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2
Chronicles Chapter Two
2 Chronicles 2
Chapter Contents
Solomon's message to Huram respecting the temple, His
treaty with Huram.
Solomon informs Huram of the particular services to be
performed in the temple. The mysteries of the true religion, unlike those of
the Gentile superstitions, sought not concealment. Solomon endeavoured to
possess Huram with great and high thoughts of the God of Israel. We should not
be afraid or ashamed to embrace every opportunity to speak of God, and to
impress others with a deep sense of the importance of his favour and service.
Now that the people of Israel kept close to the law and worship of God, the
neighbouring nations were willing to be taught by them in the true religion, as
the Israelites had been willing in the days of their apostacy, to be infected
with the idolatries and superstitions of their neighbours. A wise and pious
king is an evidence of the Lord's special love for his people. How great then
was God's love to his believing people, in giving his only-begotten Son to be
their Prince and their Saviour.
── Matthew Henry《Concise Commentary on 2 Chronicles》
2 Chronicles 2
Verse 1
[1] And Solomon determined to build an house for the name of
the LORD, and an house for his kingdom.
His kingdom — A royal palace for himself and
his successors.
Verse 5
[5] And the house which I build is great: for great is our
God above all gods.
Great — For though the temple strictly so called, was but
small, yet the buildings belonging to it, were large and numerous.
Verse 6
[6] But who is able to build him an house, seeing the heaven
and heaven of heavens cannot contain him? who am I then, that I should build
him an house, save only to burn sacrifice before him?
Contain — When I speak of building an house for our great God,
let none think I mean to comprehend God within it, for he is infinite.
To sacrifice — To worship him there where he is
graciously present.
Verse 12
[12] Huram said moreover, Blessed be the LORD God of Israel,
that made heaven and earth, who hath given to David the king a wise son, endued
with prudence and understanding, that might build an house for the LORD, and an
house for his kingdom.
Made heaven and earth — It seems Huram was
not only a friend to the Jewish nation, but a proselyte to their religion, and
that he worshipped Jehovah, the God of Israel, (who was now known by that name
to the neighbour-nations) as the God that made heaven and earth, and the fountain
of power as well as of being.
Verse 14
[14] The son of a woman of the daughters of Dan, and his
father was a man of Tyre, skilful to work in gold, and in silver, in brass, in
iron, in stone, and in timber, in purple, in blue, and in fine linen, and in
crimson; also to grave any manner of graving, and to find out every device
which shall be put to him, with thy cunning men, and with the cunning men of my
lord David thy father.
Of Dan, … — A good omen of uniting Jew and
Gentile in the gospel-temple.
Verse 17
[17] And Solomon numbered all the strangers that were in the
land of Israel, after the numbering wherewith David his father had numbered
them; and they were found an hundred and fifty thousand and three thousand and
six hundred.
The strangers — For David had not only numbered
his own people, but afterward the strangers, that Solomon might have a true
account of them, and employ them about his buildings. Yet Solomon numbered them
again, because death might have made a considerable alteration among them since
David's numbering.
Verse 18
[18] And he set threescore and ten thousand of them to be
bearers of burdens, and fourscore thousand to be hewers in the mountain, and
three thousand and six hundred overseers to set the people a work.
Hewers in the mountains — He would not employ
the free-born Israelites in this drudgery, but the strangers that were
proselytes, who having no lands, applied themselves to trades, and got their
living by their industry or ingenuity.
── John Wesley《Explanatory Notes on 2 Chronicles》
02 Chapter 2
Verses 1-18
And Solomon determined to
build an house for the name of the Lord.
Solomon’s predestined work
Solomon was born to do
this work. There is no need for the rose to say, “Now I am going to be
beautiful and fragrant.” There is no need for the nightingale to say, “Now I
have fully made up my mind to be musical and tuneful, and to fill the air with
richest expressions and melody.” The flower was born to bloom, and to throw all
its fragrance away in generous donation; the nightingale was made in every bone
and feather of it for the sacred singing throat to sing to astonish the world
with music. Solomon came into this work naturally, as it were by birth and
education. (J. Parker, D.D.)
Verse 5-6
And this house which I
build is great: for great is our God above all gods.
