2 Chronicles 3:1
Then Solomon began to build the house of the Lord at Jerusalem in mount Moriah, where the Lord appeared unto David his father, in the place that David had prepared in the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite.
And he began to build in the second day of the second month, in the fourth year of his reign.
Now these are the things wherein Solomon was instructed for the building of the house of God. The length by cubits after the first measure was threescore cubits, and the breadth twenty cubits.
And the porch that was in the front of the house, the length of it, according to the breadth of the house, was twenty cubits, and the height an hundred and twenty: and he overlaid it within with pure gold.
And the greater house he ceiled with fir tree, which he overlaid with fine gold, and set thereon palm trees and chains.
And he garnished the house with precious stones for beauty: and the gold was gold of Parvaim.
He overlaid also the house, the beams, the posts, and the walls thereof, and the doors thereof, with gold; and graved cherubim on the walls.
And he made the most holy house, the length whereof was according to the breadth of the house, twenty cubits, and the breadth thereof twenty cubits: and he overlaid it with fine gold, amounting to six hundred talents.
2 Chronicles 5:6-10
Also king Solomon, and all the congregation of Israel that were assembled unto him before the ark, sacrificed sheep and oxen, which could not be told nor numbered for multitude.
And the priests brought in the ark of the covenant of the Lord unto His place, to the oracle of the house, into the most holy place, even under the wings of the cherubim:
For the cherubim spread forth their wings over the place of the ark, and the cherubim covered the ark and the staves thereof above.
And they drew out the staves of the ark, that the ends of the staves were seen from the ark before the oracle; but they were not seen without. And there it is unto this day.
2 Chronicles 5:13-14
It came even to pass, as the trumpeters and singers were as one, to make one sound to be heard in praising and thanking the Lord; and when they lifted up their voice with the trumpets and cymbals and instruments of music, and praised the Lord, saying,
For He is good;
For His lovingkindness endureth for ever:
That then the house was filled with a cloud, even the house of the Lord;
So that the priests could not stand to minister by reason of the cloud: for the glory of the Lord filled the house of God.
Lord, how we thank Thee that Thou hast been here in our midst this morning, according to Thy Word. How we thank Thee, Lord, for the way Thou hast met with us already, touching our hearts as we have worshipped Thee and praised Thee and opened our hearts to Thee.
And Thou, Lord, we ask that Thou, in Thy grace, wouldst open Thy heart to us. Take Thy Word, Lord, and make it a living reality to every one of us. We pray, Lord, that we may not just receive in an academic way, or a mental way, but that we may receive Thyself. May it be an imparting of Thyself, Lord. Grant that spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Thyself, we pray this morning.
Lord, we thank Thee that there is an anointing upon the Head, our Lord Jesus, that includes every member of the Body. It goes right down to the hem of the garment. We stand together in that anointing which is ours—every one of us: anointing for speaking, anointing for hearing.
Lord, we know we do not want this to be merely a time of human resource and human energy and human words. We want, Lord, to meet with Thee, and we want to receive of Thee. We thank Thee that the Holy Spirit is here to glorify the Lord Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit is here, Father, to touch us and fellowship with us in all the grace and wisdom and faith and thankfulness of our Lord.
O Father, together we give this time over to Thee. We possess it in the name of the Lord. We declare that Jesus Christ is Lord, and that His will is going to be done. So we thank Thee in His name. Amen.
It is too late now, I think, to go over what we have said in the previous times on this matter of the books of Chronicles. Some people find the books of Chronicles terribly boring. But, in fact, the books of Chronicles are one of the most vital parts of the Word of God.
There are some books which interpret all the other books. Deuteronomy is one; it interprets the first four books of the Bible. Chronicles interprets the whole of the Old Testament, going right back to Adam and covering ground that has already been covered in Samuel and Kings, and going virtually to the return from Babylon and the coming of the Messiah.
The two books of Chronicles, together with Ezra and Nehemiah—which in the old Jewish order were linked together—cover all that history and, as it were, interpret all that God had been doing.
In other words, we are introduced in these books to the very secret of God’s heart. We are introduced to the yearning of His heart: the thing which, from eternity to eternity, He has longed for as His own.
What is it? We read it, of course, in Ephesians 2:
In whom each several building, fitly framed together, groweth into a holy temple in the Lord;
In whom ye also are builded together for a habitation of God in the Spirit.
