Day 172

1 Kings 8:22-9:9, Acts 14:8-28, Proverbs 15:11-20

There are a couple of ways of looking at this dedication.

To start with I considered that there is so much content in the prayer of dedication that we can only really skip over most of it. The fact that there is so much is what makes it stand out. If we were to contrast the prayer with some modern ones, we may find the latter lacking considerably. A standard prayer of dedication today would concentrate on God and the thing being dedicated, the language may be beautiful, but the content does not touch on the places Solomon goes. His prayer of dedication is for the temple and yet he speaks of the life of the people and the way that God relates to the people in so many different ways.

Because the temple is so central to the life of the people, the dedication is not just about bricks and mortar but what goes on around it. It is about matters such as the way that they treat the foreigner, about the times that they sin against the Lord. Solomon is clear that the name of the Lord is in the temple and by putting the temple at the heart of the nation he is putting God at the heart of the nation.

As I dug deeper though I noticed that the prayer of dedication comes before the actual dedication of the temple. Now this might be the prayer before the act of dedication, but Solomon might have been doing something very different. He acknowledges that God is so much bigger than the temple, a building that will never “contain” God, and so he goes wider than that place and out to the wider community. We said in our previous thinking on the temple and churches that it is not a building but people that count, perhaps Solomon had an idea of this as well.

One of the joys of the church in Acts is the very same fact that we have been talking about, that it is not a place but a group of people and in this reading it continues to grow, but not without its challenges along the way.

Whatever goes on in the life of our church let us pray that we always dedicate the people to God, and let us continually dedicate ourselves to his work, no matter what building we are in.