Scripture Daily

Context No. 763 of 4322 · 1 Chronicles

Context · Reflection

1 Chronicles 23:1-5: in context

1Now David was old and full of days; and he made Solomon his son king over Israel. 2He gathered together all the princes of Israel, with the priests and the Levites. 3The Levites were counted from thirty years old and upward; and their number by their polls, man by man, was thirty-eight thousand. 4David said, “Of these, twenty-four thousand were to oversee the work of the LORD’s house, six thousand were officers and judges, 5four thousand were doorkeepers, and four thousand praised the LORD with the instruments which I made for giving praise.”

By the time we reach this chapter, David is old and full of days, and he does two things that belong to the end of a life. He makes his son Solomon king, handing the future to the next generation, and he sets about organizing the Levites for the temple. The numbers are large. Counted from age thirty up, there are thirty-eight thousand of them, and David sorts them by task: twenty-four thousand to oversee the work of the house, six thousand as officers and judges, four thousand as gatekeepers, and four thousand set apart to praise the LORD with instruments he himself had made for the purpose.

The striking thing about all this planning is what David is planning for. He will not live to see the temple built; that will be Solomon's work. David is an old man drawing up the staffing and the roles and even making the instruments for a house he will never worship in. He does the unglamorous groundwork, the organizing and provisioning and assigning, so that a project he will not finish, and will barely glimpse, can go forward after he is gone. He pours the last of his energy into preparing something whose completion he has already handed to someone else.

David spent the end of his life organizing a temple he would never see finished. What am I willing to prepare and provision for, knowing the completion will belong to someone after me?

Sources