The secret of human history, the secret of redemption, the secret behind all God’s dealings with men, behind His great salvation and His gift of the Holy Spirit, is that He might have a home for Himself in the Spirit.
The wonder of wonders is that you and I are that home. We are the living stones. We are the material that God has so gloriously saved. Is it not wonderful when we see the whole Bible from beginning to end? The first three chapters and the last three chapters correspond. Then we realize the amazing and marvelous grace of God.
He could have finished with Adam and Eve the moment they fell. He could have said, “Right—out. Finished. One word will dynamite them, and We will start again.” But God is not like that.
God has worked unceasingly to retrieve what is lost, to recover what is lost, to bring back what is lost, and to reconcile what is lost. You and I are the fruit of that reconciliation—the work of the Lord Jesus Christ—bringing us back to God.
What a tragedy when we make our great salvation the end, when it is really the means to the end. The end is that we might come back into God’s original purpose for mankind: that we may be joined to Him, become partakers of the divine nature, and be joined together into a holy temple in the Lord—a place where God manifests Himself, expresses Himself, comes home, and reveals His glory.
Yesterday we spoke about Moriah: Jehovah-jireh, “The Lord will provide”—the place where Abraham offered his only son, the son born of promise. In the mount of the Lord it shall be provided.
God has provided every single thing that sinners need to be saved through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. More than that, every single thing that saved sinners need in order to serve God has been provided through the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Everything required for the building of the house of God—for the construction, as it were, of this holy temple in the Lord—has been provided: the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, the anointing of the Holy Spirit, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit. All have been provided on the basis of the finished work of our Lord Jesus Christ.
That is the basis. Upon the basis of that finished work, everything is provided. In the mount of the Lord it shall be provided.
You may be the most insignificant person in the whole wide world. You may be the most worthless believer in the whole wide world. But if you are a believer, you have a birthright—a glorious birthright. Everything is given to you by grace through faith. If you will only enter in through faith, it is all yours. God has done it for you. God has given it to you through the finished work of His dear Son.
Then we spoke about the foundation. What a huge foundation it was: the whole top of Mount Moriah levelled, except for that one crag which still sticks out on the site to this very day—the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite.
Huge stones were laid in place for that foundation. The foundation is Jesus Christ and Him crucified. There is no other foundation.
The devil works unceasingly to make us have a foundation for our coming together and for our being built which is less than that foundation. We like to mix unbelievers with believers. We cannot do it. We like to make it less than the Lord Jesus Christ. We cannot do it.
The most common thing is to add to the foundation: the foundation plus baptism; the foundation plus holiness; the foundation plus an experience of holiness; the foundation plus the baptism of the Spirit; the foundation plus gifts of the Spirit; the foundation plus some interpretation of prophecy or something else.
Then we say, “If you agree with us, come in. The rest of you are visitors. You can spectate and all the rest of it, but you are not in the inner circle.” But God’s foundation is Jesus Christ and Him crucified. On that foundation, God builds.
The Holy Spirit refuses to commit Himself where there is less than the foundation or more than the foundation. He will bless people as individuals; He will view them as saints. But the building work of God is paralysed. He will not build until He has the right foundation.
Our foundation must be Jesus Christ. This finds us out, because it means we have to receive everyone whom Christ has received.
Someone comes along, and someone whispers, “Pentecostal.” Someone else comes along, and someone whispers, “Oh, Baptist.” Someone else comes along, and we say, “Watch out—Exclusive.” You know the kind of thing. We have problems when we are going to receive all whom Christ has received.
If Christ has received you, I must receive you. How can I be at loggerheads with my Lord? If He has received you, I must receive you. I may not like the look of your face, but I have got to receive you. We have got to get together. We have got to be built together.
It is not a question of colour, race, nationality, or social class. It is a question of whether Christ has received you. If He has received you, you are my brother. I cannot do anything about it.
And I am your brother, and you cannot do anything about it. You are my sister; I am your brother. We cannot do anything about it. I have a sister. I cannot change it. She is mine; I cannot help it. In the Lord we have brothers and sisters, and we have got to receive them as Christ has received them. Now, that is the foundation.
This morning, in the time we have, I wanted to speak a little more about the materials used in this building. I can only touch on it. But the amazing thing is this: God went to all this trouble to get these living stones built together, and then He covered the whole lot up.