The house of God
1.The worship of God, the creator and governor of the world,
commenced with the creation of man; but in the patriarchal ages it partook not
of that formal and settled character which it afterwards, by God’s direction,
assumed. Nor, as far as we can learn from ancient history, does it appear that
there were ever any regular buildings erected as temples before the Jewish
tabernacle was set up. Noah, and the other patriarchs, appear simply to have
erected altars for their sacrifices, and these often only for immediate and
temporary use; or to have planted groves, as Abraham did in Beersheba, “and
called there on the name of the Lord, the everlasting God.” But when God had
chosen a people to be called by His name, and had given them His law, and
taught them to offer Him regular stated services, He further commanded that
there should be a particular building set apart for the same. Now, the objects
of all such buildings are twofold. They are to be built to the honour of Him
who is to be worshipped therein, and they are to be used by those who are to
meet there for the purpose of joining in that worship.
2. And this feeling which led Solomon to build “a great house because
God was great above all gods” has had its proper influence in all ages and
countries, and is based upon true and proper principles of religion, as well
under the dispensation of the gospel as under that of law. History, no doubt,
tells us that in the days of persecution the faithful were wont to meet for
Divine worship amidst the tombs and burial.places of the dead, or in the secret
eaves of the earth. But, when persecutions cease, and days of prosperity come
round, when, as David says, they themselves begin to “dwell in houses of
cedar,” then surely it is “no longer meet that the ark of the covenant of the
Lord should remain under curtains.” When mansions of costly price, and
embellished within and without with all the skill of experienced artists, grow
up on every side--when the halls of justice, the palatial buildings of the
money-changers, the marketplaces, and public works which denote and advance the
worldly greatness and prosperity of our citizens, are multiplying around us,
then too, surely, it is meet that the house which we build for the service of
God should be great and, as nearly as we can make it, the chief glory of all;
reminding us, by its beauty and magnificence, of the greatness of our God, who
is above all gods.
3. It has been too much the custom, in the age in which we live, to
endeavour in every way to serve God at as cheap a rate as possible, at the same
time that men serve themselves willingly at the costliest sacrifice. While in
your private lives luxury has been increasing, any expenditure in connection
with the building of a church or the service of God is too often denounced,
very much in the spirit of Judas, as a waste of that which might have been
turned to better account in some other way. Now, for myself, I wish loudly to
protest against such a system.
4. What use are we going to make of the house of God, now that we have
built it? “If there is one thing more than another for which we have a perfect
loathing,” says an able lay member of the Church, “it is that most disgusting
of all unrealities which attempts to make things external and earthly the
substitute for what is internal and heavenly--which considers fine churches and
complex services a sufficient compensation for general laxity of morals--the
formalism of lip-worship an atonement for deadness of hearts and unrestrained
luxurious living.” All the outward acts of s religious life may be performed,
where there is an established character, and yet every one of them be an
offence to God. They hear sermons, join in a litany, join in Divine worship,
come to the communion once a month--all like a decent garment: things outside,
nothing within. God forbid that such should be our case: that we should allow
any self-complacency on account of this house which God has permitted us to
build for Him, or any admiration of the services to be offered therein, to
blind us to the depths of our sad spiritual necessities, or make us indifferent
about these necessities being supplied. And when we draw nigh to offer our own
sacrifices, let us ever bear fresh in our stricken hearts the recollection of
that One Great Sacrifice once offered up as a peace-offering for us all, and
which alone gives any of us sinners the right of access to the throne of grace.
(Bp. Fulford.)
A great house
“The house is great, for
great is our God”--that is the reason. That is the key of all Christian life.
Our conception of God controls everything. A little God means a little life, a
little morality, a little service, a little petty, miserable effort altogether;
but a great conception of God is a great life--great loving, great service for
others. I do not fear about God in the Church. God is great. We have dismissed
Him from our thought. We are agnostics without the courage of our convictions.
