Although we went from 1 Kings to 2 Chronicles, we are in the
same place as yesterday, Solomon praying at the dedication of the temple. Here, he prays first for foreigners, those
who come for the sake of your great name and your mighty hand and your
outstretched arm.” Solomon prays that
the Lord will hear the prayer of that person as well as the prayers of the
people of Israel, that the people of foreign lands might also come to know the
Lord who can do great things, know Him as the Israelites know Him. Remember that Jesus said this place was to be
a house of prayer for all nations? This
is the basis of that claim. Solomon also
sees prophetically that the sin of the people might result in exile and asks
that when they pray from foreign lands in exile or when they are out in battle,
that the Lord might hear them then as well.
He is here but that does not limit His ability to hear and act. As he finishes the prayer, fire comes from
heaven and consumes the sacrifice, just as it did when the tabernacle and altar
were consecrated, and the glory of the Lord fills the temple, He has accepted
this offering of a place for Him to dwell.
What a powerful idea.
Those whose responsibility it was to know the Lord and make
Him known to the people, the chief priests, scribes and elders, put the
incarnate God on trial. If you later realized that you had participated in the
trial and conviction of God in the flesh how would you live with yourself? The barrier to believing that this was, in
fact, God, would be so high as to be insurmountable wouldn’t it? The question that had been on the hearts, if
not the lips of all throughout Jesus’ ministry was, “Are you the Christ, the
Son of the Blessed?” Jesus pointed only
to the signs He was doing and their relationship to what the Scriptures said as
the answer until this moment, and finally He says, “Yes.” Instead of worship, they give Him scorn and
find Him guilty of blasphemy, He is a pretender of the worst sort. They don’t evaluate the evidence He has
provided, their conclusion was already reached prior to the trial, it has all
been a sham.
James tells us to avoid the sin of partiality. What he is really saying is stop judging
people by appearances. He knows that
human nature is such that we are more likely to greet people who look put
together and to befriend them than we are to reach out to those who look like
they might actually need something from us.
Our church culture often teaches that prosperity is a sign of God’s
favor and blessing and we are then completely predisposed towards those who are
more prosperous. Some Christians,
however, lean the other way, towards those in need and hate those who might be
prosperous in the belief that they are likely then to be corrupt, greedy, or
uncaring about others. This, too, is the
sin of partiality. In the end, we are
simply to love our neighbor as ourselves, whoever that neighbor might be. Sin is sin, and yet we know that there is
mercy if we confess, even for those who “knew not what they do” in the trial
and crucifixion of Jesus. That is mercy!
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