Revisiting Solomon's Temple

I have come back around to the Bible Recap, day 162: 1 Kings 5-6 and 2 Chronicles 2-3. These chapters detail the building of Solomon’s Temple, a house for the Name of God. A couple of details caught my eye the first time, but I didn’t spend much time thinking about them. This time through I tried to meditate for a while on each of them:

When the house was built, it was with stone prepared at the quarry, so that neither hammer nor axe nor any tool of iron was heard in the house while it was being built.
— 1 Kings 6:7 (ESV)

and

The cedar within the house was carved in the form of gourds and open flowers. All was cedar; no stone was seen.
— 1 Kings 6:18 (ESV)

and

The inner sanctuary was twenty cubits [30 feet] long, twenty cubits wide, and twenty cubits high, and he overlaid it with pure gold. He also overlaid an altar of cedar. And Solomon overlaid the inside of the house with pure gold, and he drew chains across, in front of the inner sanctuary, and overlaid it with gold. And he overlaid the whole house with gold, until all the house was finished. Also the whole altar that belonged to the inner sanctuary he overlaid with gold.
— 1 Kings 6:20-22 (ESV)

It goes on to say that the statues of cherubim set to guard over the altar and the Ark were also overlaid with gold, and their wings stretched across the entire inner chamber.

I spent some time thinking about all of this, and trying to figure out what it means. The chamber is a perfect cube, which might hint at the Trinity: one Being, 3 dimensions, all equal. But it was the care in construction that got my attention. Forming the stones of the foundation away from the site, for the purpose of keeping the noise out of the house of God. I knew that I had read something similar elsewhere, so I went searching and found this passage in Deuteronomy, where God instructs Moses what to do when they cross the Jordan:

“And there you shall build an altar to the LORD your God, an altar of stones. You shall wield no iron tool on them; you shall build an altar to the LORD your God of uncut stones. And you shall offer burnt offerings on it to the LORD your God, and you shall sacrifice peace offerings and shall eat there, and you shall rejoice before the LORD your God. And you shall write on the stones all the words of this law very plainly.”
— Deuteronomy 27:5-8 (ESV)

This is later fulfilled in Joshua 8:31. I’m no Bible scholar, but this is what I see: God provides the materials for the altar, and in this command there is an implied promise that they will find stones that will work for the altar without modification. God provides materials, we supply labor, and the result glorifies God.

Going back to the Temple, clearly it’s difficult or impossible to build any structure this grand of completely unworked stone. Solomon has all of the working of the stone done elsewhere to keep the noise of iron tools out of the house of God. What does that mean? Again, I’m not a scholar, but I’ve swung a pickaxe and a sledgehammer a time or two, and the sound of iron striking stone hurts the ears. It’s a harsh noise that jars the consciousness. Maybe what’s intended here is that God’s house is a place of peace and tranquility, and has always been so, even during its construction.

Then Solomon has the stone overlaid with cedar, which to most people is a pleasant-smelling wood, and it’s often used in closets and chests to keep insects and mold away from clothes. No stone can be seen from inside the Temple. Does that mean the places where insects might find homes cannot be seen, and that the insects themselves are barred from entry? Or is it something about the concealed foundations of the structure, that the stones that hold it up are there but unseen? I’m leaning toward the latter, mostly because it fits with my later thoughts.

Over the wood is gold, in some places specified as pure gold. I don’t know the capabilities of Iron Age metallurgy with regard to gold, so I’m not sure what distinction if any there is between gold and pure gold by their standards. But the intent is clearly that every surface in the inner sanctum is covered in gold. I’ve seen some visualizations of the temple, and the inner sanctum is both breathtaking and blinding in its brilliance. It must have been a sight to behold.

I started thinking about the Temple as a metaphor for my own relationship with God. I spend a lot of my time thinking in metaphors, because it’s very useful in software development. No metaphor is perfect, but they can carry unexpectedly deep meaning.

Christ is referred to as the cornerstone in Psalm 118:22. He’s the foundation for my relationship with God, and the foundation of the Temple is concealed, but that doesn’t negate the metaphor. 1 Samuel 16:7 tells us that God sees the heart of a person, that which is concealed, and Christ becomes the concealed foundation of our relationship with God when we accept Him and begin the process of aligning our hearts with God.

Christ promises to send us the Holy Spirit, as in Acts 2:2, where the Spirit is represented as a wind. A lot of Old Testament verses refer to aromas pleasing to God, and I wonder if the Holy Spirit somehow smells like a combination of all of them. More to the point though, I think the aromatic wood may point to the Holy Spirit overlaying the foundation of Christ, not to conceal it (this is where the metaphor breaks down a bit), but to build upon it. And overlaying that is gold — the product of a life built upon the foundation of Christ with the addition of the Holy Spirit, producing a blinding brilliance facing towards God the Father sitting on His throne. He had a house built in which the inner sanctum where He rested showed Him purity on every surface. Maybe I’m supposed to live in such a way that my life does the same — or at least work toward that end.

If the metaphor holds, then maybe the stonework being done elsewhere is symbolic of Christ suffering on the Cross. It happened far away from me so that my soul can be a quiet place for God to dwell, with no memory of my sin.

I also thought about the most mundane interpretations of Solomon’s Temple. Since Lisa and I decluttered our house in preparation for selling it, we are both far happier with it. Now we both work hard at keeping the entropy beaten back and the place straightened up. I don’t start my day without cleaning the living room, kitchen, and her office before going down to mine. It is every bit an investment in our relationship that a date night would be, and it’s producing dividends faster than anything I’ve ever tried. I wonder if the gold might represent the purity resulting from continuous effort in the relationship, both with her and with God, again producing a vision both pleasing to God and dazzling in its beauty.

No matter how I follow the metaphorical threads, I keep coming back to the same ideas: a foundation (Christ) built in the deepest, most secret places of my heart, combined with the actions empowered by the Holy Spirit and producing a fragrance (2 Corinthians 2:15) pleasing to God, and an appearance of purity and holiness. As I sit here in a mountaintop cabin, surrounded by the awesome beauty of God’s creation, the only thing that makes sense to me is praying over my own house:

Lord help me to build my household, my marriage, and my soul into a Temple pleasing to You. Help me to rely on a foundation of Christ’s sacrifice for me, and to step out boldly with the Holy Spirit as my guide. Let my life be a pleasing aroma and a beautiful testament to Your love and grace and provision.