Today, I am reading and commenting on 1 Kings 8.

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I want to start by commenting on verse eight and nine where it says that the poles used to carry the ark of the covenant into the temple could be seen from the Holy Place and that they were “there to this day,” and that only the two tablets of stone containing the Laws of Moses were inside the ark.   Now in Exodus it told us that a jar of manna was put inside the ark, and then, after Korah’s revolt in Numbers, Aaron’s staff was put into the ark.  I want to highlight this because some people claim that the Book of Exodus and the Book of 1 Kings was written during the Babylonian Exile.  These verses create two problems for that theory.  First, I do not believe that the writer would have written the part about the poles being “there to this day” if he was writing after Jerusalem had been sacked.  Second it seems unlikely that someone writing this book down for the first time would write sometime in the distant past some of the things which had been put in the ark had been lost (I want to note that the Babylonian Exile was farther in the future from Solomon building the temple than we are today from the signing of the U.S. Declaration of Independence).  In fact, the writer seems to be explaining that one should not by surprised to discover that only the stone tablets remained because the other things were already gone when the ark was placed in the temple.  Which tells me that this book was written before the Babylonians destroyed Solomon’s temple.

I am now going to comment on what Solomon said during his dedication of the temple, both in his prayer of dedication and what he said to the people.  There are two points which Solomon makes that I want to highlight.  First, Solomon tells us that we can only expect God to answer our prayers if we repent of our sins.  I want to emphasize that repent means to regret and turn from sins.  It is not enough to say that we did wrong, to confess our sins.  We need to try to change ourselves so that we do not commit those sins again.  Second, Solomon said that God’s people need to act so that all the peoples of the earth may know that the Lord is God and there is no other.  I believe that Solomon is telling the people of Israel to essentially the same thing that Jesus commanded at the end of the Gospel according to Matthew when He told us go and make disciples of all nations, teaching them to observe all that He commanded us.  Solomon was telling the people of Israel to show all nations that the Lord is God and that they should do observe His commands.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.