Think of that. He went to all that trouble to quarry these stones without sound of hammer or chisel, bring them to their place, number them, fit them beautifully together—and then cover the whole lot first with wood, then with gold, and then with precious stones.
Anyone who came in would not even know there was stone in the building. They looked up—gold. They looked down—gold. They looked this way—gold. They looked that way—gold. There was no stone visible; it was all hidden.
Only God could do that. After all that work with the stone, we would want to leave it uncovered. Or we would say, “Lord, do not bother too much about this stone. It is all going to be covered up anyway. If there are chinks and cracks, do not worry too much. It will be covered by wood and gold and precious stone. No one is going to see it.”
But not the Lord. Let me tell you a few things about these stones.
First, they were quarried. As far as we can tell, they were quarried out of Mount Moriah itself. We generally think from 1 Kings 6:7, where there was no sound of hammer or chisel, that the stones were quarried miles away from the temple site.
But right under Mount Moriah are huge caverns. I have been there many times and seen the enormous chisel marks deep down in the earth, where blocks of stone—sometimes thirty-two feet long, nine feet high, and nine feet wide—were chiselled out.
It was right deep under the ground. That is why no one could hear the hammer or the chisel. It was hidden work. Much of the stone was taken out of Mount Moriah itself.
The stones were quarried—that is, cut roughly. Then they were dressed. The dressing was a great job. Then the edges were bevelled. You can still recognize ancient stones by the way that they are bevelled at the edge.
Then they were marked. This is very important: they were marked in the quarry. Josephus tells us that every stone was marked, and that they were marked in such a way that a grain ran right through the stone. He said it was just like a flower or a plant in its unity. The whole thing was thought out.
I could take you to stones from later periods in Jerusalem, stones higher than myself and almost as long as from here to that wall, where you cannot get a knife between them. Earthquakes and the passing of years have only pressed them closer together.
There is no mortar, no cement. These stones were so perfectly cut, so perfectly dressed, and so carefully numbered that they fitted together. You can actually see the grain running through them.
And God covers all that up. All that work, and God covers it up. God sees it, but it is not seen to the naked eye.
Dear child of God, you and I are living stones. That is what it says in 1 Peter 2:4-5:
Unto whom coming, a living stone, rejected indeed of men, but with God elect, precious,
Ye also, as living stones, are built up a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.
You and I are living stones. If you are a born-again believer, let it get into your heart by the Spirit of God: you are a living stone. If you are born of God, if you are saved by the grace of God, you are a living stone.
God has quarried you out of the nature of Christ, out of His own life. You have been born again unto a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. You have something of His life in you and something of His nature in you. You are a living stone quarried out of the rock-like nature and life of God.
What is the point of a living stone?
If I took you to my home and showed you a foundation with one stone on it and said, “This is my home,” you would think I was crazy. It might be a magnificent stone—beautifully cut, polished, dressed, bevelled, with lovely graining—but one stone never made a house.
There are many believers just like that. Here they are, all on their own. “I have got everything,” they say. “I have got the Lord. Praise the Lord.” They are one solitary stone, cut and dressed, standing in solitary beauty.
God says, “What can I do with this stone?” The stone thinks it is the only stone. It thinks it is a sufficiently complete stone. It has all it wants, and it is pleased to go on alone. But what is the point of a living stone? There must be other stones.
Now suppose I showed you a foundation with two hundred stones scattered all over the place and said, “Come in, this is my house.” You would still think I was crazy. A great pile of stones does not make a house.
Even if someone tidied the stones and put them all in piles, beautifully on top of one another, that would still not be a house. You get believers who are simply a mass of stones together, and they say, “We are the church.” Of course, they are the church in one sense. But we have to be built together to become the house of the Lord.
We cannot be the home of God in the Spirit unless we are built together. There may be some fellowship and some order, but if it is according to man’s idea rather than according to the sovereign work of the Holy Spirit, it is still not the house of God.
What has to happen is that the stones on the right foundation must find their relationship to one another. As stone after stone finds its proper place and relationship to the other stones, the whole house begins to grow.
It does not matter where you are in the house. You are somewhere, and you are there by God’s appointment. Because you are there, you have a responsibility for the whole. That is what it means to be built up a spiritual house. That is what it means to be fitly framed together.
