“Then the king turned around and
blessed the whole community of Israel.
The whole community of Israel stood.”
as he said: ‘Blessed be Adonai,
the God of Israel, who spoke to my father David
with his mouth and fulfilled
his promise with his hand.‘”
-1 Kings 8:14
In verse 14, a prophetic picture is painted for us.
King Solomon turns away from the Temple and addresses the crowd.
He blesses the people and then points out something significant:
ADONAI has now fulfilled the promise He made to David.
Solomon reminds them that nowhere in the Torah did God specify the city where He would eventually choose to establish His name.
Yet David was God’s chosen man for this purpose.
David was the one who identified the city where the Temple would ultimately stand.
Yet he would not be the one to build it.
That honor would go to his son.
And now his son, Solomon, is king.
The Temple has been built.
There’s a powerful takeaway here.
God gave David the promise.
But it was fulfilled by someone else.
Think about that for a minute.
David identified the city.
He made the preparations, gathered the materials, and laid the groundwork.
But he never got to build the Temple.
The lesson here is…
Sometimes God will call you to prepare something that somebody else will finish.
We naturally wanna see the payoff from our own labor.
We wanna build the thing, see the finished product, and be able to point to it and say, “Look what I did!”
But that’s not always how God works.
David’s job wasn’t to finish the Temple.
His job was to prepare the way for it.
And notice something else.
When Solomon stood before the completed Temple, he didn’t take credit for it.
He gave the credit to ADONAI.
That’s something we ALL need to learn.
David prepared.
Solomon built.
But ADONAI fulfilled the promise.
Alrighty, that does it for today.
CONNECTING THIS TEACHING TO THE NEW TESTAMENT
“I have planted,
Apollos watered;
but God gave the increase.”
-1 Corinthians 3:6
Look up this song:
“Thank you (for Giving to the Lord)”, by Ray Boltz.
It is a wonderful song about a man who goes to heaven (yes, we all know we don’t really do that) and when he gets there he is greeted by people he doesn’t know, but who say thank you to him because something he did saved them.