We say “God”; but do we mean it in all its light and music and beauty and moral
necessity? Is not the Word of God a mere convenience in speech? We must put it
in. Is it the ruling thought, the dominating idea, the sovereign force? Christ
never ignored God. Christ lifted up the Father, the God, the Sovereign, When
you get a real conception of God you will preach well. There will be no fear of
man before you. Do not sit back and say, “We cannot know Him.” That is
intellectually true; it is sympathetically false--we cannot know God
intellectually. No man’s eyes can accommodate the whole sky, but we know God
lovingly, pityingly, healingly, forgivingly; we know Him intuitively. The sun
rules all things. Haste thou, take heed of that, O man! It is the sun that
tells them what coat to put on; the sun tells them what to eat; the sun cures and smites,
and rebukes thy poor botanies and minor sciences, showing them that the Kew
Gardens of one nation are the weeds of another. The sun tells you when to go
out and when to hasten home again. And as that teaches you, so the great
Teacher of the mind, the Spirit of God, will teach them, control them, guide
them! We “live and move and have our being” in God. The house is great, for
great is our conception of God. God is greater than our conception--we struggle
towards Him, and our struggle is victory. A great God means a great morality:
Shall I tell you of the knaves that are trying to carve morality for the people? They have
schedules and stipulations and social arrangements and indications and manifold
endeavour and effort after something that is to be millennial and glorious. If
that is morality, we can make it, shape it, manufacture it, sell it, appreciate
it, prize it, barter it, nail it to the wall like a wooden idol. Talk they of
morals? Oh, Thou bleeding Lamb, true morality is love of Thee! If that were
morality which I have just described in my own words, it would be worthy of its
own little etymology--an attitude, a manner, a posture, a trick. Away! It is a
soul, an inspiration, a flame, an incarnate holiness. “Mr. So-and-so is a good
man, though he is not a Christian.” No! he is not a good man. “My neighbour is
an excellent man, though he does not believe anything about God.” No! he is not an excellent man.
There thou art in the little etymological morality, the manner, the attitude,
the posture. All thou seest is silver, but the base metal is inside. To be
silver-covered is not to be silver. He only is good who is the temple of God by
consent, by honour, by daily worship, by continued trust in His name and
service in His kingdom. A great God means a great service--not a little service
written out on the paper as to what shall come first, and next, and last, but
an enthusiasm that dares the sea, the wilderness, and the place of danger, the
cannibal, the savage, the devil “Why, missionary, dost thou so go forth? Remain
at home.” “I cannot.” “Why not?” “God is great; my service for Him must be
great also.” Your house exists for one thing--you must find out what that one
thing is. You shut the window for some one, you keep up the house for some one.
It is always an impulse. We must find the motive and governing thought. Only
let that be worthy, and all the rest will come. “Oh, my Father, the message
preached was poor and feeble, but Thy broken-down old servant could not do
better.” He says, “That was the best discourse thou didst ever deliver; it
shall be made mightier than the others on which thou hast lavished thy poor
vanity. It was the best thou couldst do, and weakness may be strength, poverty
may be wealth.” Oh, to do the best you can! that is to do a great thing in the
esteem of God. And that mumbling, stumbling prayer of thine at the family
altar--only God knows what that prayer cost. Can you tell me the meaning of the
word “great”? I will ask my young friends to tell me what great means, and to
illustrate it in some general way. I hear the answer already--the mountains are
great, the sky is great, the sun is great! There is the great mountain, and
here at its base is a little child picking spring’s first daisy. Which is
great? The child! And a man standing on the great mountain says, “That is
greatness. What am I, a poor little creature compared with that great rock?”
Why, that great rock is insignificant, and thou art majestic. Thou canst tunnel
it, bore it, climb it--that is greatness, not magnitude. Get the right
definition of greatness, and all your troubles will subside and all your love
will fall into its right prospective, and you shall say the Lord reigneth. Now
I will tell you where greatness is to be found. It is to be found in
compassion. You said great mountain; I say great pity--“And his father saw him
whilst he was yet a great way off, and had compassion, and ran and fell on his
neck and kissed him.” All the consolidated
planets never totalled up to that greatness. And thou canst be great in that
way. I will tell you what is great--great patience, patience that sits up all
night and says, “He will be here in the morning; he has been mistaken as to distance, but he will
be here in the morning”--a patience that looks at the midnight clock as if by
chance, as if it did not mean to look, but simply got its tearful eye on that
significant dial. Patience says, “The child will do well by and by. He is poor
at his learning now, but he is going to be a good scholar in a year or two.”
Ay, that is greatness; not the rocky mountains of the Alpine heights--not
these, but heights of patience, depths of love, rivers of tears. “The house is
great, for great is our God.” This house will be famous for the deliverance of
great messages. This house has no small message to deliver. The messages delivered
here will deal with great subjects, with God, and blood, and sin, and pardon,
and holiness, and destiny--themes that cannot be discussed anywhere else. They
would be out of place in the Lyceum, in the political hall, in the House of
Parliament. I speak of this house not in its locality, but in its typical
relations. This house must be unique in its messages. Men must hasten to God’s
house to hear God’s Word which they can hear nowhere else in the same sense,
degree, and quality. My brother ministers, you are not hardly driven for
subjects; the Cross still stands. You need not look up a paper to see what is
the question of the day. The question of the day is, “How can a man be
forgiven, how can a broken heart be healed, how can the lost be brought home?”--that
is the question of the day. This house will be great in its welcomes. There
will be as it were a genius, a spirit at all the doors, saying, “Come and
welcome; O every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters.” Great welcomes
will make the house warm--people love welcomes. Speak God’s welcomes to human
hearts, and men will bless thee and mothers say there never was such a man. And
this house will be known as great for its great remedies--the house of God
treats nothing superficially. There be those in the world who cry “Peace,
peace!” where there is no peace. There be those who say, “There, that will do,”
when they have not touched the heart-sore, the devil-spot. The remedy declared
here will be the old, old remedy of blood. And this house, though great, is not
final. Nature hates all buildings. Nature hates everything that does not grow.