Notice three things about this matter of being together. Consider Ephesians 2:21-22 and Ephesians 4:16:
In whom each several building, fitly framed together, groweth into a holy temple in the Lord;
In whom ye also are builded together for a habitation of God in the Spirit.
From whom all the body fitly framed and knit together through that which every joint supplieth.
Together. The stones have got to be together. This is the first thing. It has to be a spirit. It does not come academically or merely mentally. Only the Holy Spirit can create this togetherness, this sense of belonging.
It is a wonderful thing when you realize, “I belong. I belong to the Lord; therefore, I belong to these people. I belong.” Togetherness is a spirit.
Of course, every one of us must have our own life with the Lord. The boards in the tabernacle each stood on two sockets—each board stood on its own two feet. Yet there was a bar running through them, binding them together with all the others.
You must have your own two feet: your own life with the Lord, your own walk with the Lord, your own original experience of the Lord. But you must be together. The two things must go hand in hand: your own life and your life together with the others.
The second thing is relatedness. The stones find their relationship to one another in the Lord, and it is God’s choice. Every one of these stones is numbered.
We do not always like this. We like to find people who are amenable to us, pleasant, and people with whom we see eye to eye. Then we say, “Now we are going to be one with them. I can be built with them.”
But God does not do it that way. God says, “No, no, no. The grain has got to go through the stone.” You may well find that the thing you do not like about Brother So-and-so is the very thing that is in you. It is the grain.
We learn Christ by the discipline of being together. We do not learn Christ merely in books, nor in lovely meetings where we remain untouched. We learn Christ by the discipline of being together.
Sooner or later, someone in the church will say something about you which you deeply resent. Then you will either get up and walk out and say, “That is the end. I have been thinking for some time that they are not too spiritual in this lot. I am going somewhere else, where the fellowship is of a deeper kind.”
But you cannot do that. They may be wrong, but there is an opportunity for you to die. If you have lost your reputation, what a blessed thing it is—you have nothing more to defend.
Most of us have a façade because of a certain reputation we are trying to keep. We are projecting something, and we spend our lives striving to keep up that façade. Of course, God cannot do much with a façade. He has to get to us behind the façade.
When someone damages your reputation, thank them. There was an old brother in Denmark, Pastor Fjor Christiansen, a very great man of God. He was once greatly upset by something someone said about him, and he went to the Lord to complain.
The Lord said, “This person is your very great friend. They are keeping you humble.”
So he said, “Well, Lord, I will give a five-kroner piece to anyone who ever criticizes me.” And he did. When people came to him and said, “Brother, I thought you were a bit long today,” he would solemnly take out his purse and say, “Here, you shall have this. Thank you for keeping me humble.”
We should be thankful, because in many ways this is the way God deals with us. This is the way stones are built together. We get to know each other.
In family relationships—brothers and sisters, husband and wife, children and parents—we learn. Parents say, “We have learned such a lot through our children.” The children may say, “You are so old-fashioned,” and the parents resent it. Then they realize that they are getting old, and the children keep them young.
We can either resent these things and walk out, or we can accept them. But this is the way we get to know ourselves. We must get to know ourselves. In knowing the Lord, we get to know ourselves.
More often than not, the way we get to know ourselves is not through some glorious mountaintop experience where the Lord embraces us to Himself. It is somewhere down here in the dust, where someone says something about us that we do not like.
I have often told you about Jacob. His name meant “twister” or “deceiver.” When he was born, his hand was around his brother’s heel. They said, “He is a twister.” So they called him supplanter, twister, deceiver.
He was the biggest swindler in the Middle East, but he did not know it. When he stole his brother’s birthright and blessing, he did not realize what he was doing. He thought he was doing what came naturally—perhaps even in the name of the Lord.
How did the Lord cure him? He sent him to the second biggest swindler in the Middle East: his uncle Laban. It ran in the family, you think. They swindled one another for twenty-one years.
If you take off your rose-coloured spectacles and read the Bible story, you will see that they swindled one another for twenty-one years, until Jacob became sick to death—not of his uncle, but of himself.
First there was Leah. Leah was in on that swindle. Then Rachel did the same sort of thing with the household gods. Jacob saw himself in three ways: first in Uncle Laban, then in Leah, then in Rachel. He got nearer and nearer to himself.
