Today, I am reading and commenting on 1 Kings 7.

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So, in yesterday’s passage it told us that it took Solomon seven years to build the temple.  In today’s passage it tells us that it took him thirteen years to build his own house.  On the one hand, it seems wrong that Solomon spent twice as long on building a house for himself as he spent building a house for God.  On the other hand, the way I read this passage, the house that Solomon built for himself had four separate parts.  Each of which served a separate purpose.  There was the House of the Forest of Lebanon, the Hall of Pillars, the Hall of the Throne, and then Solomon’s living quarters.  The first two were for dealing with various dignitaries, both foreign and domestic. The third was where Solomon held court and gave judgement in court cases.  Finally, it is not clear to me whether or not the house for Pharaoh’s daughter was considered part of the house which it took Solomon thirteen years to build, or if it was a separate building project.  So, while Solomon had justifications for spending more time building his own house than he did on building a house for God, doing so started him down the path away from God.  By allowing himself to justify more time and effort upon himself, Solomon failed to focus on serving God and doing God’s will.  We need to pay attention to what we spend our time on.  Solomon justified to himself spending more time on his own desires and needs than he spent on worshiping and serving God.  This led him down a path which led him further and further from God.  We need to be careful not to fall into the same trap.  We need to seek ways in which we can worship and serve God while doing the other things we need to do so that we do not spend more time on ourselves than we spend on God.  That is a challenge I am struggling with in my life right now…and until I wrote this Bible study I had not even realized it.

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