We know Mother Nature is very gentle to a nettle, and gives a nettle room and
says, “Let this nettle grow”; but Nature has already begun to take off your
roof. Long before you have paid half of your £9,000 you will have a bill sent
in for repairs. Nature will not let the place alone--she will take it down.
Build thou in God, build thou the temple-life. Every man is the living temple
of God that cannot be taken down--that is a house not made with hands. (J.
Parker, D. D.)
Sermons in stones
So far as we are able to
discover from archaeological research and the details in Scripture, it seems
beyond controversy that the temple of Solomon was the most splendid and
magnificent building the world has ever seen. There have been larger buildings,
but no building represented in itself so much splendour. The gold and silver
and precious stones, besides the marble and timber and workmanship, amounted to
about £100,000,000 sterling, equal to the annual revenue of this kingdom. And
so far as we know, with all this luxurious outlay, there was no one in the
congregation of Jerusalem who raised the Judas cry: “To what purpose is this
waste?” Solomon said, “The house which I build is great,” and he gave as a
reason, “because great is our God above all gods.” What did this temple mean to
Solomon?
I. The temple was
great to Solomon because it stood for the visible sign of God’s presence among
the people. God had forbidden the children of Israel to make any image
representing Himself. Yet there is an underlying spirit of worship that is
inherent in all of us, a longing for some objective thing upon which we can
cast our eye. Out of that desire, which seems to be a very part of our nature,
and not a result of superstition, has grown, by the misdirection of it, all
idolatry. God manifested Himself early in the garden of Eden with a flame of
fire. When He spake with Moses He appeared in a burning bush. It was an
objective sign of His presence. Consider how natural it is to build such signs
as these in the land. We have on the Embankment a great Parliament House, a
magnificent building, one of the finest in the world. That Parliament House is
the visible sign of the sovereignty of the people. In the same way Buckingham
Palace stands as the visible sign of royalty. The Courts of Justice in the
Strand are a visible sign of the rights of man and the defence of man in his
rights. So we might go all through the land and note that the great manor
houses and castles are the embodiment of that subtle thing which we call
nobility. Everything in this world has its concrete sign. We look upon the
things that are seen, not as being the actual thing, but as the sign of the
thing.
II. When Solomon
said, “The house I build is great,” the inadequacy of his ability to express
his idea was also present with him. How shall I build a house great enough for
the great God? The only justification of the Infinite falling short of any
house is that it shall be a place where we shall come into His presence and
offer sacrifices to His great name. That purpose sanctifies the inadequate
efforts we make to embody our ideal. God does not receive thanks from us
because they are worthy of acceptance, but because they are responses to His grace.
Little things become big, and sometimes great things become very small, just as
their attitude is towards God. Bethlehem, for instance, was the least of all
the cities, and yet it became great because it was sanctified and glorified by
the birth of the Son of God. It was not the town, but what was associated with
it. Nazareth was a despised, contemptible, mean little village; so contemptible
that it came to be a byword, and yet Nazareth is one of the famous towns in the
history of the world, and always will be. The things we offer to God are great, not
because of the money they cost, not by the splendour of them that may meet the
eye, but because they are given to God. God makes them great.
III. The temple was
great because of what it symbolised. It was the great type of the Incarnation.
There is instinctively in man a spirit which craves for an objective
representation of God. But for us Christ is the real Incarnation. Our churches
stand as an embodiment of our thankful recognition of promises fulfilled. We
meet for instruction, for prayer, for praise, for fellowship and goodwill, and
to give forth our witness to God. It would be an irreparable loss to us if
Westminster Abbey were rased to the ground; and so with all the old cathedrals
of England. They are an embodiment of doctrine in a sense. A true cathedral is
laid out on the plan of the Cross, the nave and the transepts making a cross.