Finally, he was so sick of himself that, when the Lord met him before Jabbok, he would not let go until the Lord changed him from Jacob into Israel.
That is what God does with living stones. Do not think you will get away from the dealings of the Lord in this matter. He puts you next to someone, and you find the same thing. You may not be given to swindling, but perhaps you are proud, self-opinionated, or long-winded. The Lord puts you with somebody else, and you see it clearly in them.
Then you cry to the Lord, “Lord, deliver me from this thing. I see it so beautifully in Brother So-and-so.” Oh, how we love each other when we come to see that we are all the same in the end.
God builds us here. We find our relationship to one another in the Lord, fitly framed together—fitted together in such a way that we become an integral part of the building.
It does not matter where you are, so long as you are somewhere between the foundation and the top stone. So long as you are in the building.
This is a discipline. Are we ready for the discipline of being built together?
There is a certain kind of teaching that seems to preach freedom from all discipline and responsibility. This is entirely unscriptural. To be freed from bondage, inhibition, and self-consciousness is right. But the greatest freedom any man or woman can have is the freedom to be a prisoner in the Lord Jesus Christ.
Paul says in Ephesians 3:1, “I, Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus.” Then, after a great digression, he comes back in Ephesians 4:1 and says, “I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord.”
Are you a prisoner in the Lord Jesus Christ? The greatest freedom in this world is the freedom to lay down your life. That is true freedom. When a person cannot lay down his life, he is bound in the most terrible way of all.
He wants to lay down his life, but he cannot. He wants to fall into the ground and die, but he cannot fall into the ground. Only the Holy Spirit can give you the power to put to death the deeds of the body. Only the Holy Spirit can give you the grace and power to lay down your life for the Lord. That is the only way.
Are you prepared for the discipline? Ephesians 5 says, “Be filled with the Spirit,” and then speaks of psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, making melody in your heart. Then it says, “Subjecting yourselves one to another in the fear of Christ.”
Can you do that? Not in a slavish way, not in a way that means you have no personality, spontaneity, or originality. It does not mean that if everybody looks this way, you look this way; if they all look up, you look up; and if they look down, you look down.
Subjecting yourselves one to another in the fear of the Lord means that you accept one another in the Lord, respect one another in the Lord, reverence one another in the Lord, and refuse—whatever happens—to be alienated from one another in the Lord.
Do not get too downcast about fragmentation and division. Some people say, “Things have gone wrong everywhere we go. We hear of fragmentations and divisions.” Listen: however much we look for something perfect down here, we shall never find it. Never.
God is training us. As long as that work is really being done, that is what matters.
If I had time, I would survey the whole of church history, and you would be here until six o’clock—there would be no wedding! We cannot do that; we have got to get these two properly wedded.
But when we look at church history, we find a remarkable thing: within one generation of nearly every move of the Spirit of God, from Pentecost down to the present age, the movement has declined or died.
Furthermore, it appears that God is not interested in keeping something alive after the first generation. It is almost as if He allows it to die.
In nearly all the major movements since the Reformation, within twenty years there have been major divisions: Wesley and Whitefield; the Brethren into Exclusive and Open; the Puritans into Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Episcopalians.
Why? Because God is doing something in that first generation, the values of which go into the city and are never lost. There is gold, precious stone, and pearl produced in those beginnings and in God’s dealings with that first generation—values which go right into the city and are never lost.
God is building a city. That is why we have to learn these principles down here. We are not going to come to the throne willy-nilly.
If you have not got victory at your kitchen sink, God is not going to bring you to the throne. If you have not got victory in your family, God is not going to bring you to the throne. He is not going to have people sitting on thrones who say, “I do not know what to advise about this matter, because I have a terrible mess in my own home.”
I am not saying things should be perfect in your home. There are problems in many homes which are not of your making. But are you in the ascendant? Are you reigning with Christ now? Are you governing the matter from the throne of God?
I remember a brother who had a plaque in his study which said, “Look down.” Everybody who entered would ask, “What do you mean, ‘Look down’? Do you not mean, ‘Look up’?”
“No,” he said. “It is a question of where you are. If you are seated with Christ in heavenly places, look down. Look down on everything.”
It is a question of where you are.
