GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
2 CHRONICLES 1:4-6
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4 Now David had brought up the ark of God from Kiriath Jearim to the place that he had prepared. He had pitched a tent for it in Jerusalem. 5 Yet the bronze altar that Bezalel the son of Uri and grandson of Hur, had made, was there in front of the tabernacle of the LORD, so Solomon and the assembly sought God there. 6 So that was where Solomon went up to the bronze altar before the LORD, at the tent of meeting, and he offered a thousand burnt offerings on it.
Here once again we hear the account of David bringing the ark into the city. The ark was not in the tabernacle, but was in a tent David had pitched behind the walls of the city, and perhaps not far from where the temple would eventually be built. But the big bronze altar, seven and a half feet square (Exodus 26:37), was there before the Holy Place inside the tabernacle. It was there, at the altar (the very one that Bezalel, son of Uri and grandson of Hur, had made), and not before the ark, that Solomon went to worship. It would have been wrong to have constructed a new, temporary altar, within the city simply because David had brought the ark there. Sacrifice was to happen at the altar that was built in the wilderness. Moses had said: “Be careful not to sacrifice your burnt offerings anywhere you please. Offer them only at the place the LORD will choose in one of your tribes, and there observe everything I command you” (Deuteronomy 12:13-14).
Were the thousand burnt offerings really a thousand? One more than nine hundred ninety-nine? Or is this just an exaggeration for effect? There’s no reason not to take the number at face value. In the previous chapter (1 Chronicles 29), just fifteen verses before this (remember that 1 and 2 Chronicles were originally one book) David offered a thousand bulls, a thousand rams and a thousand lambs and other sacrifices at the dedication of many of the raw materials Solomon would need to build the temple (29:21). In comparison, in a later generation, we see King Josiah providing sacrifices for the lay people to offer for a passover offering: thirty thousand sheep and goats and another three thousand cattle (2 Chronicles 35:7).
To a modern reader, this can seem like nothing more than a lot of smoke and a lot of blood. Someone might even think of it as a gigantic waste. But remember that this was an act of worship, accompanying prayers to God. Would an outsider think of your worship as being too extravagant, too outlandish? Unthinkable? One Sunday noon many years ago my wife and I and our little boys were walking home after church. It was a walk of about seven or eight blocks, depending on the route we took. On this day, a little dog started barking at us from a yard, and one of my boys got scared of the dog, so I told him, “It’s okay, I won’t let him hurt you,” or something like that. Then the lady of the house came out and scolded us for walking past! “He doesn’t like you people who walk by here all the time in your dressed-up clothes!” she said. I’m pretty sure she wasn’t really talking about the dog. She was a woman who was not connected even to the idea of church, let alone to Christ. She saw us as a threat, just walking by a sunny Sunday afternoon. Were we too extravagant, too outlandish? Unthinkable?
Let’s set that aside. What about the little things you do every day simply as a Christian? How many of those things aren’t even done in your mind out of love for Jesus, but just things you do because you love your family, or out of a good habit? The Christian life begins in the mind, in the way we think about and cherish the gospel of Jesus Christ. As Paul says: “Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things” (Colossians 3:2). This is the beginning of loving God and loving our neighbor.
What would the opposite be like? To be unloving to God, unloving toward your neighbor? That sounds very much like the culture of the world. To have your mind set on earthly things and not on things above? That, too, is a pretty good description of the world. But Christ’s love moves us to being loving toward God and toward one another (1 John 4:11). A good example of this is the command about an enemy’s ox: “If you come across your enemy’s ox or donkey wandering off, be sure to take it back to him” (Exodus 23:4). There is no exception in that command, regarding how bad an enemy he might be, or about who it was who made the other man an enemy, or even anything about whether your enemy is an Israelite, a Canaanite, or a Philistine. Just take the stray animal back. Perhaps this will smooth over your relationship, or perhaps not, but the bottom line is that the animal belongs to him, and that is the morality of the command. What drives a man’s obedience is loving God who gave the command, and applying it even now in our New Testament context, for surely this law still remains as an example of the moral law, and stands tall in the third use of the law as a guide.
Returning to our text, Solomon’s action was entirely in loving obedience to the Third Commandment and giving worship to God. While Christians are not bound by the letter of the Commandment and the keeping of the Sabbath day, since Jesus set us free from the Sabbath as a strict command. “Haven’t you read in the law that on Sabbath days the priests violate the Sabbath and yet are innocent? But I tell you that one greater than the temple is here…. For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath” (Matthew 12:5,6,8). Even so, “We keep holy days so that people may have time and opportunity, which otherwise would not be available, to participate in public worship, that is, that they may assemble to hear and discuss God’s Word and then praise God with song and prayer” (Luther, Large Catechism). So Solomon teaches us about our worship lives by obeying the Lord, by showing a loving and ready attitude about proper worship, and by using his authority as head the nation to command the rulers and princes to join him, just as a loving father commands his children to join him, so that they will not suffer the paganism and the atheism of the world to be shoved down their throats, but will learn to thank and praise God and to serve and obey him. And they will learn to worship God without empty hands.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
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Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, New Ulm, Minnesota
God’s Word for You – 2 Chronicles 1:4-6 A thousand offerings