“When the cohanim came out of the Holy Place,
the cloud filled the house of Adonai…“
– 1 Kings 8:10
In verse 10, an incredible thing happens.
A thick cloud bursts out of nowhere and fills up the Temple.
This was the presence of the Lord.
The atmosphere was so intense that the priests had to hightail it outta there.
Everyone, including King Solomon, was blown away.
They hadn’t been expecting something like this to happen.
Yet, they were happy when it did.
Why?
Because this was divine acknowledgment of the newly built Temple.
What if Adonai didn’t accept it?
That would’ve been a bummer of gargantuan proportions
Think of all of the blood, sweat, and cash that went into this project.
The cloud was God telling them he was cool with their work.
But more importantly, the Lord was consecrating this House of God.
You know what “to consecrate” means from a Scriptural perspective, don’t you?
It means to make holy.
And do you know what to make holy means?
It means to set apart for the Lord.
That’s the basic definition.
To set something apart for the Lord IS to make it holy.
Ya feeling me here?
So here’s your takeaway for today.
And again, this is something the gentile church really needs to pay attention to.
Only God can make something holy.
Man does NOT have the authority to declare something holy.
And this, my friends, is where I gotta be brutally honest.
The greatest danger facing God’s people has never been a lack of religion.
It’s been religion replacing the Word of God.
Throughout history, men have taken what God declared holy and slowly, step by step, replaced it with their own traditions, customs, and interpretations.
The seventh-day Sabbath became Sunday.
The dietary instructions given by the Lord were dismissed and replaced with man-made explanations about what is now considered acceptable.
The biblical calendar established by God was pushed aside, and new religious observances created by men took over.
The Hebrew foundation of Scripture was buried beneath layers of Greek philosophy and Roman thought.
And over time, human doctrines and religious systems began carrying an authority that often rivaled (or even surpassed) the plain words of Scripture itself.
This is the warning we get from Solomon’s Temple.
Man does not create holiness.
God does.
No pope, priest, pastor, rabbi, denomination, or religious institution has the power to take something common and declare it holy simply because it serves their traditions.
The cloud that filled Solomon’s Temple was not a result of man’s creativity, innovation, or religious imagination. It was there because the Lord Himself chose to set that place apart.
The same principle applies today.
Our responsibility is not to reinvent God’s instructions.
Our responsibility is to return to them.
So the question every sincere seeker must ask is not:
“What has my religious tradition taught me?”
The question is:
“What has God actually commanded?”
Because when the Lord’s presence filled the Temple…
It was a reminder of a truth that has never changed:
Only God can make something holy.
And only His Word has the authority to define what holiness looks like.
CONNECTING THIS TEACHING TO THE NEW TESTAMENT
“You leave the commandment of God
and hold to the tradition of men.”
— Mark 7:8
“This people honors me with their lips,
but their heart is far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
teaching as doctrines
the commandments of men.”
-Matthew 15:8-9
“See to it that no one takes you captive
by philosophy and empty deceit,
according to human tradition…
and not according to Messiah.”
-Colossians 2:8
One of the many things that I have noted within Christian teaching is that Yeshua declared all traditions bad.
That is wrong. What he declared bad were those specific traditions which were given precedence over what God said to do.
Traditions, in general, are threads that bond families and cultures and even country’s together, and can be beneficial, serving as a connection with our ancestors.
Much, if not all, of Halacha (The Way to Walk), which the Orthodox Jews use to define how they worship and live, was designed to prevent us from accidentally violating the Torah (it has been called “Putting Fences Around the Law”).
But, what has happened is that many of the rules and requirements of Halacha have overridden Gods original commandments.
For example, the Laws of Kashrut (Kosher) that God gave in Leviticus 11 do not deny the eating of a cheeseburger, so long as the cheese was not made from the milk of the cow that gave birth to the calf which is now the hamburger (do not boil a calf in its mother’s milk).
The total separation of anything meat from anything dairy is a rabbinical requirement, not God’s rules, and to prove it we know that what God says goes for everyone (sorry, Christians, I know you’ve been told differently) yet the Ashkenazie say you have to wait so many hours after having meat before you can have dairy, but the Sephardic have a different time limit. From what I have learned, that is because one group drinks mostly coffee (black) and the other drinks mostly tea (with milk).
Oy!
So, traditions are not, in and of themselves, bad, but only when a tradition is given precedence over what God said to do so we begin to walk a thin line between obedience and rejection.
Hey Steven,
This was a very insightful comment.
I agree. Not all traditions are bad. But they don’t supersede the actual words of God.
Also, love the exposition on the Laws of Kashrut as it applies to cheeseburgers.
I’ve held to the idea that the boiling of a goat in its mother’s milk was an ancient Canaanite ritual, and that’s why the Lord didn’t want His people doing that.
Shabbat Shalom.