Are you learning the discipline of being built together? Are you prepared in every company from which you come to subject yourselves one to another in the Lord? Are you prepared to take responsibility?
In some places, one person does all the putting out of chairs, all the preparing, all the cleaning up. Everyone else comes, enjoys themselves, says, “We are enjoying the Lord,” and then goes away. No one takes responsibility.
God watches those practical matters. “Well, well, well. They all came in—thirty of them—and enjoyed Me, and then went out and left that poor soul to do the whole thing. I cannot think much of their enjoyment of Me if they do that kind of thing.”
When we enjoy the Lord, the Lord will teach us somehow to be practical.
We have said rather a lot about stones, have we not? Shall we say something about the wood?
In 2 Chronicles 3, the next thing which comes over the stone is wood. The wood was of three kinds: fir wood—or, in some versions, cypress—cedar wood, and olive wood.
It seems that the great outer timbers of the ceiling and under the floor were probably fir wood. The inner walls, ceiling, and floor were cedar. The doors into the most holy place were olive wood.
In Scripture, trees symbolize man. Psalm 1 speaks of the man who is like a tree planted by the streams of water. Jeremiah speaks of the man who trusts in the Lord as a tree that does not fear when heat comes.
Stone is rock-like. Wood is warm.
Now that you have seen that you are a stone, that you have been quarried, fitly framed together, and brought into relationship with one another, never forget to be human beings.
This is an area in which the devil undoes many a real work of God in a life. People become spiritual machines. They suppress themselves so much, and feel that there is something wrong with being human, that they become like walking Bibles or spiritual slot machines. You put in a little, and out comes the expected response.
I can tell you many things I have suffered from spiritual machines. Have you not all, at one time or another?
Was our Lord ever a spiritual machine? Never. He wept. He sorrowed. He felt. He was moved with indignation. He became angry in a holy way. The whole range of human feeling was His.
His was a true humanity without sin and not governed by the soul. His spirit governed His soul. Once God has done a work of dividing soul and spirit in us, and once our soul has known something of being broken—and that is a costly business—then our soul comes into its own.
God wants us, once we begin to see what the church is, never to lose our humanity. In many companies, people are no longer human. You enter and feel something artificial, something mechanical. Press the button, and everything flies off. That is not what God wants.
God wants human beings. He wants a new man: something that thinks, laughs, cries, travails, and can be touched with the feelings of others. God wants that kind of humanity.
Fir wood or cypress is among the most durable woods known in the Middle East. The doors of St. Peter’s in the Vatican are said to be sixteen hundred years old, and they are made of cypress wood. There is a very old tradition that gopher wood was cypress wood. It is exceedingly durable.
Cedar, of course, is incorruptible. If you want wood where wood-boring beetles do not get in, where dry rot does not begin, and where insects and diseases do not corrupt it, use cedar. Cedar is relatively incorruptible.
Cedar also speaks of nobility. We think of the cedars of Lebanon—the kings of the forest. Thus, we have durability, incorruptibility, and nobility. That is the kind of manhood God wants. That is the kind of humanity God wants.
Put on the new man, that after God hath been created in righteousness and holiness of truth.
Did you find the manhood of the Lord Jesus durable? Absolutely. It weathered every storm. Was His manhood incorruptible? He was tempted in all points like as we are, yet without sin. Was His manhood noble? He is King of kings and Lord of lords.
We have it all in Him.
Did you ever find the Lord Jesus acting like a machine? He said, “I do not My own works, but the works of My Father.” He said, “I do not speak My own words, but the words of My Father.” Yet He was not a machine. He denied Himself, but He was absolutely human.
No one could be more human than our Lord at the tomb of Lazarus. Why did He weep at Lazarus’s death when He knew He was going to raise him from the dead? Was it an act? Was it a theatrical performance? Of course not. He really wept.
Why? Because the misery all around Him touched Him: what had happened to this world, what Satan had done, what sin had done. He wept. That is our Lord Jesus.
The Lord Jesus is the same this morning as He was then. Never forget that. Just because He has gone into heaven, He is the same yesterday, today, and for ever. He is still touched with the feeling of our infirmities.
He is glorified Man as well as God. When He came to Jerusalem, He wept over it: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem.” There was something very human in Him.
I believe the Lord had humour. Publicans and sinners are not attracted for long to a person without humour. The Pharisees could call Him a gluttonous man and a winebibber only because they saw Him among ordinary people. I believe He was a man of the whole range of human feeling.
