foreigner asks of you so that all the peoples of the earth may know that your name know your name and fear you as do your own people Israel may know that this house that I have built actually does really bear your name at every point in Israel's history God had in mind the outsider God listen to this saved Israel for the purpose of the outsider and this temple was built with the salvation of the outsider of the nations in mind in fact the maddest that we ever see Jesus get in the new testament he goes in and he overturns the tables of the money changers in the temple remember this drives him out with whips that's mad and what he said was my house was supposed to be a house of prayer for all nations but you turned it into a den of thieves now when I heard that preach going up it was always applied to why we shouldn't sell overpriced t-shirts in the lobby but the main thing that what God was saying there was not about selling things in your lobby what he was talking about was here's what had happened those money changers had been set up in the court of the gentiles which was the place that Solomon had constructed so that people like the queen of sheba could come and see what God was doing in the midst of the people and what Jesus said is you took my temple you took the place for my name and you turned it in on yourselves if it was all about you and I am furious at that I will tell you that Jesus gets every bit as furious at a church that turns all of its attention into itself and says this church exists for me and my preferences it's here to meet my spiritual needs and a church that does not grasp that we were saved with the nations in mind and yes I'm talking to a group of you who come every week and you love the sermon and you get your religious fix and you go home and you never volunteer and you never contribute anything you are a consumer of the church and Jesus if he was here would grab a whip and it would not be a pleasant experience because he says I saved you for the purpose of the nations I saved you if you have been saved by great generosity you ought to become a person of great generosity you see we always say that Jesus is like a spiritual cyclone he never pulls you in without also hurling you back out he saves you for the purpose of mission and that'll change how you look at your career it'll change how you look at your money it'll change how you look at your talents it'll change how you look at your time these six truths shape Solomon's knowledge of God and that knowledge formed the foundation of his life that was a knowledge that he expressed in prayer a prayer that God had promised to answer when Solomon finished that prayer God responded by saying this is in second chronicles which is a parallel account of first kings eight um but it's a famous verse and you've probably seen it if my people who are called by my name if they will humble themselves and pray they will seek my face and turn from their wicked ways I will I promise I will hear from heaven and I will forgive their sin and I will heal their lands as Christians we are God's people called by God's name if we pray God will hear and heal us you're listening to Summit Life with Pastor JD Greer Pastor JD and I chatted recently about how good God has been to our ministry so far in 2023 including how Summit Life has expanded to some brand new areas we had a goal for this year of expanding into places like Atlanta Dallas Phoenix Houston San Antonio to be honest with you when these opportunities were put in front of us we did not have the resources to obtain them but we we just sensed in our spirit that this is what God wanted us to do and to go through that door and so we stepped out in faith and you know the good news is is that we have a listening audience you who responded with generosity and they believe in the kind of things they hear here and they want other people to hear them and they were so generous in how they they donated to Summit Life so that we could go into these new cities and we're already hearing great stories great reports of how God is at work there we want to invite you to continue partnering with us by sharing this program or by giving financially so that we can keep offering everything that we do free of charge so go to jdgrier.com and find out how you can be a part of the ministry here at Summit Life. Our gospel partners support the work that we're doing by donating a regular monthly gift of $35 or more to this ministry and we'd be honored if you would consider joining this exclusive team to give call us at 866-335-5220 that's 866-335-5220 or visit us online at jdgrier.com I'm Molly Vidovitch inviting you to join us again Thursday for our next teaching from King Solomon's life called How to Bring a Good Man Down and Back Again. Don't miss Thursday on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.