Scripture Daily

Context No. 1348 of 4322 · 1 Kings

Context · Reflection

1 Kings 6:1-10: in context

1In the four hundred and eightieth year after the children of Israel had come out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign over Israel, in the month Ziv, which is the second month, he began to build the LORD’s house. 2The house which King Solomon built for the LORD had a length of sixty cubits, and its width twenty, and its height thirty cubits. 3The porch in front of the temple of the house had a length of twenty cubits, which was along the width of the house. Ten cubits was its width in front of the house. 4He made windows of fixed lattice work for the house. 5Against the wall of the house, he built floors all around, against the walls of the house all around, both of the temple and of the inner sanctuary; and he made side rooms all around. 6The lowest floor was five cubits wide, and the middle was six cubits wide, and the third was seven cubits wide; for on the outside he made offsets in the wall of the house all around, that the beams should not be inserted into the walls of the house. 7The house, when it was under construction, was built of stone prepared at the quarry; and no hammer or ax or any tool of iron was heard in the house while it was under construction. 8The door for the middle side rooms was in the right side of the house. They went up by winding stairs into the middle floor, and out of the middle into the third. 9So he built the house and finished it; and he covered the house with beams and planks of cedar. 10He built the floors all along the house, each five cubits high; and they rested on the house with timbers of cedar.

In the four hundred and eightieth year after the exodus, in the fourth year of his reign, Solomon begins to build the temple of the LORD. The passage gives its dimensions, its porch, its windows of fixed lattice, the side chambers built in three stories around it. And in the middle of the construction details comes a striking note: the house was built of stone made ready at the quarry, so that neither hammer nor axe nor any iron tool was heard in the temple while it was being built. The stones were cut and shaped elsewhere, at the quarry, and brought to the site already fitted, so that the temple rose in silence.

That silent construction is worth pondering. All the noisy, laborious work of cutting and shaping the great stones was done away from the temple site, out at the quarry, so that when the stones arrived they only had to be set in place, and the house of God went up without the din of hammer and chisel. The hard shaping happened in a hidden place, out of sight of the finished building. There is a picture in that of how God shapes his people. Scripture speaks of believers as living stones being built into a spiritual house, and much of the shaping, the cutting away, the hard and often painful work of being made to fit, happens not in the visible, celebrated moments but in the hidden quarry of ordinary life, in private struggles and unseen years of formation. We often wish the shaping were quicker or more visible, and we grow impatient in the quarry, in the long hidden seasons where nothing seems to be built. But it is precisely there, away from the site, that the stone is made ready, so that in time it can be set silently into its place in God's building. The hidden shaping is not wasted time; it is the very work that makes us fit to be part of what God is building.

Can I trust that the hidden, often painful shaping of my ordinary and unseen seasons is God preparing me, like a stone made ready at the quarry, to be set into his building, rather than growing impatient that nothing visible seems to be rising?

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