The spire tells of the aspirations of worship, and if we come into the choir we
have an expression of praise. The old mediaeval idea was to work out in stone
and in building the foundations of our faith. I would fill the land with
buildings that should be in the highest sense great buildings, expressing the
great inheritance which has come to us from God by Jesus Christ. (G.
F. Pentecost, D.D.)
Solomon’s conception of
God
By the sentence, the
heaven and heaven of heavens, that is the heaven in its most extended compass,
cannot contain God, Solomon strikes down all rationalistic assertions that the
Israelites imagined Jehovah to be only a finite national God. The infinitude
and super-mundane exaltation of God cannot be more clearly and strongly
expressed than it is in these words. That, however, Solomon was addicted to no
abstract idealism is sufficiently apparent from this, that he unites this
consciousness of the infinite exaltation of God with the firm belief of His
real presence in the temple. The true God is not merely exalted above the
world, has not only His throne in heaven (1 Kings 8:34; 1 Kings 8:36; 1 Kings 8:39; Psalms 2:4; Psalms 11:4; Psalms 103:19; Isaiah 66:1; Amos 9:6), He is also present on the earth (Deuteronomy 4:39), has chosen the temple for the dwelling-place of His name in
Israel, from which He hears the prayers of His people. (C.F.
Keil.)
Verses 7-16
Send me now therefore a man cunning to work in gold.
Huram and Solomon
Learn from this intercourse--
I. That friendship
in life is helpful.
II. That
co-operation among men is desirable.
III. That men may
know God, yet not serve him.
IV. That when God’s
people are consistent in their life, their influence upon others is for good. (J.
Wolfendale.)
Co-operation
No temple should be built by any one man. Blessed be God,
everything that is worth doing is done by co-operation, by acknowledged
reciprocity of labour. Your breakfast-table was not spread by yourself,
although it could not have been spread without you. Sometimes we may almost
bless God that we cannot identify the authorship of some books in the Bible. It
is better that many hands should have written the book than that some brilliant
author should have retired into immortality on the ground of his being the only
genius that could have written so marvellous a volume. (J. Parker, D.D.)
And Solomon numbered all the strangers that were in the land of
Israel.
Naturalisation of foreigners
I. A good
government will tend to make a country attractive to foreigners.
II. Foreigners thus
attracted are amenable to the laws of the state.
III. Thus protected,
they may contribute materially to the enrichment of a state by the importation
of foreign industries. Silk-weavers of Spitalfields.
V. Be kind to
strangers. (Bibical Museum.)
Strangers in the city
I. Strangers in a
city are in danger from the temptation to explore the underground life of the
community. I believe that three-fourths of the young men of our cities are
ruined for the simple reason that they went to look at iniquity. In 1794,
during the Reign of Terror in Paris, there were people who, to hide from their
persecutors, got into the sewers under the city, and went on mile after mile amid the
stifling atmosphere, poisoned and exhausted, coming out after a while at the
river Seine, where they washed and breathed again the pure air. But, alas! that
so many men who attempt to explore underground New York life never come to a
river Seine, where they can wash, and they die horribly in the sewers. I stand
on a mountain of Colorado, six thousand feet high. There is a man standing
beneath me who says, “I see a peculiar shelving to this rock,” and he bends
towards it. I say, “Stop, you will fall.” He says, “No danger; I have a steady
hand and foot, and see a peculiar kind of moss.” I say, “Stand back”; but he
says, “I am not afraid”; and he bends farther and farther, and after a while
his head whirls and his feet slip--and the eagles know not that it is the
macerated flesh of a man they are picking at, but it is. So I have seen men
come to the very verge of the life of this city, and they look away down in it.
They say, “Don’t be cowardly. Let us go down.” They look farther and farther. I
warn them to stand back; but Satan comes behind them, and while they are
swinging over the verge, pushes them off. People say they were naturally bad.
They were not? They were engaged in exploration. No man can afford to sail so
near the coast of eternal fire for the purpose of discovering how hot it is.
Stand off from that exploration. If you are a good swimmer, and you see a man
drowning, leap for him and bring him ashore; but if you are merely going to
jump in to see him drown, stand back.
II. Strangers in a
city are in danger from the temptation to desecrate the Sabbath. There is not
one in ten who knows how to keep the Lord’s day when he is away from home and
absent from all Christian influences.
III. Strangers in a
city are not safe without Christian restraint. (T. De Witt Talmage.)
──《The Biblical Illustrator》