Scripture Menu—
1 Kings 6:38
And in the eleventh year… the house was finished in all its parts, and according to all its specifications. He was seven years in building it.
1 Kings 7:51
“Thus, all the work that King Solomon did on the house of the LORD was finished. And Solomon brought in the things that David his father had dedicated, the silver, the gold, and the vessels, and stored them in the treasuries of the house of the LORD.”
John 19:28-30
[On the Cross, Jesus] knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfill the Scripture) ‘I thirst.’ A jar full of sour wine stood there, so they put a sponge full of the sour wine on a hyssop branch and held it to his mouth. When Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, ‘It is finished,’ and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.”
Cogitations—
To begin some thoughts on 1 Kings 7, I need to go back to chapter 6. In the first ten verses of that chapter, Solomon begins building the Temple. In those initial verses, the foundations and the walls of the structure are put in place. But before the work on the interior of the “house” can begin, God interrupts the process with a needful prophetic word in 6:11-13— “Concerning this house that you are building, if you will walk in my statutes and obey my rules and keep all my commandments and walk in them, then I will establish my word with you, which I spoke to David your father.” This is reminiscent of the Apostle Paul’s exhortation in Romans 2:28-29, “No one is a Jew who is merely one outwardly, nor is circumcision outward and physical. But a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter. His praise is not from man but from God.” A true outworking of faith is always a matter of the heart.
Moving now to the beginning of 1 Kings 7, there is a second interruption in the building of God’s house. This time, there is a long description of Solomon building his own palace. No holds barred. The king spends twice as long in building his own house as he spent building the house of the Lord! (Yet another fault line in the kingdom.) With that "burp" duly noted, the description of the interior design and furnishings of God's "house" resumes at verse 13 through the end of the chapter. It’s apparent that Solomon is sparing no expense to make sure this temple will be a show-stopping sight to behold: Gold and the finest, most expensive woodwork, expertly crafted.
A House for the Lord and a House for the king. King Solomon says, “It is finished!” The reality, however, is that Solomon and his kingdom were far from complete. God already identified the most needful of all things: A heart for the Lord. The Temple Solomon built was beautiful. The Temple was a good thing. The symbolic import of God coming to rest in Jerusalem was a matter of great comfort and joy to God’s people. The Exodus from Egypt ended— after 480 years of wandering in the wilderness and being unsettled in the Promised Land. In the next chapter as this Sacred Spot is dedicated, the Glory of God will suffuse this space, a Divine seal of approval.
Parenthetically, I must insist that God is not opposed to beautiful church buildings. The Jerusalem Temple is still a legitimate template for worship aesthetics (minus the sacrifices, of course). How we build and furnish our worship space is a tangible declaration of what we believe about God and the glorious redemption accomplished in His Son. I think the Protestant Reformation erred in over-reacting to the excesses of the Roman Church, with the fruit of the effort being Puritan ugly, beige or off-white worship spaces. Most churches built today are uninterested in symbolic significance, majoring in “practicality,” manifested as a reluctance to invest in beauty. That kind of spending is believed to be a wasteful and unnecessary expense. Most Protestant church buildings resemble cookie-cutter concert venues at the one extreme, and bland cheesiness on the other side - both ends devoid of any holy texture. Solomon was not wrong to want a breath-taking monument to God’s "Ground Zero" holiness. Nevertheless, if awe inducing aesthetics don’t lead to true worship and inner transformation, it can and often does lead to idolatry.
Solomon succeeded in finishing a house for the Lord. But he failed in finishing the house of his heart. The succeeding kings of Judah and Israel will continue this unfaithful pattern, and exile will once again be the name of the shame The Lord Jesus Christ, a son of David, a son of Solomon, would be the king of Kings to truly finish building a holy house for His Father. Secured in His holiness, in perpetuity for anyone, by faith in Christ. Remember that loaded encounter in the Gospel of John? (2:19-22) “‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’ The Jews then said, ‘It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?’ But he was speaking about the temple of his body. When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.”
The Gospel of John follows up on that declaration with the record of Jesus on the Cross. He cries: “It is finished!” This is a prime example of what we call intertextuality. (Remember that big word?) John is playing off the words of 1 Kings 6 and 7, where Solomon declared the work was finished. Solomon thought God’s people had finally arrived. No more mobile Tabernacle! Permanence. Rest. But the “mission” was not finished in the Jerusalem Temple. By contrast: In the Lord Jesus Christ. His Incarnation. His faithful, sinless, obedient life. His death, burial, resurrection and ascension— Declared on the Cross: It. Is. Finished. Now and forevermore.
Not coincidentally, there is a third declaration of “It is finished” in the Scriptures. In Revelation 15:1, at the introduction to what is usually called the “bowl judgements” – the last of the three judgment cycles in the prophecy, the same language is used as 1 Kings and Jesus on the Cross: “Then I saw another sign in heaven, great and amazing, seven angels with seven plagues, which are the last, for with them the wrath of God is finished. And at that, it is definitively finished!
Art: The Stations of the Cross, Magdalene Chapel in the Holy Sepulcher, Jerusalem.
(The complete work. Now, it really is, “Finished!”)