Dear child of God, we have to be governed by the Lord and broken by the work of grace, but we must always be human beings. Put on the new man. Do not let us become machinery, automatic, or impersonal. Let us be human beings.
God made man in the beginning. God redeemed man. Now we are the new man in Christ. We are not soulless spirits, and we shall never be bodiless spirits like angels. We are spirit, soul, and body—redeemed by the grace of God.
Consider 1 Thessalonians 2:8:
Even so, being affectionately desirous of you, we were well pleased to impart unto you, not the gospel of God only, but also our own souls, because ye were become very dear to us.
There is something to think about.
What about the silver? This is very interesting. In 1 Chronicles 29:4, David speaks of “three thousand talents of gold” and “seven thousand talents of refined silver, to overlay the walls of the houses.”
Bible scholars have had many problems with this silver. Where is the silver? It is not mentioned in the record of the building, yet there was more than twice as much silver as gold for the walls.
Some have said that the silver was used in the outbuildings and storehouses. But silver tarnishes. Gold does not tarnish in the same way, but silver quickly grows dark.
The rabbis, however, have always said that a silver membrane was put on the stone between the stone and the wood, to stop any form of rot or trouble. I think that is probably correct.
Over all the stone: silver. What a wonderful picture—redemption. Redemption is the only thing that will stop the rot.
Always go back to it. Never get away from redemption. However far you go on in holiness, good works, sacrifice, zeal, prayer, Bible knowledge, or service, none of these things will preserve you from loss. Only the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ.
That is the only way you overcome Satan: by the blood of the Lamb. Go back to it again and again and again.
Then, of course, there was the gold. Everything was overlaid with gold—again and again and again. Even the nails were of gold.
If you have anything to do with building, think of banging in a nail of gold. Gold is soft metal. Yet we are even told the weight of the gold nails.
When you came into this house, you would not have known that there was stone, silver, or wood. It was all gold. You were walking on a floor of gold—pure gold, the best gold of all. Walls, ceiling, floors—everything was gold.
What does gold speak of? The divine nature. The stone is there, the wood is there, and then the gold goes on.
I think immediately of Scriptures such as:
Christ in you, the hope of glory.
And:
Through these ye may become partakers of the divine nature.
We have become actual partakers of the divine nature. The gold is coming into us.
I think of the Lord’s words to the church at Laodicea:
I counsel thee to buy of Me gold refined by fire, that thou mayest become rich.
Christ in us, the hope of glory. After God has done all this work, it is Christ that matters. He does all the preparation work, but finally it is the glory of the Lord Jesus.
Do not tell me how much you know about the Bible. Do not tell me how powerful you are. I want to know one thing only: Is the Lord Jesus seen in your life?
That is the one thing that counts in the end, and the one thing that will determine your everlasting reward and inheritance: how much is there of Christ in you?
John the Baptist said, “He must increase, but I must decrease.”
Finally, the gold was encrusted with precious stones. When you went into this house, probably not on the floor or ceiling but on the walls, there were beautiful precious stones set in places that brought out the beauty of the work.
The palm trees, cherubim, and lilies were highlighted with precious stones. The whole beauty of the house was brought out. If you and I could go back into history and walk into the house of the Lord, I think the first thing we would do would be to gasp.
Even though you know about it from the Bible, you would have no idea how beautiful it was. Gold everywhere, precious stones shining.
What do these precious stones speak of? Stones like these are formed in the dark parts of the earth, under high heat and pressure. I think they speak of the radiance, incomparable beauties, and glories of Christ.
The Lord never finally shines like this through anything until there has been a real work. Then you begin to see something of this shining out of a person.
Dear child of God, that is what God wants to do with you and with me. I think of the unsearchable riches of Christ, the riches of His glory, and the riches of His grace. Everywhere you look in the house of God, there should be incomparable and radiant beauties, glories, and treasures of Christ.
How can you and I show forth Christ like this? Only if we are prepared to go into dark places and let God do His work.
Consider Isaiah 45:3:
And I will give thee the treasures of darkness,
And hidden riches of secret places,
That thou mayest know that I, the Lord,
Which call thee by thy name, am the God of Israel.
You have to go into those secret and hidden places where no one sees but God. There something is done in your life. Many lives are visited by things that are inexplicable.
Wherever I go, people come and quietly pour out their stories. The story is inexplicable: “Why has the Lord done this to me? What does it all mean? How should this happen?” But God is doing something.
Out of that person’s life comes something which could come in no other way: something of incomparable beauty and glory which finally comes forth and will never be taken away.
Consider Isaiah 54:11-12:
O thou afflicted, tossed with tempest, and not comforted,
Behold, I will set thy stones in fair colors,
And lay thy foundations with sapphires.
And I will make thy pinnacles of rubies,
And thy gates of carbuncles,
And all thy border of precious stones.
Listen to the context: “O thou afflicted, tossed with tempest, and not comforted.” There are times when the Lord allows storms to come into lives, and He stands right back. He will not even touch. He seems hidden. He does not say a word. He is silent.
Dear child of God, if I am speaking to anyone who is in such a storm, in such an inexplicable way with the Lord, and the Lord is absolutely silent—if you crave a word from the Lord and He gives you none—rest in Him.
You may be tossed with tempests. You may be afflicted and not comforted. Do not fear. God is doing something in your life which will shine out with incomparable beauty. He will do it.
I remember a time in my own life when I was going through a period of great distress. A Scripture came to me through my dear old sister-in-law, who knew the Lord deeply. Throughout her home she had the words, “My peace I give unto you.”
I used to wonder why she had that word everywhere. But when I was in great distress, I told her, “I have been in terrible torments, but suddenly I have passed into peace. I cannot tell you why, because the situation is still exactly as it was. But I have peace inside.”
She said, “Let me tell you something. Years ago, when I was in great trouble and was taken to a mental home, it seemed that nothing would help me. I believed in the healing of God, and He did not heal me. I lost my reputation and everything else.”
She said, “In great torment, one verse came to me: ‘Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you.’ I saw that He left me, as a legacy, peace with God.”
“He never needed peace with God; He always had peace with God. Sin had destroyed my peace, but He left it as a legacy. Then He gave His own peace: the peace of the sinless One, shown in Gethsemane and on the cross when He said, ‘Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit.’ After all the torment and affliction, there was His peace.”
“My peace I give unto you.”
We should conclude the time. There are other things I would like to speak about: the pillars Jachin and Boaz, the cherubim, and the holy vessels of God.
The old cherubim were still there over the mercy seat, looking down. But the two great cherubim stood at full height, with wings stretching from wall to wall. They did not look down on the mercy seat; they looked out into the house of God.
That is a lovely picture. God must first point our attention to the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ, and then He points our attention to the habitation: “This is the first thing you must see; now here is the next thing—a home for Myself.”
But I will finish with this: when finally the house was built, the ark of the Lord came into it, and the glory of the Lord filled the house.
Does that not make Psalm 27 live?
One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after:
That I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life,
To behold the beauty of the Lord,
And to inquire in His temple.
You stand there and see nothing but beauty. The wonder of it is that it is all in and through His own. What grace! Not merely the Lord Jesus uniquely in Himself, but His beauty revealed in those whom He has brought to glory with Himself—bringing many sons to glory.
In the end, dear child of God, this habitation of God is for the presence of the Lord. He wants to commit Himself.
When the ark came in, we have a great problem in Hebrew over the verse concerning the staves. Some versions say the staves were drawn out. Others say they were lengthened or made longer. The Hebrew simply says that the staves were made longer.
I think it probably means that the staves were drawn partly out. The law of Moses forbade the staves from ever being removed, so perhaps they were drawn out partway to signify that the ark had come home to rest. No more carrying. The ark of the Lord had come home.
The ends of the staves could probably be seen as bulges in the veil, showing the people: God is at home. At last, God is at home.
Wherever I go, I ask, “Where is God at home? Is He at home in Richmond? Is He at home in Washington? Is He at home in these other places?”
There may be thousands of living stones, many dear believers, and much experience of the Lord. But where has the ark come home? Where have the staves been lengthened? Where has God finally come home?
We can end with Psalm 27. One thing have I desired of the Lord; that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, to worship Him, to offer sacrifices of praise unto Him, to see something of His glory manifested in and through the other saints as they are changed together into His likeness from glory to glory, and to inquire in His temple.
That is what the house of God is for:
And the Lord bless.